The Making of Inside the Wright Brothers

Despite having read literary criticism and biography all my life, I don't know much about how other writers go about creating their novels. Some writers are intuitive and inarticulate about the creative process; some are secretive and destroy evidence of the evolution of their works. I don't know whether many writers have written as extensively about the act of creation as I am doing, but if so, I haven't come across their accounts. To my knowledge, there are no detailed explanations of how Hemingway created his novels, but I have the impression that he faced the torment of the blank page every day, and that his remedy for this problem was to stop writing when he still knew what was to follow. This implies that if he went too far on a particular day, he would no longer know what was to happen in the rest of the novel.

I find that having a structural plan, which I treat as the backbone of an idea, and which I bring to realization by constantly adding detail, means that I always know what is to follow. This does not mean that the novel is cut and dried before it is written. On the contrary, it actually proceeds by continuously presenting mysteries that must be constantly solved. I always start with the overall outer structure and work my way inside by deciding on the details. I puzzle my way through the planning-writing-editing process by trying to figure out how to add support-structures inside what I have already built, rather than trying to add something more to the outside of it. Although I complete one chapter at a time, the writing process that produces each chapter involves, as much as possible, the planning and writing of the entire novel as a unit.