MÜELLIF: The Process
Part 2 of 4 of the writing process. This week: from idea to finished work, or How I Get Past My The's
It takes a while to settle into the commute. I mean the one path that you normally take from home to office, especially in a city where you’re spoiled for choice like in Vienna. From home to work, it can take me anywhere from forty minutes to an hour solid; I didn’t care back then, sometime late 2016. It was my first job, and I had only started in September. I just wanted to find the commute, and I was convinced that taking the route up north and not going to the literal city center only to go back up to my district was faster. (Spoiler: it’s not). In an evening commute like this I was changing the commute at the station Spittelau, a double-floored station that housed two subway lines and several train lines on the other side. To get to the other line, you have to climb the escalators and then some other stairs. I’m not sure what I was thinking up until that point, but I remember I wanted to write a movie or a series just as cool as Mr. Robot, a series I was into at the time. I got out of the subway, walked to the escalators, and that’s when I got this image. It was Rami Malek and Christian Slater, with Malek as the boxer, and Slater as the hardass coach. An underground boxing place, somewhere downtown, just like the vibe that Agust D’s give it to me gave me. Just that vibe and this image. I quickly changed the characters up in my head: now it was Suga and J-Hope, something to write as fanfiction. But I had grown unhappy with fanfiction back then due its inherent limitations. I wondered… for the first time, I wondered if I could write original characters. I wanted to be a novelist. I really liked the idea. I wondered if this could be my first novel.
So have you ever heard about the trunk novel? Haha, it's totally a coincidence that I just brought it up…
Welcome to MÜELLIF, the series for the month of August where I talk about my writing, out every Friday. Last week I introduced the whole concept to you and left you with a short story about Schottentor, home to U2 and U4, a real subway station in downtown Vienna. So today we started off with Spittelau, also a real subway station, up north and home to U4 and U6 lines. We have to start at the top, so today is all about the writing process. That word alone is so loaded, and for good reason. Because it not only implies, but factually is a lot! Planning is a lot! Just the writing alone is a lot! And editing, that’s a whole other lot! And all the emotions in between! All of it is arduous and stressful. But - but - the more you do it, the more you finish works, the easier and better it gets. It’s all a matter of finding the commute. And knowing all the detours.
The muse, the idea, the inspiration. That first spark has many names, and I call it “the image”. Regardless of name, I would never sit down in front of a document not knowing what to write about. I can’t do that. I have to have an idea first. There’s a way of getting it with or without a pre-existing prompt. With a prompt, I will wonder what story and imagery will fit that prompt best, what is unmistakably me. Recently there was a prompt that went like Spring has a special smell; describe it. First I wondered if I could make a very dystopian work in which a character went to a garden for a limited time? But then the smell made me think of this SF9 performance, and then I wondered how I could tie it to what I wanted to write. And the image came to me and it was… also sexy. And insane. I like that! Back when I had to commute, these ideas would happen most often during a commute. Nowadays, it’ll happen when I am not occupying myself with something: unloading the dishwasher, making my bed, the five minutes between reading a book and sleeping in bed where my thoughts will run haywire. Once I was brushing my teeth and in my thoughts a character randomly introduced himself to me. The basic premise came to me quite suddenly too. But a lot of times, it will happen with music. One of my all-time favorite own characters, Vedat Karabulut, came out of listening to Şirket by mor ve ötesi, during a commute! When all that fails and my brain is stalling, I’ll complain to my best friend: then, miraculously, I’ll come up with something within the hour. But unsurprisingly I need an idea to work with. For me, that just happens to be something visual.
Once I have an image, I let it play out, or try my best to. In my thoughts, I’ll throw things to the wall that I deem cool and see what sticks. During this process some things get lost. Since this entire process is still within my thoughts, and my thoughts tend to be more fleeting than a Snap set to a single second, it has to stick and it has to be simple. This means that when I need a lot of time to come up with the details previously thought of, I’ll tend to discard it. Recently I had this idea that involved card symbols and a parallel selves, on top of a whole goose chase because the protagonist’s boyfriend was abducted by the organisation that used it. Not that this was a bad idea, but I grew more concerned with the organization and what each card symbol could possibly mean, rather than the protagonist. That’s when I stopped. Instead, another idea came to me. It involved the two characters already present in the story, everything around them in grey, separated by a wall of fire. To reach the other character, the protagonist had to enter the fire. This I kept. First, it’s a simple concept I can build on: sacrificing yourself for another person. Second, already you have the grey and the fire, symbols that you can use throughout the story. Finally, the possibilities surrounding this image are very much to my personal liking: sacrifice, dramatics, tragedy. I had noticed that I had gotten increasingly… caged in the overarching emotions and themes I wrote about the other day. So I wanted to write one last work that had all of it, that got as dark as I needed to go, in order to allow joy into my next work. This image fits that perfectly.
