Explaining my process

Work in progress on the New Sheffield Markets, 2012
courtesy Wikimedia Commons

 So what have I been doing over the last week or so in regards to the WIP. (I only discovered today that companies use this same acronym for their Work in Progress meetings. Fair enough. I’m sure we writers are generous enough to allow them to pinch our writerly acronym.)

Let me say first that there isn’t a lot of forward progress, in the sense that no new chapters have been written, and chapter 8 remains at about 600 words, which is where it’s been for a week or two.

Is this a problem? No, because I’ve been consolidating, for want of a better word. By which I mean that chapters 1 to 7 have all been revised, and in at least three cases, substantially rewritten.

But wait, you say, Aren’t you some kind of a pantser when it comes to writing?

Yes, I am – but as I pointed out in this post, my approach to writing has been refined over four previous books, and seems to be getting refined still further with this one.

At this point I’m satisfied enough that the first seven chapters I’ve written are keepers. That still may not be the case ultimately. However they’ve got enough structure and detail in them to give me a good starting point. I’m not just writing an initial draft and moving forward until the last page, as a pantser might, but I’m going back over these chapters to make sure they hold together as well as I can currently make them.

As I say, they may not even turn up in the final book. It’s happened in the past. But what they’ve done is give me new characters whom I hadn’t even known existed until I started writing, characters who are taking shape and giving me surprises. And on top of that, they keep saying things that give me clues as to where the book might ultimately go, clues to the underlying plot, for instance. Already some of these ‘clues’ have been ditched – at least for the time being - because I don’t see them as being important enough, or having enough of a seed to take me forward.

Other clues, however, have opened up possibilities and surprises for me – and hopefully one day for the reader. I make notes about these in the comments column in my Word document (yup, Word is good enough for me) and also discuss them in a separate file which becomes increasingly chaotic as further ideas turn up and other things are rejected.

Is it a problem to have a chaotic file like this? I used to think it was, and would worry about not being able to find things in it. Occasionally I’d read a section through and discover something I’d forgotten I’d made a note about was now being used in the story. As though it was a new idea. Or I’d laugh at some of the thoughts I’d had as to where the story was going, and wonder why I’d given them house-room.

With my last book I began to use this file increasingly for structuring what was coming in further chapters because things - as they should - got increasingly complicated in the story.

It was also a good place to pour out my woes when I’d pushed one of my characters into a corner and didn’t know how to get them out again. If I went back to these notes now, I’d find that various solutions would have been tried and found wanting, and then out of the blue the ‘right’ solution had turned up.

It’s still a kind of scrapbook, notebook, or junk box even, where anything and everything finds a home.

I know many authors use writing programs like Scrivener and Atticus that have all sorts of places to fit things so that you don’t lose track of them. I’ve tried some of these, and found them more work than I want to do. By the time I’ve set everything up and followed the manual in detail I could have written a few chapters, plus added to my structuring/note-taking file.

I’m sure many writers find them useful, but they’re not for me.

So what’s to come? In the next few days I’ll take another look at chapter 8 in the light of changes made in the previous chapters, and see where my characters will take me from here.

Being interrupted

One of the great skills I learnt when I worked for the local City Council – a fairly minor cog in a large organisation – was that it was possible to be interrupted fairly regularly and still get my brain straight back onto the job I’d been doing. 

Interruptions of all kinds get in the way of writing. And our concern is that we’ll lose that impetus and that thought we were in the middle of. But the brain copes. 

I’m sure all would-be, fledgling, and persevering writers have all read stuff about setting aside a certain part of the day for writing and nothing but writing. 

Some suggest first thing in the morning. In my case that’s the best time for me to be spending time reading my Bible and praying for people. I don’t want to give that up, even for writing. 

But apart from that, early mornings aren’t good for many part-time writers: kids have to be got off to school, breakfasts eaten and lunches made, last minute ‘I forgot to do my homework!’ problems dealt with and so on. Both fathers and mothers are involved in these sorts of things to various extents. 

Someone will say, ‘I’m well past that time of life.’ Good, you’re fortunate, but even in retirement the most carefully-laid plans for spending time writing get interrupted for all sorts of reasons. Sickness, your partner’s health or another family member’s health; maintenance on the house that you have to do because it’s too expensive to get someone in; weeds in the garden need attention unless you think a wilderness is a good look. 

And most of all, if you’re still married, or have a partner, their needs also have a part to play in the daily round. 

