Process again

I have been watching the documentaries on the extended DVDs of The Lord of the Rings all afternoon, which is what I seem to end up doing most Sunday afternoons before we do to LOMLs' parents, and I have been thinking about the process of making films and how it relates to the process of making a book.

When I first started writing novels, I thought the key was to begin at the beginning, carry on until you get to the end and then stop. Ha! No. Well, that's how I wrote my first published novel, because I was writing it as a serial for my cousins, who were sick at home with nothing to do. I would finish a chapter a night and then email it to them. Since then, though, my novel-making has been a matter of writing a chapter here, a scene there ... sometimes just a sentence that I know I will need, saved out in a separate document to be spliced in later. Watching the documentaries of the filming of The Lord of the Rings, my process has come to seem remarkably similar to a filming process. Film actors are required to do scenes in a disjointed fashion for the most part, rather than working through it in a linear way as you would on stage. But they have to make it work. They don't have the luxury of working up to a scene by going through all the other stages of the story beforehand - they just have to plunge right into the moment and give a great performance. And when the performance is there on film, the real work begins ... all the post-production work. There are definitely parallels to be drawn. It is fascinating watching a creative work come together like that, as all the bits and pieces fall into place.

I like the idea of being a 'wordsmith' rather than a writer. I think it gives a more accurate image of what being an author is actually like. You are hammering sentences into shape, welding them together ... it's a craft like any other. And it's a job like any other, too. You don't skip a day at the office because you don't 'feel inspired', and you shouldn't miss a day at the keyboard for the same reason. I have good days where everything's going great, and days where I think I should give the whole writing thing up and get a real job, but most of my days are pretty standard, really ... neither particularly good nor bad, even a little tedious sometimes. But what I have noticed is that, when I read back over what I have written, the stuff made on the bad or humdrum days is just as good as the stuff written on the good days. It's just a matter of putting in the miles. That has been a really good lesson to learn, these past few months.