Slow writing

A good story like a meal is prepared with all the right ingredients

 I wonder if slow writing can be taken like slow cooking - taking your time over creating, waiting for things to marinate for a fuller flavour and then taking your time over the result?

I suppose a flash story is a microwaved ready meal. It takes minutues, then 'ping', it's done! Though to be honest, writing a flash story can take just as long to write as a short story. And so what of the short story? Perhaps a combination of brunch or a long lunch, depending on how long the story is. A novel is a casserole on a slow heat, bubbling away for hours, rich and flavoursome.

Apologies, I am getting carried away with this. Prepare for some rambling. What I am trying to get at here is my method of writing. Usually I rattle off my words with the bones of the story. In editing I fill it out (a bit like stuffing, oh we are back to food) with all the detail that got sidelines in my eagerness to get words on paper. But sometimes, and this is one of them, I write slowly. It goes against my nature because I am always in a hurry. Usually, if I slow down it's because I'm stuck, and that's my 'mulling time'. Then I'm off again.

My current WIP has all the right ingredients - characters, setting and a cockeyed plot (sorry, did I really say that?) and they are steeped daily in the mulling process. If I am lucky, I get one scene written, and this time a lot of the detail is going in as I write. When I last posted, I said that I had no idea where this piece was going, but something magical happened. I found a scene ending that came out of nowhere and then I had to ask questions. Why has my character done this and where does it take me now? For a while I stumped again, and then I had another one of those flash moments - a plot twist! This story threw me into some quick research, and here I thought I might get bogged down in detail, but I have found my way out of it. 

Like people who wait until the last moment to write their essays for college, I write on my wits. I am a pantser, often fully fledged. I plan up to a certain extent, but prefer to wait for that light bulb moment that I would not have found if I'd plotted. I know that if I plotted, my logical mind would kick in and I'd find it hard to deviate from the plan. It would worry me. You see, my personality is a bit weird because I am both organised and unorganised depending on what I am doing. I am certainly a planner when I go on holiday. The itinerary is fixed ahead of time. I have all the train times written out, maps have been downloaded, walks sorted. I have schedules. If I am with others, I have to make sure I don't take over. Oh, and by the way my essays were always started way in advance and then picked over until about a week before the due date. Yet when I come to creative writing, I am at the other extreme. It can be scary to write this way, especially when there isn't even an idea of ending. 

This piece I am writing now is a fully fledged piece of unplanned writing, and maybe that's why it is taking so long. So instead of writing a thousand words a day (on a good day that can be up to five thousand), I am writing scene by scene. We are talking a few hundred words at a time. I am still waiting for the splurge to happen, but this time I don't think it will come. It annoys me. I'd rather be pumping out at speed. When I finish, will I have a slow cooked casserole of a story full of flavour, or a haphazard mix of ingredients that don't quite pull together? I hope it's the latter.

Still, I do all my own preparation from scratch and if my recipe doesn't work, I only have myself to blame. The proof is in the pudding and all that! Back to mulling.