And at whatever age you are, if you have a partner or spouse who thinks that writing gets done between the cracks when they happen to be looking in the other direction, you not only have the ongoing issue of actually making time for writing, but of justifying having time to write. 

I try to write every day, but it doesn’t always happen. Sometimes it gets into the evening and, being in my eight decade, or rather, closer to my ninth, I run out of steam altogether. 

There are spaces in most days. Take them when you can, and focus. You’ll still get interrupted, but you will, little by little, get the work done.

courtesy Nicolebrandi18

More benefits of writing slowly

 Originally written back in 2017 for a site that no longer exists, which promoted authors and their works.

In 2014, I published three e-books. That sounds impressive until you realise that the first of those books, Grimhilda!, had started out life as a musical produced in the theatre, back in 2012. In spite of having a script to work from, it took another two years for the book version to get off the ground. Procrastination took its toll, along with many rewrites. Turning a playscript into a novel wasn’t as straightforward as I’d anticipated. 

I finally published it in January 2014, by which time I was viewing it as the first of a series of children’s fantasies. 

However, the second book, Diary of a Prostate Wimp, was non-fiction. I’d had this book in mind for some time, planning to use a set of blog posts from 2009 as its basis. It wasn’t just a matter of publishing the posts: they had to be edited, an introduction had to be written, and more material added from other sources to complement and give additional breadth to my own experiences. 

Nevertheless, all that was done in a short time, and that book was finished and published in April 2014. 

The draft of the third book, The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret, took a little longer, but was still written at a fair pace. It became the second in the fantasy series under the collective title of Grimhilderness. The Blood Secret still had to go through a rigorous process with my editor-cum-beta reader, a person who’s like a dog with a bone; she won’t let anything go that she’s not satisfied with, or that reeks of inconsistency. 

Still, that book was produced far more speedily than Grimhilda! – it was published in early November, 2014. I was beginning to think I was a bit of a whiz at producing books. 

The third in the Grimhilderness series, The Disenchanted Wizard, turned my idea of being able to churn out books at a rate of knots on its head. I started it in late 2014, as soon as The Blood Secret was finished, writing the first (very disorganised) draft as part of the NaNoWriMo challenge. I had a good idea in mind, some thoughts about how it would end, and some well-defined characters. 

Yet another two and a quarter years passed before it was ready for publication. Did I do something wrong?

 Not really. Though procrastination and music work got in the way (I play the piano, mostly accompanying singers), the book’s original plan was sidetracked again and again. My co-author/editor/plot-consistency-overseer/script consultant and I discussed the intricacies of the plot endlessly, and again and again discovered loopholes that readers would see right through, or brick walls in the story that were apparently unassailable. Sometimes we’d sit in my house staring into space, wondering if all the effort was worth it, or if we’d ever find a way out of the maze. 

The first half of the book took long enough to get worked out, but once the writing process was begun in earnest the structure didn’t really change. The second half was a nightmare: much of it was rewritten several times over after going off in wrong directions. Whole scenes were abandoned, characters annihilated. I even wrote a piece of flash fiction at one point in which the lost characters railed against their fate. 

The grand climax I’d envisaged got chucked, leaving a great gap, and then later was brought back in. It too was rewritten over and over as various improbable things were removed. The biggest difficulty was that the main character, a girl with no defensive magical powers of her own, had to confront the villain – a wizard – and somehow lay him low. She’d already failed to do this earlier in the book, so it was a challenge to figure out she could deal with him in the climax.

Sometimes solutions turn out to be so simple that you think they’ll be seen as too easy by the readers. In fact, readers accept them. We spent ages figuring out how the girl’s father would be found after he’d been whisked away by the villain. I’ll let you read the book and see for yourself whether you think the solution worked. 

There were things I wanted to keep in, and fought tooth and nail over. In the end I had to let them go because they complicated the plot unnecessarily. Being willing to give up seemingly great ideas for the betterment of the whole book isn’t easy. It was another reason things took longer than anticipated. 

So, two and a quarter years of slog. Were there downsides to this slow process? Yes, of course. The frustration of feeling that it would never get finished, for one. The sense that I wasn’t really a very good writer because I couldn’t produce another book at speed. 

But the upsides were that the book was immensely better for its long gestation. Weak and unnecessary characters were left by the wayside, as were weak scenes. Scenes that did survive were continually strengthened, and, because I had time to think about details, the book was improved in a myriad of small ways. 

A number of authors promote the idea that writing at speed and producing two or three or more books a year is the ideal. Yes, there are authors who can work at this kind of pace and produce quality. I think they’re few and far between. I’ve read books by some of these prolific authors, and I wish they’d given more time to their work instead of to trying to add more titles to their bibliography. 

