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?