What comes first: plot, world, or character? Trick question. It’s all at once, always. I tend to think of the scenes in images, especially ones with the protagonist in it, so to me any event that my mind comes up with that has a character (or more) will usually tie into their arc or the romantic development, that depends on the scene in question. Around this time I’ll start thinking about the theme of the work. This will shape the protagonist’s arc, give me insight to their inner lives, and give me a sharper image of the world in return. Again, with the recent caginess I noticed, that will usually go a predictable route for me: a hardwired system and characters marginalized one way or another. The last three female protagonists I wrote all went down a similar insanity route. My current male protagonists will turn out sad and heartbroken. Nonbinary characters are kind of inbetween? This isn’t set in stone though. Damla from Nymph’s Pond (remember her from my first Substack post?) I’ve written both really angry and sad across two drafts. Vedat is also kind of both. Endings isn’t something that comes to me easily; I’m more the type to have a more detailed start, then realize I wanted to write something completely else, and by the end I kind of tie it up to the start. It’s why I have to edit extensively across drafts. I do try to think of a vague ending nowadays though, just to have something to hold onto for the end. It’s tricky to think of a vague ending and still be hyped enough to see it all through. I’ve burned myself on planning too much before writing it. Sucks out all the fun. But being like: “Okay, it’ll kind of end like this” helps hold onto some of the magic. It’s important to know vaguely how to end it, because it’ll give the work better direction. Plus, it makes foreshadowing easier (so long as you remember what the end is!)
And somewhere here I'll start noting down the basic idea and characters. Longhand or Evernote doesn’t matter. It will serve as the husk of an outline later.
Alright. So we got a basic idea, the protagonist, the theme, and the world as a result of the protagonist’s inner life and the themes at hand. Then I’ll think of the first shot. I like first and last shots a lot. I think they can be quite meaningful and if done well, it’ll make such a lasting impression on you. I aim to represent the atmosphere in a nutshell in the first shot. I try to boil it down to a sentence, though usually it’ll take me all paragraph anyway. No, it’s not the hook, and I hate that kind of standard. It’s specifically the atmosphere, and ideally will have something of the character in it too. I want the reader to know what vibe the work will have from the start. I’ll show some examples later. It’s important that I like it and hold onto this for as long as I can. Usually around this I'll get to actual outlining. God. Never ever in my life will I ever wing any work ever again.
Before we move onto the outlining and writing process, here’s a few examples of what I mean with the first shot. This is from a five-years-old fic that still gets kudos and comments and bookmarks today. The opening paragraph is this:
Yoongi wakes up to his phone buzzing against the wood of his bedside table. Groggily, he reaches out to his phone, the sunlight coming from the windows reflecting onto the screen and making his eyes squint. Once he unlocks his phone, though, it brightens automatically so Yoongi gets to see the notification. 9am, Grandparents’ 50th. Yoongi’s mind doesn’t register it right away; it trickles slowly into his consciousness and then crashes on him all at once.
It’s an okay introduction. It’s just not to my personal standard anymore. We get the hint of a premise, but that’s it. It tells me virtually nothing about anything. Good for Yoongi that he woke up. Maybe some Armys will call him meow meow for waking up or whatever.
In contrast, this is from Nymph’s Pond:
As if the rain was capable of magic, Damla whispered to the pouring rain: "Please hear me out." She blinked, realized what she was doing, and pressed her lips shut.
Much better. So Damla is a desperate enough character to talk to the rain. She’s also imaginative enough to think of the rain as capable of magic. And she’s self aware about it: we get the sense that this is something she shouldn’t wish for, maybe, or maybe she’s a character who never really gets what she wants. All the same, there is a question here. Is there magic? Or is it just a contemplative piece? Either way, I get what I want. I want enchantment, a fairy tale gone wrong, and I manage to do it.
The Nymph’s Pond one is a year or so old. Have a more recent one (July 17th, Google Drive tells me) and what I showed friends for a flash workshop.
Up in 78th, but way, way, way back - past the last compartment, a dead-end leads to a room where something flickers from nowhere. You open the cupboard - hard to find, but still - and inside the glass case is a dial of four rows, three buttons each, and a curved thing next to it that Leanne started to call speak-in. The light turns the darkness to #0E1D32: Leanne can't make out the room, but the speak-in is clear.
