You’re not going to believe this, but I learned a lot about writing from reading this article about, er, recording and mixing pop songs. But what does an interview with one of Beyoncé’s sound engineers have to do with writing a book about kissing?
I write genre fiction, the pop music of the literary world. And before you sneer at that, consider that romance novels make up 40% of the entire global book market. Your literary stream of consciousness debut novel is a free-rider on our sales (you’re welcome.)
Pop music has to get its point across in three minutes. Less, ideally, because if the first fifteen, twenty seconds don’t slap, no one is going to want to hear the rest. And by slap I don’t mean bombast. I mean that the opening has to suggest a big payoff is coming. A fat beat, a mad drop, some crazy vocal run that make your hair raise. The money shot, if you will. The Big Fight at the end of the action film or the last kiss at the end of the romance (where we always promise a happy ending.)
But again, what does that have to do with writing books? It’s all about Stuart White’s commitment to the first take as being the truest. Understand that this first take he’s talking about isn’t a demo. When Queen Bey walks into that sound booth, it’s already planned what’s going to happen when she starts to sing. Hours of thought and setup, years of training and experience, all come into play in creating a perfect moment, where singer and song unite at an instinctive level, the way they ideally do onstage. Everything after this first take is fine-tuning.
Similarly, by the time I write my ‘first draft’ of a book, I’m ready to deliver a great performance. Even though I call it a ‘zero’ draft (gives me permission to let it be bad) I go into writing a book with a full synopsis, and all the scenes I’ve collected since thinking of it all nicely laid out in order. With chapter headings. Ready to write. What’s missing at that stage is the feelings. And those can be planned for but not plotted. That’s what I deliver when writing a chapter from my notes, the emotions of the scene, which register in my body* while I’m writing. I don’t want to stop and figure out which character is sitting on which side of the bed in the middle of getting them into the bed. If all those bothersome details are plotted, everything else just flows.
Your results may vary, but this is my system and it’s what my high-diffusion scatter ADHD seems to like: wild ideas, usefully structured, with a flowchart of operations and a minimum of attractive nuisances i.e. side-quests my characters don’t need to go on.
What my dang brain hates is editing. The rewrite, the do-over, the second take. A rerun of the same creative form that strives, and often fails, to improve on the first instinctive attempt. And for my busy little enterprise, a massive time and/or money sinkhole.
I despise writing words that I’ll have to delete, and that’s what happens when I write without a plan. Being very (problematically) imaginative, I can take a story in any of a dozen directions if left unsupervised. My plan is therefore my supervisor, and they’re a hard-nosed bitch who I hate to disappoint. Speaking of, they’re looking meaningfully at me over the imaginary cubicle wall. Time to clock in.
*This is why I hardly ever watch tv or movies and am very selective in my reading. By the end of the day I’ve had So Many Feels that I don’t want to have any more, and certainly not most of the feelings that ‘broadcast entertainment’ wants you to feel: jealousy, confusion, revulsion, futile anger at the establishment (I have that to spare, you want some?) When my day is done, I want real people. Or sleep.
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