Taking Your Time

By Claire Booth

Scott D. Parker’s post yesterday about the movie Ratatouille got me thinking about the long record of quality films produced by Pixar. The animation studio has been making phenomenal movies for more than twenty years. It’s a track record unrivaled by any other major studio (which each manage to put out at least one bomb a year). So how do the geniuses at Pixar do it? I think their success comes down to one thing:

Time. 

They take a lot of it. Toy Story took more than four years to bring to the screen. And that was fast. Monsters, Inc. took almost six years, and Finding Nemo took almost seven. The complicated (and absolutely perfect) story of the inner emotions of a 12-year-old girl took about seven years to develop, write and animate to become the movie Inside Out.

In all of these instances, and their thirteen other movies, Pixar didn’t let their work out into the world until they thought it was ready. It’s a good policy that I think applies just as equally to writing. Taking your time is never a bad thing.

How a writer does that can take many different forms. There’s no one correct way, but I do believe that when you reach the end of your manuscript, you need to have taken time somewhere along the way. You can outline carefully before you ever start a draft. You can write the entire manuscript slowly and carefully without an outline (that’s me). Or you can write like you’re Usain Bolt in the 100-meter dash and then let it sit for a while before coming back to it for a final read-through and edit.

Any of these ways will make for a better story in the end. The proof is in the Pixar.

And Now for Something Completely Different

by Dave White

Scott Parker often talks about his experience reading Shutter Island. He says when he sat down with it, he expected Mystic River Part 2. He wanted Lehane to give him another version of the same book. (And now, he says, he can't wait to read SI again. I think he's gonna love it, knowing what he's been reading recently.)

I've been thinking a lot about his statement though. Being disappointed in a book because you expected the same type of book as the one that came before it. I used to be the same way. I could read several Ross MacDonald or Robert B. Parker books in a row and not get tired of them.

Now, I look for something different.

I love that Lehane went out and stretched his writing muscles to give us a private eye series, then a small town Greek Tragedy, then a gothic horror novel, then a huge historical melodrama. I could sit here and argue that all his novel fall into crime fiction somehow, they are all tied to the genre, but they're like balloons tethered to the same banister--each string leads to the same place, but at the end of each you'll find a different color.

Anytime I email Duane Swierczynski that I'm about to start one of his books, he writes back something along the lines of "Just so you know, it's NOTHING like the last one." (By the way, his forthcoming novel EXPIRATION DATE is fantastic. I just received and ARC.)

That's one of my favorite things about Duane's books, much like Lehane. I never know what I'm gonna get. I could get a spy novel that makes Pepperidge farm cookies frightening. Or a book about a sexy blonde who poisons a drink. But each goes off in a different direction.

You want something new from an author. You don't want to read the same book over and over again. If you like that, then you also want to be able to recognize who the killer is by page 50.

But I like most of my writers to stretch their writing muscles. I want to do that too. Even in a series, I often don't want to see the characters going through the same thing over and over again (certain characters aside).

The book I'm working on now is different. There are things in it that I've never done before. It's surprised me at times as well. It has been hell on my writing muscles. What I have planned after this book is even more different.

(Also, if you want to see something really different, you can read about Band Bashes at my own blog. See? I can stretch my muscles.)

Just like the authors I love.

And each time I start, I'm excited to see something new happen.