Meet Lois McMaster Bujold
Science Fiction Writer
The Writing Process

Karen: Do you sit down and completely write everything and then edit it ?

Lois: Everyone does something different. Every writer has a different process. My process has developed over the years. So, I'll sort of describe how it works now.

I begin with an idea that is exciting to me. It's almost like a visceral feel. I can feel it in my solar plexus, there's a sense that this is interesting enough to be a novel. This is a theme I care about. This is an idea I can think about for a year. Novels have to have endurance. They can't be an idea you're going to be tired of working on in three weeks. For that you need a short story.

The characters begin to develop. Usually, I begin with characters and build plot and setting around them, although I have assembled the parts in other orders. And again, I make notes just as the ideas come up. I'll make notes about the characters, about their background, about their relationships, about plot ideas, little dialogue ideas, incident ideas. And I'll just collect these in a three ring notebook in pencil and it will get to a certain critical mass and I'll begin to see how the story should start.

I'll look at other plot ideas. Stories vary as to how much I need to know before I begin the story. Sometimes, I just sort of plunge in when I have my initial idea and then I get to a certain point and I stop and think about the next section. The thing about a novel is you're never writing a whole novel at once. You break it down into little pieces and work on the parts and then put them all together.

Karen: Do you work on scenes in order, or do you move scenes around in your outline and work on those?

Lois: In my case, I work sequentially. I don't work ahead and jump around. I know at least one other writer who does do it that way, but I've found things don't fit properly if I do that. I find I come up with new ideas in between that weren't there originally, which alter the tone of what I've written. I end up having to throw it out and write it again, which is twice as much work.

Prior to the time I had a place to put my computer that was a private room - I've only just acquired an office - I would write my first drafts in pencil, in longhand in the three ring notebook, because I could carry it around. When my kids were little I would go to the Marion Public Library and write my first drafts there. When I had the notes up to a certain point where I thought I could sit down and write two or three pages, I would take it to the library and do that there. Then I would bring it home.

By that time I had acquired an inexpensive computer which my dad bought me. It was a Coleco Adam. But, it had a daisy wheel printer and, at that time, nobody was accepting dot matrix. I typed the draft into the computer and that would be my first printed draft and that would go around and be read by friends, Pat and Lillian and other people that I acquired.

Karen: Do you have a group of friends that read works in progress?

Lois: Yes. I use a lot of test readers. I will run the thing past readers and see if they had the kind of responses that I want them to be having or if they go off in some odd direction. And, it's like okay, I have to fix it so that the reader doesn't get the wrong idea from this section of the story so they all pretty much herd in the direction that I want them to do in terms of reader response.

So, as a chapter is finished, I will usually take it around and get some feedback and then go on to the next section. Sometimes I'll have two or three chapters pretty well blocked out in my mind. Sometimes I'll be working or shorter sections. At any given time, the basic building block is the scene. The scene has a beginning, middle and an end and that's what I sit down and have a really detailed outline of.

Now, that I'm not doing the handwritten draft any more, I do slightly more detailed outlines of the scene. It's not like what they teach you for writing non-fiction in school with Roman numeral one, capital letter A, small letter B, that kind of outline is for non-fiction and article and that kind of writing. For fiction, it's more like you just tell the story to yourself real quick. And, make notes of the nifty little ideas and the ideas for sharp dialogue that you think up that you might otherwise forget. A lot of writing is simply capturing thought as it goes by before it vanishes into the haze. And then I'd repeat the process until I'd come to the end of the book.

Karen: Do you think about things they teach girls about in school, like "theme", when you're working?

Lois: Theme is how it all comes together to not only tell a story, but to mean something beyond the story. It's the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Theme is a vital part of the underlying structure of a story, but developing it is not a conscious process for me. My backbrain is smarter than the rest of my brain. It does that part and I pretty much have to leave it alone to work. I can only see my themes after - sometimes long after - I'm done.

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