![]() ![]() (The general idea is that it’s way easier to just keep researching than it is to get back to writing, and that you’ll probably make the best and most crucial discoveries about your story by writing it, not by reading.) I think a similar principle probably applies to outlining plot: I want to know where I’m going, but I also want the story to feel like a trip, not like a map. I once heard the novelist Kathryn Davis say something smart about doing research that I will now attempt to paraphrase and probably get wrong: She said that she does research whenever she gets stuck, but then stops doing research as soon as she’s not stuck anymore. Martin: A plotter, but I’m not fundamentalist about it. TQ: Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid? My first published story came out in Gargoyle in 2003. I wrote a few things that would probably qualify as functional short stories when I was in high school and college, and I started getting serious about it-taking classes, reading clinically and rigorously, writing stuff meant to be read by people I don’t personally know-in about 2000. As to when, I’ve written stuff for as long (or longer) than I can remember. In most undertakings-creative and otherwise-we have to accommodate the limitations of our materials and circumstances, but since writing gives us all of language to work with, as well as the freedom to decide for ourselves what “exactly right” looks like, it’s an area where this kind of exactitude seems, or feels, possible. ![]() Martin: Thanks! I have gradually come to realize that my impulse to write comes mostly from the satisfaction of getting something exactly right. ![]()
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