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A Blog About Walking With God
​and Writing

Organic Versus Structured

6/11/2021

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​ 
          It is an interesting exercise for a writer to consider how they write. For example, I write Christian romance novels. How do I develop the plot, characters, setting, time, and all the other elements that go into my novels?
 
        I’ve been thinking about this recently. A word that keeps coming into my mind is ‘organic’ – that I write organically. So, I looked up the word and some sentence examples to gain a better understanding of its definition. One of the definitions Lexico.com provides for organic is, “denoting a relation between elements of something such as they fit together harmoniously as necessary parts of a whole” (Lexico.com is a new collaboration between Dictionary.com and Oxford University Press (OUP).
           
            Here are two examples of the word used in a sentence:
  1. Health systems need to be organic and flexible rather than rigid and mechanistic.
  2. The majority of the songs on the album blend each element into a full, organic, and integrated whole.

            My next step was to look up what I consider to be the opposite of organic and that is
‘structured’. As a transitive verb, Lexico.com defines structure as, “construct or arrange according to a plan.”
           
         When I sit down to write a novel, I do have an overall plan. But the parts within that plan are flexible. For example, in a way that is difficult to explain, my characters sometimes go off in directions that I did not anticipate when I developed the structure. Rather than stick rigidly to the structure, I allow the character to go where he/she wants to go. Sometimes this is inconvenient, as it means rearranging other aspects of the book. But I believe it is important to give the character free rein.
           
           In “Seventy Times Seven,” the character Maria was to play a secondary role to the main character, Merisela. However, Maria took on a life of her own and played a much more important part in the book than originally designed. I believe that letting Maria be Maria ultimately enhanced the part of Merisela.
           
​           Am I saying that it is better to write organically rather than structurally? No. What I am saying is that I am a writer who writes organically. Ultimately, it is the reader who will decide whether they like an organic writer. They will vote yay or nay with their pocket books.
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    In this Blog, I want to share with you some of the things I've learned from many years of following Jesus. 

    Also, I'd like to impart some of what is involved in writing Christian romance fiction.

    I'd love to receive your comments in either category.

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