Fred and George and the Toilers of Trouble (Year 1) ✔

Q & A: My Writing Process

I started writing out my reply to this one and realized a few sentences in that it needs its own part.

@life_without_limits – What is your writing process? Is there a specific way that you always follow?

Great question. I don't think I've ever put this into words before. Let's see. It all starts with an idea, of course.  It could be as small as a passing thought while making breakfast, or something that develops while sitting next to some very angry looking dude on the el train headed into Chicago. Then I bring it to life, usually on some sort of walk. Always at night, sometimes dictating my thoughts. (Word of Caution: dictation often means transcription... and you don't want to have a folder full of unknown recordings waiting to be transcribed. Trust me.)

I used to take walks a lot at night in my old neighborhood growing up, where I would even talk to myself. It was a healthy way for me to decompress and find some semblance of order to the events of the day. This transitions well to storytelling, because much of what you're doing is first telling the story to yourself. Thankfully, my wife doesn't think I'm a crazy person when I'm off on a walk for an hour-and-a-half. Well, she probably does think that.

After this, I type out my thoughts. Always on Microsoft Excel. I know, it's *super* weird. No author in their right mind uses Excel for story development. But I'm not in my right mind, and I've used it since 2001.

To any normal person looking at my documents, it would seem like a scattered arrangement of lines across many uneven cells and rows. Especially because I pile them on top of one another first, quite erratically, because I don't necessarily know where everything belongs, the order of events, what I'm gonna keep or delete...it's best to just make a pile. In there, you've got some gems like lines of great dialogue, a faint description of your protagonist, a scene, an idea of place or setting, and most likely the ending (I always know the ending).

Pretty soon those scattered thoughts become a sequence of ideas and I start moving them around in blocks of text, as if I were using note cards. Things become ordered slightly, and before you know it I've got a character list, and I'm starting to divide my notes into chapters, which I separate through worksheets on the same Excel document.

When this process has ended, I do a number of revisions on my notes until it begins to resemble an official outline, again mixing dialogue with descriptions. Then, I take that outline and perform a sort of in-depth read-thru, where I clear out the last remaining garbage thoughts and expand on the dialogue.  By the end of it, my insanely dense document no longer resembles an outline. It's basically a rough, very rough, first draft.  From first to last, I know everything that's happening in the book.

I get that the tendency for writers is to avoid outlining. I DESPISED outlining in school. But if the other option is sitting down and just typing out your thoughts, I'm not gonna do so well. There are some people who can do that masterfully. Stephen King is a great example.  Wattpad is awesome for writers like him. I'm not that. If I don't have structure, I'm basically useless. But because of my meticulous (some would say ridiculous) outlining practices, I've survived the dreaded "writer's block" time after time.

Mine is an extremely long process. That very rough first draft is like a hunk of marble that vaguely resembles a person. It needs to be shaped, molded, chiseled, and refined through many more passes in order to become a sculpture. My style is certainly the long way around when it comes to writing books, but it works for me. Every author needs to find their own style. That said, it's both a blessing and a curse. There are many documents hiding on my computer, where I have outlined an entire series of books. And they're just sitting there in quiet, digital drawers, waiting for me to stop neglecting them, yearning for the day that I'll make them important enough to give life to their individual stories. It actually makes me slightly depressed when I think about it. But, so goes life.

One more Q & A post, and then we're on to the best bits!