People often ask how I write.
Not just the general, how can I be that creative and string that many words together. They genuinely want to know the method behind the madness.
First, there isn’t. A method that is. At least not one that most can comprehend, so here’s my best attempt at explaining it. Well, at least how I write a serial series like Felix — which is odd in and of itself.
Someone was asking about it the other week. How I wrote a coherent serial and if I massively plotted it out so that everything I’d do later fit well with what I’d already written. Or if I wrote the whole thing at once, edited it, and then published it.
Nope. None of the above.
In thinking of an answer that really explained how I do what I do, I came up with a gardening analogy.
Each season of Felix, I come up with a title and basic theme and the gist of what happens over the course of ten or so episodes. Then, I come up with the basic framework of each episode — humorous incidents, funny scenes, takeaways, one liners and zingers.
Basically, find the seeds of the season and plant them.
Then, I wait a bit and see what grows — shaping and molding each story as it spins out into a whole, weaving the results into what’s come before. Early season episodes tend to grow faster than the later ones, but sometimes there’s just something so perfect for a later episode it gets written first and then I weave it into the whole.
Nothing’s planned or plotted — even if it is planned, my characters always defy me (looking at you Molly) — it’s all discovery writing which mystifies people, apparently. They don’t see how I write what I write without a plan. I guess that’s a compliment? I guess I’m doing my job if they can’t tell I don’t have a plan for any of this and am just winging it.
I mean, hell if I know what my characters are going to do until I put them in the situation and let them have at it. Then I just write the incident report and weave it into a narrative structure rather like a topiary.
I shape and mold it as it grows into something magnificent. And when I’m finished molding it, it’s set. No changes, no revisionist history here. Even if I think something could be cooler, I leave it as is and work around it, because to me, that’s the way it is. You don’t cut the limb and expect the leaf to stay put. The very thought of going back and changing things is simply incomprehensible to me to the point where when this person asked the question, it took me far too long to realize exactly what was being asked.
That’s just how I’ve always written and it’s what I think makes me so suited to writing serialized fiction. I just go with the flow and roll with whatever comes along in the story world.
I’ve mentioned previously how I don’t edit – I write and refine as I go, cycling through the words until I’m satisfied. This is an outgrowth of that tendency. This is literary topiary.
–j.e. pittman