Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Levels of Thought

Writers often think at three different levels. These are tactical, operational and strategic.

For example when thinking "Tactically" an author is focused on writing a short piece, like a short story, vignette or chapter.

Operational Thinking in writing a novel is how the chapters will be strung together to form a coherent manuscript.

Strategic thinking deals with those overarching considerations in writing a novel like, what tense will it be written in or things like should I kill my Central character off or leave her fate hanging for a subsequent novel?

I mention this because it is not possible for my brain to think at all these levels at the same time. They are all important but to entertain them as a writer I must be wearing my tactical, operational or strategic hat when I do.

In developing The Exploratory Writing Workshop , the Program of Instruction focused on getting the student to deal with all three. The vignettes were to practice tactical writing, stringing them into chapters was the operational part and the strategic dimension was in getting the student to think about where the story was going, how it would be written and how to get the whole thing where you wanted it to go.

I hope you are beginning to realize that writing a novel has enough complexity that a writer can't just start pushing the pencil or pounding the keys and expect the whole thing to just fall together in the end as if by some magical coincidence.