Cycling

How prolific novelists write without editing

I’m still on my anti formulaic writing bent.

There’s too much of it everywhere online. In marketing it’s so prevalent that it’s virtually the norm.

Everyone is looking at what other people are doing. They’re trying to see what’s “working”. They deconstruct and reverse engineer. Then they copy.

There’s a prominent writer here on Substack that is slinging a ChatGPT wrapper tool that feeds up ideas based on what’s already popular. It’s probably got a bunch of people using it already.

The thing is that formulas only work until they don’t.

People get bored. If they see the same ideas in the same formats and the same tone too often they turn off.

Saturation is what people used to call it. Now it’s slop.

But it doesn’t matter what word you want to use.

The point is that it gets tedious. And the more the copying happens (which is what the internet is right now), the faster people turn away.

So, instead, how about looking at a way to develop your own style?

I’ve said a bunch of times before that I like books.

I’ll read history, business, marketing and fiction. And it’s from fiction that today’s suggestion on how to develop a unique voice comes from.

See within fiction writing there seems to be two poles on how to approach writing a novel.

The first is called plotting. Here you plan out what you are going to say in advance. You’ll make a map of the plot, the characters, what’s gonna happen, the twists and the turns etc etc. Then once you have that ready you start writing.

The second is called pantsing.

And it’s pantsing that I think it the more interesting of the two.

In pantsing, an author may have an idea, or a main character, or a situation, or even nothing more than a title. Then they sit down and start writing.

They never know where they are going but discover it sentence by sentence.

When I was looking at a lot of the novelists I liked, especially the ones that had written a lot of books, they tended to be pantsers.

Plus, they all seemed to enjoy the process of writing too. It allowed them to enter into the creative part of their brain. They followed the muse from start to finish.

And apparently, although this tends to make a lot people angry, they don’t edit either!

They don’t have five or six different drafts of a book. There’s just one. The one they started on.

So, how the hell does this magic happen?

There’s a writer called Dean Wesley Smith who explained the process in his book Writing into the Dark. The key part is what he calls “Cycling.’

In a sentence, cycling means writing and editing at the same time.

You write 300-400 words or until you get stuck. Then you cycle back to where you started and go back over the text. You fix the mistakes, change any words that are repeated, delete unnecessary sentences etc etc.

Then, usually, by the time you catch back up to where you left off, your brain knows what to say next and you start writing again.

And you just keep doing that until you are finished.

Simple.

The idea being that writing should be more like reading. You don’t quite know what’s going to happen next. So you stay excited and motivated.

And it allows a pantser to write more and faster. They finish more novels. They get more reps in. It’s how they improve and how they develop their own style.