The word limit for the workshop I’m at is a thousand words. That means you have to be very sparing with your words. Well, RIP to them, but I’m different. Out of all the people in the workshop I’ll edge the closest to a thousand words and consistently so. You do learn very quickly, though, how economic you have to be to get a good pace in your work. This paragraph here I thought was necessary as an atmospheric setup. I’ve been associating Leanne with the image of a telephone cabin at night - the specific loneliness of it, the symbol of a modern harbor, almost - for so long and when it was the turn to, I didn’t hesitate employing it in the futuristic setting she’s in. Light also ties in to the prompt we had that week. It was Imagine a city where you can openly stare at the sun. The sun made me want to play around with light as a theme. So I opened with a tiny light, climaxed it with sunlight, and ended it with utter darkness. Three birds, one opening paragraph.
A more recent work where I knew exactly that something would end the same way I started it gave me opening and closing shots that mirror each other:
When the subway rushes through tunnels and the music blends to nothing, Juyeon stares at the passengers around him, his job fading to the back of his mind. A middle-aged man is burrowed into his phone, just like the teenager besides him, uniform cuffed in this heat. A woman in a suit talks into nothing, voice muted in private conversation. A girl openly gapes at Juyeon, quickly looking down when she notices him staring. He looks at his hands, so big it could swallow his head whole, and allows himself to smile. In the midst of artificial cold air and hints of perfume, he thinks he can smell his own sweat. In the black screen of his phone, his long, hollowed face stares back at him. Not bad. It speaks to the power of the creams he uses both day and night, which he dedicates twenty minutes to and not more. It would look better with makeup, every wrinkle of his face smoothed over, every light shining favorably on him. But this isn’t what his job requires.
And the final paragraph:
Jaehyun doesn’t respond right away, so Juyeon turns to Melon and shuffles Mondo. When the subway rushes through tunnels and the music blends to nothing, Juyeon stares at the passengers around him, his job fading to the back of his mind. Mondo’s music is full of synths and bass, more modern than TVXQ, but just as danceable as them. It thumps in his ears, the bass so deep that it feels like his heart. He watches the other passengers sitting, browsing their phones, listening to music, and an odd feeling settles in Juyeon’s chest. So many lives and different paths, souls that may have been split and then stitched back together at some point. Passions and fears and hatred and love. Juyeon’s hand holds over his heart; thump, thump, thump. Not the bass then. He pauses the music and takes the headphones off. The rush of the subway, the steady jerking of the wagons, sounds like the blood rushing through his body. If it were any more silent, he could hear all the heartbeats of all the passengers, beating in sync with him.
Even down to sentences that mirror each other, here you have the two feelings you experience from people-watching: loneliness, but also a strange sense of community. It’s insanely satisfying as an author to close something the same way you started it, and I can only imagine how rewarding that must be for a reader. And this is why I spend a lot of time imagining the first scene until it’s there in my mind’s eye with perfect clarity.
But, as it happens, this will be just one sentence in my outline. My outlines… tend to be messy… and vary from project to project. I hopped a lot with the dramatic structure: I tried three-act-structures that I don’t really like, I also tried John Truby’s way recently and we’ll see if that fits me better, but mostly I just… grow increasingly unconcerned with it all. (I hope to touch on this next week). I don’t outline flash fiction; I kind of outlined this series just because there’s so much to cover and I’m bound to forget things, but normally I won’t outline a Substack post either. So outlines are reserved for longer works or anything that I’ll write over a long amount of time. Usually I’ll try to list things that have been swirling in my mind before, and then summarize them where I think it makes sense, as denoted by an arc name. I’m lucky I’m messy enough to have these vague bulletpoints in my Nymph’s Pond outline:
Each bulletpoint will later represent a chapter, and these parts will either be the climax of that chapter or end the chapter. Now each of these chapters will need to have more going on, and every sentence will denote a scene. That’ll take me all afternoon coming up with such points, making sure it makes sense and each scene either leads to the point initially described. It looks like this by the end:
This is a very cute outline of which 80% may have actually happened. I really try my best writing according to the outline, but sometimes as I write I realize there’s a smarter way to go on about this, or I realize the characters would act differently, and I have to deviate from the script. That is normal. For a chaptered work I’ll take more care that each chapter has a very defined end; you have to get the sense that something happens with every chapter. That’s different for unchaptered works (of which I’d include fanfic), because I’ll simply try my best to keep up a good pace. (Rule of thumb: If you think nothing’s happening, if you have to excuse yourself, then nothing’s happening and forget about it). Here’s a more recent outline, and yes, this is in the Google Docs because I’m apparently in my Chaotic Evil phase:
The numbered sections actually represent the plotlines I had come up with before. I cheekily took this from ao3 user kittebasu’s writing process, because I really liked her approach to it. She uses plotlines to keep track of what goes where. I tried the same, and mine looks like this:
So “Moonbae” is the sub-plotline to the main plotline, and the “dream” is here also denoted as a sub-plotline. The other two mainlines need more description to work with, so I write them down as I have them in my mind’s eye. I don’t recommend this because my memory is fickle - remember, attention span shorter than a Snap set to one second - and the other problem is that it will lead me to a lot more editing than it’s worth. Scenes might go nowhere or be moodier than anticipated. But I’m willing to take the risk this time around. Just because.
