In a post on the Killzone blog, James Scott Bell examines how Raymond Chandler kept his work flowing, even when he felt demoralized by the demand to churn out scripts for Hollywood.
In a letter, Chandler explained that he began dictating his stories to get them out, without reviewing or editing. “Some of the stuff is good, some very much not,” he wrote. “But I don’t see why the method could not be adapted to novel writing, at least by me. Improvise the story as well as you can, in as much detail or as little as the mood seems to suggest, write dialogue or leave it out, but cover the movement, the characters and bring the thing to life.”
He added that stories may be lost when a meticulous writer focuses too much on initial story faults, rather than moving forward with the writing. “[Y]ou never quite know where your story is until you have written the first draft of it,” Chandler wrote in a another letter. “So I always regard the first draft as raw material.” Bell agrees with that approach and encourages his students to adopt it.
However, Chandler also identified two pitfalls: “The strange delusion that something on paper has a meaning because it is written…Also, the tendency to worship production for its own sake.”
“Just because you write something doesn’t make it good,” Bell says. “And publishing junk over and over doesn’t make a career.” Chandler believed that style and voice made the difference. Bell recommends focusing on voice as you write your first draft. It can’t be faked and will set you apart from writers cranking out by-the-numbers books to readers who only want more of the same.
