Organization, Self-Discipline Win For Writers - Or Do They?

Careful organization combined with self-discipline are a must for profitable writers, aren't they? Or are they, really?

Perhaps a better question would be: What works greatest for you when it comes to your writing career?

I recall some years ago, when I was aspiring to becoming the next Stephen King or Dean Koontz, or possibly Lawrence Block or Evan Hunter/Ed McBain, I read every thing I could discover within the way of how-to books by productive novelists. I even bought a book which carefully set out an elaborate step-by-step program for generating an idea, planning, outlining, and writing a best-selling novel. ("The Marshall Plan," perhaps, was the name of it? I do not keep in mind.)

The difficulty with all of that, from my standpoint, is that I would rather pull my fingernails out with pliers (well, perhaps just one fingernail) than master all those methods, plans and schemes for writing a novel. I appear to recall the "plan" put forth in that elaborate step-by-step book was so complex that it involved crafting tiered levels of index cards as plotting and outlining tools. Soon after searching it over closely and giving it a start off, I discovered the plan would really make a pile of cards as well as other documents amounting to nearly an entire novel in itself.

More significantly, I discovered as I began to read recent how-to books by writers like King and Koontz that they only loosely followed their own stated approaches and guidance about tips on how to write novels. In his great book published some years ago, "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft,"King admitted that he usually does his finest work when he tosses out formal plotting and outlining and relies on his imagination to answer the "what if..." and "what occurs next is..." situations that arise in writing a novel. Dean Koontz, who wrote a couple of "how-to" books for novelists in the 1970s and '80s, takes significantly the same approach to structuring a novel. (Which does not mean he "wings it" when he's really writing the bits and pieces of a novel. Go to Koontz's web page and read some of his Q&A responses there. Though his work sometimes seems to flow magically when you read it, he says he often does 20+ revisions per page when he's writing a novel.)

According to interviews he's given on television, best-selling author John Grisham is one of the success stories of careful plotting and detailed outlining. He spends months doing all that groundwork, sometimes amassing hundreds of pages of material, before he starts basically writing a novel.

So what works for you? Do you write most effective when you've thought through plot lines and written outlines, back stories for your characters, etc.? Or do you write ideal when you move the story along scene-by-scene as it unfolds in your head, with little planning and plotting? If you do extensive pre-writing research, plotting, and outlining--why? If you do not do all that groundwork, how do you basically move your story forward, i.e., how you can you start off "here" and go about getting "there"?

The most important lesson you can learn from your particular, individual approach to writing is this: Become extra self-aware of how and why you do the things that work, then improve on them.