I’ve mentioned the word procrastination a few times here. There are an endless number of authors online who want to advise you on how to deal with procrastination. I’ve read endless advice on the subject. In spite of that, I’m currently procrastinating on a fourth children’s fantasy. Some of my reasons are valid, and more important than the completion of a book. Some of the reasons are pathetic and need to be dealt with severely. Either way, real life does get in the way of writing, and often takes priority, as a local author, a Mum with two children, has frequently noted on Twitter. 

But if we want to write, we need to try and find a balance between procrastination for good reasons and procrastination for bad reasons. Take every day as it comes. Take time to write (rather than make time to write), even if the creative brain feels at its lowest ebb. A piece of draft writing may seem like rubbish, but I find that it usually gets creativity moving again. That’s always a plus, and it moves us one more step on the road to publication day.

Taking hold of whatever the brain offers you

Had a great day yesterday rewriting and revising some of the chapters I've written so far for the latest book in the Grimhilderness series.  

At present I have around seven and a half chapters in draft form, and still no idea about some of the things the characters have mentioned, or how the whole story will work out. I have an inkling of what the end will be, but nothing more. 

This isn’t unusual. With The Disenchanted Wizard I only knew, from early on, that the wizard who’d escaped the map would be put back in it. Hardly a rousing climax, you might say. But by the time the book was finished, the climax took place in the middle of a football match in a stadium. The wizard had by this time caused chaos in the large crowd, and this wasn’t to change until he was dealt with. 

Equally, with The Counterfeit Queen, I always had a thought in mind that there’d be a Dragon involved in the final battle. The only problem was there was no Dragon in the book at all until year four of the writing! 

It pays to note down these wisps of ideas, even if you can’t work out in advance how that wisp is going to come to fruition.

I know most writing books say you can’t set out until you know how the book is going to end. If that was the case I’d have written nothing. All I knew about the current book was that there were three lead boxes involved somewhere. At first I thought they contained three corpses, including the supposed corpse of one of the main characters. That changed in a moment when the boxes turned out to be much smaller than I’d originally envisaged, and when opened, had something altogether different inside.

I don’t regard myself as a ‘pantser’ in the complete sense. Pantsers, to me, sit down and write the first draft without much thought as to how it will all pan out. Then they basically start all over.

In my case, however, I find that by writing a few chapters, then going back and making notes on them, picking up clues as to what might move the story forward, placing characters in situations that only occur to me as I write, discovering the significance of those places and more is what gives me – very slowly – a story. 

After a few chapters I can see one or two things clicking into place. Rewriting the chapters in the light of that helps me get a better picture of where we’re going. But dropping ideas into the draft that I haven’t given any thought to also propels the story forward. I have to take a step back and ask what these things mean, whether they’re truly of use, whether some other version of them will be more accurate and so on.

So, for me, writing a chapter or three gives me an impetus to keep going. Chewing over the things in those chapters gives me further ideas and connections. Carrying forward into the unknown again opens up new possibilities. Avoiding doing things I’ve done before also helps. 

What’s your approach to getting up and running?

Having a forward-moving rhythm

 

One of the things that helped me overcome the so-called problem of Writer’s Block was an idea I found in a book wittily entitled Around the Writer’sBlock. The author is Rosanne Bane.

 As with so many books on writing, one particular thing sticks with you. Bane sees Writer’s Block as a procrastination problem. It’s dealing with procrastination that’s important.

She talks about Process Time and Product Time. Process Time is basically about play, doing something creative you wouldn’t normally do. She suggested juggling as one possibility. Since I’d tried to learn to juggle some years ago I had another go at it. This Process Time is intended to get your brain up and running before you start working. (I’m no doubt simplifying here, but it is three and a half years since I read the book.)

 Once you’ve done your allotted amount of playing, stimulating the brain into working on something that is fun, you move to Product Time. As you might expect, this is when you do the creative work on your particular project. In my case it was aiming to complete the full draft of The Counterfeit Queen, as well as making lots of notes as I went along.

 The Process should overcome your procrastination by giving your brain something fun to do. Once the brain is into that ‘play’ mood, it will be ready to do the more complex creative process of working on your product.

 It probably takes a few weeks to really settle into a routine, but I found it did work for me. Check out my original Excel file below. 