Regardless of how I did it, I will now be ready for the actual meat of it: the writing. I’ll be so hyped to finally write the first shot just like I imagined it to be. And that motivation to finally get to this and that and that other scene will make me practically jump to sit down to write with music that suits the mood. For flash fiction, since I just sit down and get it done in one sitting, I will only listen to one song on loop until I’m done, which is usually two hours? For longer pieces, I will work with albums, their length depending on how much free time I have. On weekdays, that’s usually in the mornings, thirty to forty minutes. For weekends, it’ll depend, but I’ll allow myself to work with an album running up to an hour. I sit down, I hit play on the album, and I’ll get to writing.
As I recently read in Bolla by Pajim Statovci:
There’s nothing great about writing per se; on the contrary, it’s painful and agonizing, forcing yourself to say things that others have already said far better and more eloquently. I didn’t know that something I thought I loved unreservedly could feel so wrong and unpleasant. The endless need for comparison and an uncontrollable, paralyzing shame come to afflict literature once you transition from reader to storyteller - one would be better off without it.
I’m at a point where I won’t write with the immediate desire to edit every sentence I’ve written. That makes me think of clawing at the nail bed you’ve chewed on, and in the end there’s pus and blood in it and it completely poisons what you’re doing. I know firsthand it takes a long time to get to the level of acceptance though. I don’t mean I don’t ever edit what I write as I do so, but it’s just reduced to a minimum. Writing longhand years and years ago has helped me a lot to split up the process of writing and editing, and it’s how Nymph’s Pond was written in the first draft, through three notebooks I… may have snagged from my summer internship… anyways. My issue with longhand is that it takes me ages to type all that up, and it’s very frustrating. So I’ve returned to my Google Docs. Sometimes when I’m writing I will choose not to look at the screen at all, either by closing my eyes or turning my head away from the screen, just writing the words as I imagine the scene. On the best days, my brain will direct the scene, visceral and visual, and I’ll put it on digital or traditional exactly in that manner. On the worst days, something will grow within me, it’ll taste like dissatisfaction, and I’ll later realize what I wrote was completely useless. Both are rare though. Mostly it’s just writing the scene more or less as I imagined it as, or unexpectedly writing a route I hadn’t considered before. There will be phrases I really like. There will be some I don’t. I’ve grown to accept both.
I like my routine, so it’s important to me that I write in regular intervals, and not “whenever I feel like it”, which frankly would either be eight hours every single day or not doing so for three weeks at a time. Sometimes I take breaks from writing when I’m done with a chapter or a larger part to do other things. But then it’s back onto the grind. I never really feel like writing is a chore. I don’t write every day, but I do write most days. On bad days, it’s a compulsion. Those don’t really happen anymore though. I simply like to stay on top of my tasks and I don’t like quitting. I’ve briefly touched on self-loathing on the parasocial relationship post, and I know, very intimately, how much I’d hate myself if I quit some writing project midway through. So I try to see through projects. That can lead to problems though. For another trunked novel, I spent all year, 2019, trying to get it to the idea I want. Except it wasn’t one, but different ideas that didn’t work at all. Needless to say, when you don’t know what you want, you will get crap - the novel didn’t pan out. The problem was spending too much time with it, not listening to my gut, not allowing things to be as they are, and not taking proper breaks. And I still saw it through, or tried to. In the end, I don’t feel bad about the time spent. The characters present appear in another work and I don’t even consider that novel a “trunked novel” in that sense. I do feel bad that I hadn’t listened to my gut feeling telling me to quit. That’s one of two lessons I learned. The other is: trust the process. Because I’m such a perfectionist, that’s sometimes hard to do, just allowing things to happen as they’re meant to be. But if I can work with an outline on Google Docs, so be it! If I have to rewrite everything from scratch because somebody decided not to listen to their gut feeling of taking a break (again)… that happens! That’s fine! If I deviate from the script, all the better! These are things I now allow to happen. Things will take as long as they need to, I tell myself.
