Much of the writing process doesn't look or feel like writing
I am trying to write a novel. For several important but somewhat de-anonymizing reasons, I need to produce a finished draft of this novel in about a year. This is kind of freaking me out. I've never written a complete novel before, much less within a year. I have begun to feel that every day that goes by without me opening up Scrivener and typing out 1000+ words of my novel is an utter wash.
Of course, I think about my novel all the time. I scribble down ideas for it in my journal or my notes app. I make plans for character arcs, sketch out the themes to myself, create playlists of music that capture the mood and setting and time period in which the story takes place. I guess I'm writing about the novel. But I'm not actually writing it -- if you define "writing" as "generating readable chunks of prose."
Last week I had a conversation with a mentor who is guiding me through the novel-writing process. I mentioned that I've been feeling a lot of stress about the fact that I am thinking about the novel but not writing it. I told her about all the plans I've made for the novel which I have yet failed to get onto the page in a coherent way.
My mentor's response was surprising. She told me, "It sounds like you actually have been writing this novel." She explained that most of the novel-writing process is actually not the generation of prose: it is instead the ideation, the slow collection of knowledge about the story, the accrual of loosely-connected material that may not ever wind up in the finished product but is nonetheless important to create. She said it might actually be better to spend a relatively long time doing the part of writing that doesn't look or feel like writing -- i.e. not putting words on the page -- because, when the time does come to actually put words on the page, all that accrued material will already be there. I won't have to grasp for it while I am also attempting to put it into words.
I was very relieved and energized by this conversation with my mentor, and not just because it's nice to hear that I am actually working hard when I thought I was procrastinating. I do think it is taken for granted within the world of writers that the only thing that "counts" as writing is the making of words, specifically words that could eventually wind up in a finished project. But really, when I think about all the written projects I've produced over the years, so much of the process was not writing. Or at least it didn't look or feel like writing. It didn't involve me at my computer with my hands on a keyboard. It was riding the bus and daydreaming while I looked out the window, or it was thinking through my ideas out loud over coffee with a friend, or it was walking around in a park listening to music and trying to conjure up imaginary feelings. If I hadn't done all of that non-writing stuff, I wouldn't have had anything to produce when I eventually did sit down and put my hands on a keyboard.
And who knows, maybe this is all an elaborate justification for my procrastination habit, and six months from now I will really have to get my ass in gear and just generate words.