 Using an Excel sheet, I write the date on each successive line. As I work on the book each day, I make a brief note about what I've done, as well as any other relevant comments. Somehow this instils in the brain the idea that it’s good to keep moving forward each day. The amount of work isn’t necessarily important.

I used Bane's layout for some weeks before simplifying it for my own purposes. It still works well. 

 There are days when nothing gets done: I might be away from my computer and notes, as has happened over the last couple of days. Something more important than writing may come up, such as a crisis in the family. Or it may be a Sunday, when I don’t tend to work at writing. I still aim to keep the dates consistent, rather than only noting the days when work is done.

 It's surprising that a simple line reminding me of each step forward makes an ongoing difference to my sense of progress.

Writing at your own particular pace

At the moment my 'work in progress' opens with the collapse of a house, something that came to me while I was out walking the dog one day. The house, which hasn't collapsed, by the way, is a specific house in a specific street in my hometown. Why the house in my story collapsed remains to be discovered. I certainly don’t know at this point. 

I think it takes time for any writer to find their own approach to putting a story on paper. That doesn’t mean they don’t get books written, but gradually they discover that other people’s methods may not suit their personality. 

I remember reading years ago that the Irish writer, Joyce Cary, (a man in spite of his feminine-sounding name) would write scenes as they occurred to him. Not necessarily in any coherent order; that came later. From memory, Anne Lamott used a similar approach with her novels. 

Other writers, often known as ‘pantsers’ because they write ‘by the seat of their pants,’ just sit down and write from the beginning to the end without having any idea where the story will go. In the book, Reacher Said Nothing, Lee Child claims that’s the way his books get written. 

Young writers are often told that the way to write something as large as a novel is to structure it all out before you start, to make lots of notes about your characters so that you know all sorts of details about them – how they dress, the colour of their eyes, what they keep in their pockets and much more.   

This is rather how the film director Alfred Hitchcock worked: he wasn’t ready to film until every scene, even every shot, was set down in its place. It’s not surprising then that he sometimes said that the process of making the film itself bored him.

I can’t structure anything until I have some idea where I’m going. I understand - now - that this is my way of working, and I’m happy with it, even if it’s slow. It’s an enjoyable process of discovery. However, I don’t write the whole book before thinking about what’s already happened in the early chapters, or who the people are and how it will all end. So my first draft is already littered with comments, and there's another file altogether in which I discuss with myself what's happening. 

I can’t write about characters until I see them in action, even if the scenes that get written eventually vanish from the book. Check out these two chapters from The Disenchanted Wizard, which were deleted very early on. But they were written as though they could be used if necessary. 

I can’t imagine a whole plot in advance and then write the words that fit it. I prefer to discover things that turn up while I’m writing and then work out how everything clicks together. This is a slow process, for me, because when it comes to plotting, I’m a bear of very little brain. Nevertheless I enjoy putting my characters in difficult, even impossible, spots, and figuring out a way to get them out again. 

So, with my current work-in-progress, I’ve now written six or seven chapters. I know something about who the characters are. I know something about the places they go to, and what happens in those places. So far. I have all sorts of unexpected possible plot points turning up, unbidden, and I have the ongoing ‘fun’ of figuring out what they mean and how they’ll fit to other events. 

Hopefully it won't take another five years...

Why it took me five years to write The Counterfeit Queen

 Why it took me five years to write my most recent book, The Counterfeit Queen. 

 Reason 1: Procrastination.

 Reason 2: Thinking it wasn’t going to be good enough.

 Reason 3: Having to work at it completely on my own instead of with the person who’d been my idea-helper and idea-processor, plot-hole-checker, proof-reader, dismisser of unworkable or silly ideas, as well as being someone against whom I’d sometimes had to battle in order to bring storylines I wanted to include.  

 In spite of these reasons for an overlong gestation, the book got written and is now published.

 In spite of not having someone to bounce ideas against, I was still able to use that same approach when it came to working on my own. Countless words got written as notes and thoughts and possibilities, so that I acted as my own thought-bouncer, plot-hole-checker, dismisser of silly ideas, etc. In fact I was confidently able to put two drafts aside completely, each consisting of several chapters, before finding the right approach to the story.

 And the book is twice as long as my previous three children’s fantasies, to my surprise.

 Were those five years wasted? No…

 I learned that I could manage to write a book on my own, by determining to do it.

 I found that the book was good enough.

 I found that procrastination can be overcome.

More about procrastination, and my approach to writing in general - kind of pantser, but different - in future posts. 

Painting of Russian writer Evgeny Chirikov - by Ivan Kulikov