What's your agony?

[Bluma Bezbroda]

The article I've shared here recently contains an interesting statement:

"Vonnegut once said there were two types of writers: swoopers and bashers. Swoopers vomit everything down on the page, then edit, edit, and re-edit until it starts to look like coherent language. Bashers work sentence by sentence, only moving on when it's perfect."

I definitely belong to the second category. I agonize over every sentence, just to not find it perfect enough the next thing in the morning. Given my recent problems with getting my shit together and actually producing some content I've tried the swooper's approach. It didn't go well- I ended up angrily deleting the whole paragraph

I'm curious to hear- are you more of a swooper, or a basher?

 

[Robinne Weiss]

Sometimes I swoop, because I know that whatever is in there will escape if I don't get the fundamentals down immediately. But more often I scribble notes on scraps of paper everywhere to hang onto those ideas, then do a lot of bashing.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

I'm neither. I'm more of a Stalker if I had to describe my approach. Although I like flying by the seat of my pants, I do a ton of research on what will come up in the next chapter of my crime novel, mentally rehearsing how it's going to be written. Sometimes, I write sections of the narrative beforehand, inserting them into the action. Occasionally, these prepared bits were written months before I even started the WIP, being more about my protagonist's internal dialogue as he ponders criminal investigation as a way of life. If they fit the mood of a chapter, I'll drag them out of the vault.

In this way, I rather ambush my story, falling on it in a well-prepared attack. I still have to fact check, of course, as that's inevitable when writing 21st-century police story dominated by technology.

My warped brain works in peculiar ways too, contributing to the editing process. I wrote an exciting arrest scene yesterday, with the police moving into woodland at dawn to snatch a post-office raider who's living in a converted horse transporter. As they got into position, they disturbed deer, heard an owl hooting and worried when magpies gave alarm calls that might have alerted their suspect. They did—and she flees in her truck—though is captured.

I finished 99% of the chapter, intending to spell-check this morning. Halfway through the night, as I turned over in my sleep, I literally said 'Bunnies' out loud. Part of my sleeping brain was appraising the day's writing and noticed that I'd forgotten to put any rabbits into the scene where my criminal fled across grassed pasture next to the wood.

Panicking bunny rabbits duly hopped into the manuscript this morning!

 

[Carol Rose]

I get the words down, go back and edit every few minutes, and re-edit again the next day before I move on. Sometimes I go back to the beginning and edit again, but only if I've not written anything in a few days and need to figure out where the story is going next, or have some layering to do.