I am a knitter. I love the repeated motion and the sense of accomplishment as your work gets longer and longer. Lately I’ve been knitting a lot of simple hats, but I’ve got my eye on this lacy shawl that is simply gorgeous but really complex. I know that if I follow the pattern—even when it seems nonsensical—something beautiful will grow beneath my knitting needles. Sometimes things go awry. You drop a stitch that you have to retrieve or even backtrack to. Sometimes you have to pull out inches of a sweater because the size is wrong or you misread the pattern. Sometimes your skein of wool becomes a tangled mess and you have to stop what you’re doing and just untangle and untangle so that you can resume your forward motion.
You can probably guess where I’m going with this. Yes, writing is a lot like knitting. I am in the midst of writing a sequel to my first novel, Watersmeet (Marshall Cavendish Children’s Books), a young adult fantasy. I started with a clear sense of where I was headed. I even had an outline. My goal was to do what Anne Lamott suggests in her seminal book about writing, Bird by Bird: a [crappy] first draft. (Lamott’s language is a little more, erm, salty.) I’ve heard this from other writers, too. Just get it out. Don’t worry about details, terrible wording, overuse of adjectives, characters that appear out of nowhere. Get the arc of the story and then go back and revise, revise, revise. This approach appeals to me. I love revision and find invention much harder. Why not write my crappy first draft and spend the bulk of my time revising?
But I am a knitter and I think like a knitter. I craft my story as far as I can, but then I notice that it has become hopelessly tangled. A character that is supposed to be arrogant has become humble; another character who is supposed to fall in love refuses to; my heroine has more resources than I knew. It is impossible for me to go forward until I’ve untangled. I still don’t worry about the little things. I am happy to let characters appear out of nowhere and overuse adjectives to my heart’s content, but if a character’s motivation has fundamentally changed, or the arc of a story shifts, I need more than a note in the margin. I’d feel like I was adding bright orange to sweater of deep brown That makes for an ugly piece—and lots of extra strands of orange that show up when you try to weave them in.
I suspect my process is not terribly efficient, but creativity is seldom efficient. I’ve tried the crappy first draft approach several times and it clearly works for lots of writers. I’m just not one of them. So I’ll go buy my wool for that lacy shawl, cast-on knowing that I may have to pull out row after row of stitches, and trusting that somewhere down the line I will have a work of art to share with the world.
Comments
1 Chelsea M. Campbell // Sep 3, 2009 at 8:12 pm
I’m a knitter and a writer, too, and that’s totally how I write! The details can change as I go and be smoothed over later, but I can’t move forward if character motivations are out of whack or if some big plot element just doesn’t make sense. So if something gets weird, I backtrack, untangle, and move forward again, just like with my knitting.
2 Jen Dutton // Sep 4, 2009 at 5:16 am
Hi Ellen–I’m a knitter a too. I can’t tell you how often I’ll start a pattern and then just change it because I want to see how it will look. Sometimes this works. Sometimes I make sweaters that look like they were designed for octopuses. If this isn’t a metaphor my writing issues, I don’t know what is. Thanks for an excellent post.
3 Jacqueline Houtman // Sep 4, 2009 at 7:03 am
I knit, too, but my knitting serves a different purpose (http://jjhoutman.livejournal.com/9513.html). I prefer the mindless kind of knitting, like doing the same mitten pattern over and over.
Not sure there’ s a metaphor there, but sometimes I skip over bits of writing that aren’t working and go on to another scene that is more clear in my head. Then I know where the troublesome scene needs to go. Perhaps it’s like putting that skipped scene on a stitch holder.
4 S. Terrell French // Sep 4, 2009 at 7:30 am
Yes, knitting! Now I realize how much changes during revision and am trying not to obsess over small things (like chapter endings).
Good luck, Ellen!
5 Ellen Jensen Abbott // Sep 4, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Wow! So many writers and knitters! There must be some connection in the brain….Knitting can be really soothing at times–when you’re not pulling out!–and so it is a good way to relax after a particularly tough writing day. And I can’t tell you how knitting’s saved me in faculty meetings!
6 BFF // Oct 2, 2009 at 7:30 am
BFF! I love this! I often feel guilty when I knit, tho, like I should be reading more or writing…so I still have a half-finished sweater on my needles. (Needles, which, btw, Hally has chewed the ends off, not once but twice now…I’m going to end up spending more on needles than I did on the yarn)
However, I just commandeered my daughter’s old ipod and downloaded several YA books onto it so now I can ‘read’ while knitting and not feel guilty. There is definitely something therapeutic in the repetitive, quiet activity that feeds a need somewhere deep within;)
I also have a pb about snail sisters where one is a knitter…go figure.
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