Put Aside the Planning and Pantsing, and Consider A Land of Your Own Invention
By Julianna Baggott | January 3, 2020 |
In 1987, Michael Graziano was a young neuroscientist. He and his team would study macaque monkeys to explore certain areas of the brain. The macaques were anesthetized, but the anesthesia leaked so, in their dark laboratory amid the chatter of firing neurons, he sometimes found himself hallucinating – the macaque getting up and moving but then after a double take, he realized the monkey hadn’t moved at all. He became a leader in the field of peripersonal neurons as it relates to the concept of personal space.
What does this have to do with writing? Nothing yet. So let me get to it. In a time when every experiment was laid out in advance – analyzed and mapped with clear succinct goals and contingencies, Graziano “…followed an extravagantly different playbook, an older style,” as he puts it in his book The Spaces Between Us. “I followed a two-stage cycle. First, go fishing. Second, take out the calipers and measure the fish.” He extends the metaphor. “In the first stage, we’d spend months exploring… Nothing was publishable… we’d keep our eyes open… filling notebooks… We’d pull out amazing fishes of bizarre shapes and colors that nobody had ever imagined before… When we stopped surprising ourselves every day, when we thought we knew what was going on, we’d shift to the second stage: measuring the fish in a formal, controlled manner.”
This resonated with my own process. I’ve taught workshops for a very long time, and, most recently, I’ve taught a lot of screenwriting. In screenwriting, it’s especially typical to write treatments, beat sheets, to work out the structure of the architecture, on a grand scale. A grand hypothetical scale or so it seems to me. What I’ve found is that sometimes the best work – that with the most grittiness and disorienting truth – often comes by accident, not planning.
In fact, early on in my workshops, my goal is often to have the students write well by accident – creating low-stakes, ambitiously risky opportunities for them to do just that. Once they write some scenes that have that charge to them, then I like to see their minds play out a larger structure for that scene to dwell inside of. Or as they come in with ideas to pitch to the group, I like to have them dig into a scene pretty early on – any scene – just to see how the characters mess with each other in a confined space. Often they can have a great idea, but can they write it, at this moment in their lives? Are these characters creating themselves or is the writer a puppeteer, telling them what to do?
As Graziano puts it, “If it hadn’t been for that two-stage approach… I would have elaborate theories, impressively complex experimental designs, well-trained monkeys pressing buttons and pulling levers, probably a whole stack of papers with enough technical showmanship to get into the most respected journals. But insight? Probably not so much.”
Yes, exactly.
So when it comes to the two camps of novelists – those who plan everything and those who write by the seat of their pants – I’d like to offer this other model.
The Graziano Model, in which you explore, maybe write some short stories or poems or essays, maybe sketch and jot one-liners, filling notebooks, or, as Graziano puts it so simply: we’d keep our eyes open. Once some characters, some scenarios, some ideas arrive, can you allow for this mucking around time, this “bushwhacking,” as Graziano puts it? “To a neuroscientist, a brain area is like a country. It’s vast,” Graziano says.
Yes, understood. The terrain of a novel is a country, too, vast and lush, a land of our own invention.
Julianna Baggott is the author of over 20 books, including two New York Times Notable Books of the Year, PURE and HARRIET WOLF’S SEVENTH BOOK OF WONDERS. She runs a film and television production company, Mildred’s Moving Picture Show,. Her latest book I’D REALLY PREFER NOT TO BE HERE WITH YOU is a collection of stories, many of which are in development at places like Netflix, Paramount, and Amblin. The feature film WHICH BRINGS ME TO YOU, based on the novel she co-wrote with Steve Almond, is currently streaming. www.juliannabaggott.com
I like this idea – the Graziano model. My most recent work in progress is kind of following it. Where before, while researching and developing the story I tried to keep everything organized and orderly, this go round is much more messy with things stuffed in a notebook in whatever order. I’m still plotting, but consider even my first draft a matter of exploration. This is new for me, as I’ve always had a plan and would work very linearly. By the time I got to actually writing the story, it was pretty much the way it would be. What I have found is that I’m much more relaxed and curious about what I’ll write next or how it’s all going to fit together. I still need the structure of plotting at least the main points of the story, but getting to play with the story as I’m writing it is much more fun than pounding it out.
This feels like validation and I love it. I write fantasy set in the world of Ontyre. In years past I wrote about the dystopian society in Carrdia near the continent of Tremjara’s center. A few years ago, while overhauling the continent’s map, I was drawn towards the islands off the east coast. How might they have developed differently given they were buffered from all the wars, etc.?
Most of the magic was in place, and I had a lot of ideas bouncing in my head, but instead of brainstorming until my brain locked I decided to take a different approach. I decided to let the islands of Pannulus tell me their story. I wrote papers about their society and technology (airships!). Then came short stories, each one revealing new elements. Over time came a couple of novellas and a novel.
As I said, much of the worldbuilding foundation was in place, but each paper and story added another floor above. Over time, I accumulated a lot of stories, established a nation, and had more fun than I’d ever have had trying to force facts.
The Graziano model reminds me of how I used to “write” scenes I in my head as a child, before I even thought of becoming a writer. I would imagine my heroine in a variety of dramatic situations, and if I stuck with her long enough, I would string these events as a narrative (that girl got around!) I think my friends got the same satisfaction from playing with dolls, but I gave up on Barbie when I found she couldn’t keep a proper seat on my Breyer horses.