Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Difference between revisions

** King said in ''On Writing'' that he does ''occasionally'' plot his stories, he just does it rarely because he usually isn't proud of the results (like ''Rose Madder'' and ''Insomnia'') when he does--with one exception: ''The Dead Zone''.

* [[Cory Doctorow]] wrote ''[[Little Brother]]'' in eight days.

* The Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe [[Extruded Book Product|churned out novels for Badger Books]] on the basis of a book cover, a title and a very short deadline. Badger's policies mean it's impossible to tell exactly how many he wrote, but the estimate works out at one 158 page book every twelve days. To manage this, he dictated into a reel to reel tape recorder, then shipped the tapes off to a pool of typists for transcription. To hit the word target, he would [[Padding|pad out]] the books with philosophical discussions, mundane detail and [[Department of Redundancy Department|redundant descriptions]] (robots: "Metal things. Metal things that could think. Thinking metal things"), but then could be told that he had only three pages left to wrap up the story, so he had to [[Ass Pull|pull out]] a [[Deus Ex Machina]]. Despite, or perhaps because of all this, Fanthorpe's work has picked up a [[So Bad It's Good]] following.

* [[L. Ron Hubbard]] claims he wrote by meditating into a trance-like state and typing constantly for hours at a time. According to [[Harlan Ellison]], Hubbard used the Jack Kerouac method -- he rigged a roll of butcher paper of the appropriate width to feed into his typewriter, wrote for several hours, and at the end cut the long sheet down into even pages.