My Basic Writing Process

Confession: I'm not even sure if my writing process counts as a good writing process or not. But it works for me, and if you hate it I never said you had to do it with me, so go suck a lemon, I guess.

My process has come a long way since I started writing at eleven. Another confession: I didn't even know what plot was at that age, so.... yeah. But these days, writing has almost fallen into a nice consistent process for me.

Keyword being almost.

I haven't thought through how I'm going to arrange this, so I suppose I'll just go one step at a time.

Ideas

(The part where you get an idea and start thinking about it)

Basically, I always have too many story ideas and snippets in a big red folder on my desk, and once the idea has stewed around in my brain enough and feels complete enough, then I pull it out of the tangled web of other ideas and start working on it. Under no circumstances do start on a novel right after I come up with the idea. Any time I'm dumb enough to attempt this, it ends in tears, hair-ripping, and the attempted murder of several of my characters, all ending with an uber-sucky draft. I must always let the idea stew around for at least a few months.

Prewriting

(The part where you still thinking about the idea. But, like, with a lot more paper)

My prewriting goes as such:

• Figure out where the heck they live and it has not yet collapsed into Jurassic Park (worldbuilding! my favorite part!).

me doing worldbuilding

• Figure out who the heck they are (character profiles/sketching/mass Pinteresting)

• Figure out what the heck they're doing (plot, outlines, me doing a giant plot web that covers eight rooms of my house).

• And all the while I have to figure out what the heck it all means (theme, etc). This list is written sequentially, but the weird thing about prewriting is that it doesn't really happen sequentially. It all kind of happens at once and we detangle it from there.

Drafting

(The part where you're actually trying to make the idea real. This may be accompanied with a lot of screaming 'whyyyyyyy' if drafts aren't your thing)

For me, drafting is really fun, but also hard. Like editing. Come to think of it, I don't find any part of the writing process 100% easy. Is that normal?

During drafting basically I try to follow my outline and plot points, think I have it memorized and don't look at it, then realize I skipped something important, wonder how I fix it now, somehow fix it through some miracle involving unicorn tears and a double rainbow, and continue writing.


Editing

(The part where you whisper to yourself 'What have I done?')

My process for this part: see above.  What I do during editing is essentially just floundering around and going 'ooh!' over and over as I have better ideas, and eventually, somehow, through happenings unbeknownst to me, the novel ends up being somewhat better. I don't have a ton I can say for certain on this stage because I'm currently in the middle of the very first editing job that has actually worked out for me. So, yay me. But it makes for poor humor on the subject. Ah, well, that cna be saved for another week.



Yeah, the post is gonna be a little short, but I've been in a quandary about what to post this month and I've had a lot going on, so this is a little last-minute. Anyhoo, visit me on Twitter and Instagram and check out all my writing memes, or just say hi. I'll be back next week with another post, so don't go anywhere. See you then!