My Writing Process

How do I write?

How do I write?

This knowledge may be useful. It may be a positive hinderance.

Every writer varies. In their techniques, in their processes, in their habits. The same writer can vary from work to work.

For instance, some writers can write scenes out of order, and even find it a help. Me?

I begin with notes. Writing down everything to occurs to me about the story.¹ This can go down to lines of dialog; advice books that say you have to start with an overarching idea of the story only make my muse giggle.²

I try, of course, to stuff as many plot bunnies as I can into the story. This is, in part, because it maximizes the use of plot bunnies. The higher the ratio of bunny to stories, the fewer stories must be written to use them.

What's more, they are useful. This is a beginning and that an ending?³ Now all I need is a middle! (All. . . .)

Though it does require a careful eye. This requires a man on good terms with his father, and that, a fatherless man, so they don't play well together, unless the men are two different characters. (And if I decide they must merge into one character, one idea must be cut.) Likewise this needs there to be no race except human, and that another race. And, more treacherously, this and that don't create the same sort of mood, in a way that damage the unity of the final work.

I go poke, poke, poke, trying to figure out where it can start. Once I have that, alongside the notes, I outline. To get that beginning, middle, and end. For the main plot at least.

At this point, I start to generate names. I can outline without names, but I will need them for the first draft. There are writers who can write their entire stories about WIZARD-NAME and KING-NAME, but I can't.

Also, the circle around stuff?⁴ It can start here. At least here there is the excuse that I need idea generation, and the plot bunnies hop up when they do.

Sometimes I do a high-level outline, when it is the overarching idea that occurred to me, but what I need is a list of all the scenes in the main plot of the story. This is how I force the incomplete ideas to form a full story.

If I can not flesh it out to that -- well, abandoning a half-finished outline is nowhere near so painful as abandoning a half-finished story.

It's like going through a forest, blazing the trees where I want to lay the path. With the added advantage that you can blaze them out of order, just so long as you know approximately when in the story they occur. And relocate them at need. (This is different than writing the full-blown scenes. This is because it works differently for me.)

Sometimes as I plug along, the outline is just one scene after another. That doesn't work. You need to have high points in the middle of the story. Landmarks, if not actual sights, along the path.

Then I pull out a plot skeleton and try to map the highlights. And lowlights. Because the bad guys have to get their punches in, or there will be no real conflict.

On the other hand, sometimes the problem is that whatever I expect to happen next doesn't work. Not for any coherent problem, it just means I'm stuck.

I find taking whatever I thought would happen next and doing the exact opposite helps. I thought they would find someone in the fair to learn more? A dragon attacks, breaking up the fair. (There's a limit to how far this will work because by the time you are narrowing down on the climax, a tangent will distort the story structure. But for much of a story, it works for me.)

And then, once I have a tale from the opening scene to the denouement scene by scene, I can start to write. (YMMV. Some people simply can't write a story if they have written the outline first. What they do if they keep petering out, I do not know.)

Consider this actually building a trail. Digging up the way and putting down the concrete, with railings on the awkward slopes, bridges over streams, and signs for the sights.

Sometimes, of course, the ground proves to be less sound -- I have to rework how the plot goes. The metaphor breaks down, because it's often something at the two-thirds mark that needs more work in the first quarter mark, or vice versa.

And there are often subplots that sprout and have to be worked around the main plot. They may alter it, of course. Often they should.

One rule I have is to write fat and revise lean. If you are in the slightest doubt about whether something should go in, in it goes. I particularly did this when I knew that a thing should get one detail, and I thought of two, and couldn't choose. Throw them both in and choose while revision. Much, much, much easier than trying to remember the one you didn't put in.

Sometimes, when I'm plugging along in the draft, it occurs to me that three scenes ago shouldn't be in summer. I put nothing in the outline about the weather at this point, but immediately after, there's a snowstorm. Or I just realized that a snowstorm would fit perfectly here.

Or the main character should have learned something, three chapters ago.

Some writers just make a note that something is needed and forge onward.

Me? If I don't put in the foundations, I don't know how to build on them. The exact details may matter vitally. I go back to revise it in.

On the other hand, it can still be a form of vacuuming the cat. The longer I spend setting up the forward motion of my story, the longer it takes before I have to settle down and actually write it. And I'm particularly likely to revise back when I've hit a difficult patch.

Then, the difficulty may benefit from such revision, such as it may benefit from my circling around to other stories. Hard to juggle these things.

But once I reach the end, the tale goes on the backburner, and I do circle around. For at least a week, I work on something else. I may take notes on bright ideas, but I work on something else. (If I do revise, particularly the end, I reset the week.)

When I come back -- and part of circling around is forcing yourself to go back and not to the new sparkling idea -- I revise. I personally find that while I may trim words, sentences, paragraphs, or even scenes that do not serve sufficient purpose to justify their length, my revisions are generally elaborating what I forgot to actually put in precisely because it was so clear in my mind.

And the end of a pass is putting it aside for another backburner session. And another pass.

At least one, late pass should be done quickly, so as to keep it all in memory at once, and find plot holes. The hero whose father was all alone in the early chapter should not, in the end, return home to his mother and father.

At some point, when it has no flaws that I can find, or I know it has flaws I can't identify, I send it off to beta readers. (I note that if I suspect the plot has fundamental issues, I do not fuss around with phrasing. By the time I fix the plot, all the phrasing issues are liable to be replaced with new phrasing issues.)

I read and evaluate their comments. (Sometimes I take notes to achieve emotional distance.) Remember that while they may be wrong about the fix, they are much more likely to be right about the problem, and if they are wrong about the problem, they are much more likely to be right that there is a problem at the point they indicate.

Then I go back to passes.

A story is done when a pass doesn't find any major issues.

I give a final pass in which I change the font and the color of the font, to make it look different, and look for spelling errors.

Then I have to kick it out the door.

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