Turns out Picasso was a plotter.

Empress of Dorsa update:

I finished the new outline. More on that below.

As regular readers of my blog know, I’ve been struggling with Empress of Dorsa, the third book in the Chronicles of Dorsa trilogy, and recently took a step back to reevaluate where I was at and write a new outline.

By luck, I tuned into Freakonomics Radio on my way to the gym this past Saturday. By bad luck, the gym turned out to be closed (July 4th, darn it). But that was good luck, because it meant I got to take a long walk and listen to the rest of the Freakonomics episode.

Discovery vs. Outline // Experimentalist vs. Conceptualist

Not to bore you, and you can always check out the episode if you want, which I linked above, but it turns out the debate in the writing world between discovery writing and outlining finds an equivalent in almost every creative field there is.

Instead of Pantsing vs. Plotting or Discovery Writing vs. Outlining, University of Chicago Professor of Economics David Galenson categorizes all artists as either experimentalists or conceptualists.

An example of an experimentalist would be Leonardo da Vinci, who worked on the Mona Lisa for over fifteen years before he called it “done,” endlessly painting and re-painting and painting again.

A conceptualist, by contrast, prepares and prepares and prepares but then creates the final product just once. Want to know who was a conceptualist? Turns out Picasso was.

When Picasso was in his mid-twenties, he was super jealous of Henri Matisse. So he decided he was going to out-do Matisse, and he set about it methodically. He made hundreds — as many as five hundred! — preparatory drawings and then finally — meticulously — created Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

A short-hand way of thinking of “experimentalist vs. conceptualist” is to replace it with “tinkerer vs. perfectionist” (and yes, I recognize the limitations of making those into two supposedly different categories).

But back to novels.

I’ve been down about Empress of Dorsa, I ain’t gonna lie. First my writing stalled out, and then more recently, even my outlining stalled out. I was in that Artax sinking while Atreyu desperately pulls on his neck and begs him not to go moment.

But then Freakonomics brought on novelist Jennifer Egan, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for her novel A Visit from the Good Squad. Apparently, it took Egan

~ A COUPLE OF DECADES ~

to write that novel. Her next big book after that, Manhattan Beach, took seven years. In the interview, she said she’ll write forty or fifty drafts of each chapter before she’s happy with it.

I’m still having an identity crisis, but I’m feeling better about it.

I still find myself going back and forth between pantser and plotter, discovery writer and outliner, tinkerer and perfectionist. I guess I still lean more towards discovery writing, but since I finally finished my fresh outline for Empress of Dorsa, I continue to try to “discipline myself into” being more of a plotter.

But either way, after I heard Jennifer Egan talk about her writing process, those 93,000 words of Empress that I might have to mostly throw away don’t hurt quite so much. If she can write a book over two decades and go through 40-50 drafts before she reaches a final version, then surely I can be patient and take a few more months and two more drafts to find the final version of Empress.