Blog Post 4: My Process
In previous posts I’ve talked about why anyone would want to be an author in the first place, some common pitfalls that can plague new writers, and where inspiration to craft stories of our own comes from. What I haven’t talked about yet is my specific process, how did I go from being just like every other dreamer who wanted to write a book someday, to just like every other author who got to hold my freshly printed dream in my hands? It’s not a simple question to answer, but I will do my best to walk through each step I took to get here, and share what it looks like to write a book using my method.
I have read a lot of tips and tricks from the pros, listened to many authors talk about how they write but honestly none of it was as valuable as I had hoped it would be. Some people said they write their books from beginning to end, starting from a single point and just seeing where it would take them. Yet others wrote knowing the end, where they wanted the story to end and then worked backwards from there to write their book. Some people plot out the whole book, know every twist and turn long before they ever put pen to paper. Others just throw spaghetti at the wall until something emerges from the chaos.
No matter what I tried though, nothing seemed to work for me. Sound familiar? I tried to emulate what successful writers had done to achieve what for so much of my life felt like an unachievable flight of fancy, but I just never found my way to a completed manuscript. So what changed? How did I do it? What’s the secret? That’s what we all want to know, right? Find the way that someone else achieved something so we can do that too. Well here’s the thing, I have no idea if my process will work for you or not.
What I do know for sure, is that it is the only thing that worked for me. I hate to say this as underwhelming an answer as it is, but I simply found my own way. I took a sort of middle road, a balanced approach, taking a little bit of this and a little bit of that and blending it all together in my own way. In college I sort of had to find a way to push through my procrastination, and my struggles in order to meet deadlines for my assignments, and I eventually figured it out.
Alright, enough dancing around it with vague nonsense, here’s what I did: I stopped overwhelming myself, I outlined major plot points, I made a list of chapters that I suspected I would need, I set a definitive word count goal (Not page count, which varies based on typography and margins), I set aside time to work every day, I took it seriously, and most importantly I gave myself flexibility. You see as it turns out I am sort of all over the place when it comes to my inspiration, one day its thinking about the start of my book, the next a fight scene later on, then a deep intimate personal moment between two characters in the middle and then how it all ends before jumping back to a travel sequence or bit of dialogue.
At first trying to control this chaos was impossible, like trying to wrangle a tornado with a lasso. But the more I worked with it I found a way to make it work. So here’s how that looks in practice, I sit down at my scheduled writing time, I put on some music to help inspire, excite, and engage my brain but usually something without lyrics so as not to distract too much and pull focus. I make sure I have water handy and won’t need to get up for awhile so I can just sit down and disappear into my work without interruption. I open my word processor, or writing program, and I think about my book very generally, sometimes about a piece of mythopeia or world building just to get myself into the right headspace.
When I am all ready I ask myself, where is my inspiration today? What is coming to mind, if nothing does, I usually pick an open space and see what comes out. But, if I do have a strong scene that is singing to me in the moment, I focus on writing that. So I give myself space in the text, either a blank space, or a insert a page break (you can always remove them later) and I write my daily writing goal of 500 words there. I should mention that that is my minimum, I won’t stop for the day until I’ve hit it, but if I am particularly verbose that day and I feel like I am going over, I usually just go until my energy is spent or the scene I am working on is either complete or at a good stopping point.
That’s pretty much it, by taking it seriously, and staying committed to the goal, I wrote a little bit each day, all over the book. Take your total word count goal and divide it by your guesstimate chapter count to get a goal for where each chapter should roughly stop, its not a hard limit more of a guide to know when to stop. Doing this, little by little each chapter grew until at last, every single chapter was full of words. Only then did I start sewing all my words together, cutting out excessive chapters, or dead end scenes. It took years, so be ready for that. It’s not a sprint, its a marathon, but it is achievable. You can do it too!