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.