Top down?

A reader, Amy, with whom I have exchanged many letters, sent me this question a few days ago:

Do you mind if I ask you a little about your writing process? I’m curious if you ever approach stories... I’m not sure how to put it... from the top down, I guess? Like using a Campbellian mythic cycle for structure, for instance. Or is it more making things up as you go? Or something else?

This post is an attempt at an answer. I know that for everything I am about to say, there will be one or more exceptions, which I might or might not point out depending on if I think they’re interesting.

Like most of you, I imagine, I have flashes of sexual fantasy. That has been true since the first day I saw a girl naked: I had absolutely no clue about sex or the use of body parts at the time, but I knew I wanted to do something with her. (What I imagined is irrelevant except for this: at the age of perhaps seven years old, I was already thinking in terms of dominant and submissive behaviors — further support for my contention that those traits are innate.)

Sometimes such flashes are formless. Sometimes they are fleeting, like ill-remembered dreams. Some have a little staying power, and come back more than once. Here’s a brand new one, from looking at a photo with my belovèd yesterday and tossing story lines at each other:

What if a fellow came home and found that a girl he slightly knew, someone whom he had no idea had any interest in or attraction to him, had conned her way into his place and was waiting for him, nearly naked?

That’s it. No story, no characters, no motivation, no history, no future, no idea how it might play out (except insofar as the story in which he indignantly tells her to get dressed and get out would be no fun to write). No decision on the question: is she so infatuated that she can’t be bothered with getting to know him conventionally, or is she so desperate or in trouble or under someone else’s influence that she is there reluctantly? Given that little oocyte of an idea, there are dozens of potential stories.

So what I do, when the flash of fantasy becomes solid enough to be captured in a sentence, as above, is to write just that much down, stick it in a file in my Work-In-Progress folder, and let it sit.

Over the ensuing months, I might recall it, or I might not. If I do, I will slowly begin to think about stories and the characters who might populate them. What sort of girl would be that bold (if she’s there eagerly, not apprehensively)? What would make her think “The heck with dating and fencing around and getting to know each other and games, I want him inside me today”? Is it just physical attraction, is she leaking every time she sees him? Is she a submissive girl who recognizes his quiet authority? Is she a schemer who wants something he can give her? Or if it will be an [RC] story, what straits have compelled her to surrender her dignity and freedom of choice?

In time, one of those ideas will begin to seem sustainable, in that I have characters, motivations, emotions, conversations, and situations that feel consistent and interesting to me. At that point, it’s less of a fantasy/idea/potential and more of an unwritten story. When it has that feeling of solidity, I open up the WIP file and write down whatever I’ve come up with. It might be fragments of dialog, or notes to myself to remember a certain action or frame of mind or mood. And then it sits again, simmering, sometimes for years. I began Quality Assurance twelve years ago; perhaps it will survive, perhaps not. I open it up from time to time and add thoughts.

At some point, one story gains focus, to the extent that I can say it is my current project and that I’m actually writing it. Sometimes there are bumps on that road. I am currently working on Empty Nest, but that has been true for about three years, and in the meantime I’ve published thirty flash fiction morsels, Recession, and Lust For Elsa. Sometimes a story that’s pretty far along just dies off, usually because in the meantime I find that I have covered its themes or ideas in other stories. This can result in a great deal of text being abandoned: School For Wives was as long as Order when I binned it.

But, once I do finally get settled in to a single tale, I write sporadically and non-linearly. That is, I write in small bursts of time — I find it difficult to sustain the right mood for a long time — and I don’t usually write in order (counterexample: Empty Nest is progressing beginning-to-end). If I feel like working on a climactic moment in the middle of the story, I do; if I feel like working on introducing and establishing characters and motivations, I do; if I feel like I am up for dialog but not for narrative, then I work on dialog. It probably is obvious that, even as I write to entertain and arouse others, I write to please myself: girls are pretty and wear sexy things, blow jobs are sloppy, romance is real, spankings are loving, reluctant, and fierce, teenage virgins are attracted to oldsters like me :o)

It generally takes from several months to three years to write a story, depending on length and complexity.

Now, Amy asked about making things up as I go. I don’t set out with that approach in mind; generally speaking, I start with a pretty good idea of the story I want to write or the characters I want to write about. In the former case, I think about plot and then create the characters that will make it work; in the latter, I create the personalities, thoughts, and emotions and then see how those characters might interact with each other. But things get odd.

I don’t write about genitalia with bodies attached, I write about people, characters and personalities that are fully formed in my mind (I often don’t know what they look like, but I always know how they think and feel). In my experience, once the characters exist, they have power to shape the story out of my hands.

A case in point: I have no real interest in polygyny. My experience with sex is in loving, monogamous relationships. I especially can’t conceive of an owner/submissive relationship that isn’t mutually devoted and single-focused. But at the end of First Date, we discover that Sarah is joining a harem.

I didn’t set out to write that. No idea could have been more remote from my thoughts. But Porter turned out to be arrogant, powerful, and manipulative, and his character drove the ending. I was astonished by it; the result is a story I did not mean to write and am not particularly happy with. For the record, the germ of that tale was the elevator scene, and everything else grew around that one tiny spark of fantasy.

Finally, for I have rambled on far too long, the writing is finished. Almost always, that means that there are open questions and unfinished business left for you, dear readers, to contemplate, for even my longest works are meant as Flash-like inspiration for your own fantasies. And then all that is left is the little task of editing: say, oh, a hundred re-readings of the text, polishing and tweaking and rewriting on every trip. Another span of months or years. But I know it’s worth the work, from all the comments I get that mention thanks for the clean grammar, spelling, and other mechanics.

So I guess the answer to the original question is: something else. A slow, organic, and sometimes out-of-my-hands growth from seed to story. Perhaps if had a more disciplined approach I could write more or better. But at least for now, this is how I write.

— Frenulum