I was listening to the Story Studio Podcast State of the Industry interview with Becca Syme last night on my way home from work and had a profound realization about my process.
The point of the interview was that there is no formula to success in this game and you cannot blindly follow what has worked for other authors. You need to find the path that works for you and builds on your strengths, instead of blindly following dogma.
Intellectually, I get that. One of the papers I am most proud of from my school days was an analysis of Maoist guerilla warfare where I concluded that Mao didn’t follow a formulaic approach. Instead, he did what he needed to (or what smarter people in his circle told him to do) and it only got written up as a formula later, after trial and error and eventual success. Success came first, and the model came later.
I have accepted that when it comes career paths in writing. The whole point of AuthorDad is that the paths that other authors have taken to success don’t make sense for my situation. I can’t just quit my job and write. I can’t/won’t abandon my family time to write instead. I am committed to writing around my other obligations.
But I have developed my process based on what works for my situation, not necessarily for my strengths. And I haven’t applied that thinking at all to my writing style.
What really hit me in the interview was when Sean told a story about a panel he’d attended where the speaker said that Finding Nemo had a perfect story structure, but in the same breath said, yes, of course it does, because it’s a finished, released work and you can go back and lay the model over it and say, “See, it fits.” But you can only do that because it’s finished. You don’t do that before it starts.
I have spend a lot of time trying to write my stories according to the models from Truby’s Anatomy of Story, or the Hero’s Journey, or the How to Write a Bestseller Course, but I think I might be adhering too much to the dogma of those models, instead of internalizing them and creating my own story and way forward. Letting the story be what it needs to be.
This certainly needs some more thought. For my story and for my writing process. For how I approach writing advice in the future. For how I create my own voice.