Interviews with Wattpad's intuitive minds. Ponderings & Process: Has your writing changed since the use of AI? How do you outline? Do you write by the seat of your pants, or sit in silence and pause for the words to flow, or simply channel things ma...
And you've come well prepared with a story to tell us about your writing journey... and how you see your intuitive senses fitting in. So, please, just go ahead!... Share away! ~~~
🤗 Last month at work, I had to do a Discovery Insights psychometric test. It revealed I was a 'thinking' rather than a 'feeling' person.
Not sure about this. It may be true in a work context but when it comes to writing, I'm definitely more intuitive.
The idea for my first novel Annifer came during meditation — that counts as intuitive, right? I attend a group meditation once a week and during one of them that I had the germ of an idea for a story. I realise meditation is all about emptying your brain of thoughts, but if an idea comes that feels like it might be worth pursuing, I'll follow it — not thinking with words but letting the ideas play out as images in my mind's eye. It feels like the ideas are coming from a different plane that I don't have access to in a regular mental state. This idea was simply: a girl encounters a mysterious wise woman who teaches her the skills she needs to save the day. How the day was threatened, I didn't know at that point.
Walking by the banks of the Thames a few days later, the story started to come together in my head. I wrote it all down in a cute flowery notebook over tea and scones at the end of my walk. (I looked through that notebook recently and saw that my initial plan bore very little resemblance to the finished story).
Over the next few weeks, that story just poured out of me, I had an A4 notebook with me at all times which I scribbled in on the bus to work, in my lunch break, weekends, evenings, late into the night. The notes were a hot mess, filled with circled passages, asterisks and arrows pointing to other passages. I used circles and triangles as well to distinguish from the star asterisks and some passages were marked 'see back' because all the margins and the tops and bottoms of the pages were filled up and I'd needed to start writing backwards from the end of the notebook. I had diagrams, family trees and timelines. The main characters were kids and teenagers and I needed to keep track of how old each of them were at different points. When I'd handwritten the whole thing, I began the laborious task of typing it up, editing as I went.
Plaguesbane, the second story in that trilogy poured out of me in a similar way. As soon as it was finished, I had the idea for Sacred Mountain. But that's where the creative torrent stopped.
Annifer and Plaguesbane are aimed at the nine to twelve age group, first person narrator, straightforward, linear narrative. Sacred Mountain has several protagonists with action taking place simultaneously in different places and I didn't know where or how to begin. I wrote several versions of the first chapter and then gave up and shelved it.
A couple of years later I wanted to get back on the writing horse. I googled 'writing prompts' and had a go at some of them. Like this one from Authority Pub which I really enjoyed:
Who just snuck out of the back window?
What were they carrying?
Where were they going?
Soon I was ready to pick up Sacred Mountain again and I found I had a much clearer idea of how to shape the narrative. I decided to start writing and post chapters on Wattpad weekly. It was such a challenge for me to get the chapters completed by Thursday every week. That's why some of them are quite short. Getting comments from readers was so useful and really influenced the direction of the story. Suffice to say, one of the characters that I was going to kill, survived only because readers prompted me to give her story a redemptive arc.
Then came a period in my life which I think of as the 'suffering times'. I suffered a bereavement as well as a series of other losses and I ended up leaving the job I'd done for twenty years. During this time, I wasn't inspired to write anything except agonised diary entries. I've always used Expressive Writing (it's capitalised because it's a thing) as a tool to help me with my mental health. If I'm upset or angry — grab a pen and write it all down. Don't let the pen leave the page until it's all out. If I'm overwhelmed (which I frequently am) write down everything that's getting on top of me. Just the act of expressing it makes me feel better and somehow seeing it on the page helps me to put it in perspective and work out how I'm going to get it all sorted. As well as novels, I also write rhyming stories for little kids. I have two collections on Wattpad, Mouse Stew and Will there be a Unicorn?
The stories are either completely made up or adapted from folktales. It was these that got me back into creative writing after that fallow period. I heard a Korean folktale on Dan Scholz's The Folktale Project podcast which I was desperate to adapt. I have to be on the move to write rhyming stories, the rhythm of my steps helps me put the lines together. If I'm at home pacing up and down, I'll write in a notebook, if I'm walking in nature (preferred method but not a good idea if it's 2am) I'll use the notes app on my phone. Thus Mole's Tail was born. Not my best by a long shot but it unblocked the creative flow. Shorts are fun and way less daunting than a full-length novel.
By now I had a new job in a big corporation in Kings Cross, London. One day we had a visit from a motivational speaker — a former Army Sergeant who'd been blown up by an IED in Iraq. One of his men had been killed and he had suffered brain damage and severe PTSD. He talked about how he'd used creativity to put his life back together and about his current work painting portraits of fallen soldiers for their families. I was so inspired by his story.
In meditation I'd had the idea for a new novel about an extreme empath. I'd wanted to write it as a realistic contemporary novel about a woman who works for a big corporation in Kings Cross (they say write what you know, don't they?) But it wasn't giving me any joy. I went home after that talk and refashioned it into a fantasy novel set in the universe I'd already created for the Annifer trilogy. I sat in an armchair and stared at the radiator for two hours one Sunday morning while I worked out the ending in my head. Now I had the start and the ending but no idea how to get from one to the other. So I decided for the first time to 'pants' it. Just pick up my pen and start. Somehow by virtue of just keeping going, I wrote The Wise Women.
And it was terrible.
Way too much exposition in the beginning because I was still working out my magical system. About that time, I was listening to Marian Keyes 'So you want to write a novel?' masterclass on Instagram. 'Don't you dare moan about editing,' she said. 'That's your job. You can't just waft around being creative all the time. You have to do the work. And editing is the work.' (I'm paraphrasing).
With the help of The Scribblers Society, an off-Wattpad editing group, I took my editing shearing scissors to it. Now it's vastly improved and was featured in Wattpad 'Editor's Picks' this summer. Readers' comments are helping me improve it further.
I have a few more story ideas treading water in the back of my brain. I'm writing them as shorts in The Stranger and waiting to see if they coalesce into a coherent narrative at any point. Martin Amis (I think) said that if you get blocked, put your draft aside for a while and do something else. You might not be working on it, but your subconscious is.
I definitely agree.
That's fantastic! I agree as well.
Thank you so much for giving us this wonderful insight into your storytelling arrival and your musings on the process of intuition so far. I know this is yet the beginning of a wonderful journey that will sweep more and more readers along with you all the time.
Good luck, Bhashini!
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