So once the work is finished for good, through good and bad days and messy and clean sessions, forgotten plot points and moments, I’ll take a longer break from writing. That’ll be the time where I write my Substack post, or maybe I won’t touch my Docs at all. But I won’t start a new project, just so I can recuperate my creative energy. (That’s not something people talk about, I notice! Writing is work and it’s a serious effort!) After a week or two - sometimes maybe even up to three months, like with Nymph’s Pond -, I’ll return to the work or to writing. This is assuming I’m happy with it narratively. If I’m not, I’m the type to rewrite the whole piece from the start. (And I’ve done that just recently!) So once I’m happy, I’ll read over it and correct prose, cut in or add things. But letting time pass is important, or else you can’t look at it with a fresh set of eyes. If you’re too close to the work, then this will be painful and you’ll cringe a lot at yourself. Again, I think it boils down to time and acceptance. Nowadays I think revision can be pretty fun. It’s not as exciting as writing or outlining, but it is its own kind of reward to sharpen your own vision to what it’s meant to be all along.
Once I’m done with that, I’ll pass it around to friends, see how they like it. Then I’ll edit it over one last time, and then, hit publish! Send to submission! Party time! Celebration... and back to the grind. Rinse and repeat.
Writing - be it novels or a 50k fanfic or even just a short story - takes a lot of patience: with yourself and with your work ethic and with your creative abilities, all of which will be tested, again and again. It’s an intrinsically solitary thing to do, even if you have friends that support you every step of the way (and I’m very lucky that I have them!), it’s still just you and your words. I think a lot of writing - the agony and the worries, so many of the worries - also has to do with the ability to be okay with yourself. Being okay with who you are and what you do. And that’s probably the hardest part of this uphill climb, because it’s not something you can sense but not see, something invisible that takes up every thought regardless. I also think it's the one thing that makes the improvement curve that much harder to see compared to drawing. You could agonize endlessly about all the words you’ve ever poured out, be forever blind to any good quality you have. To me, it’s easier with drawing. It’s good or it needs improvement. To get to that level of clarity with writing takes a lot of time. I think that’s why I feel comforted when I find out SZA had to be locked out of her debut album Ctrl because she agonized too much over it. Or when I find out how much it takes authors to go from first draft to published piece (I hated the book, but in the acknowledgements Arkady Martine says it took her four years to get to the point of a published A Memory Called Empire), I think to myself I’m not wrong or too late or not good enough, and that I’ll get there when this is ready. It may sound silly, but that’s how you remember you’re not alone in the loneliest art there is. And that’s how you remember it’s you versus yourself, in the very end. The deal is that - no matter what - you’re always the winner. Yes, bloody and beaten and yes, perhaps so bruised that you think to yourself that you should’ve not entered the battle to begin with. But every finished piece has left me stronger and my insane obsession of wanting to be a novelist is ever so slowly paying off. The reader will never know about the struggles, but it’s in the DNA of every single book ever written, I believe. And perhaps in the end, that makes writing the most human thing there is.
Next week, I want to talk about themes and motifs and inspirations and influences. Speaking of inspiration, here’s radio host and writer Ira Glass talking about the taste gap:
The bit of talking about how being on transit would give you that bit of muse or inspiration made me miss my daily commute to work each day. Every time I was on the subway and had my music on or just watched the rain on the windows and felt transported to a different world. I love the way you talk about writing, your process and just the love for the craft is so apparent in everything you share. Thanks again for posting this and I know it has given me something great to take away from it and I can't wait to read more of this series.
That process of images appearing as you go through day to day life things like during commute is very relatable. I used to have 2 hours commute each way and during those times it be be just me, my thoughts, my music, and the faceless sea of people around me. Countless ideas came and went during those times, but unfortunately none ever made it to paper. Simply walking up some steps, seeing a person walk by, or smelling the mix of rain and diesel lingering in the air lights up the imagination so very much.
Those long commutes were soul crushing, but I do miss the hours of nothingness during which my mind could freely explore.