My writing process

There is no right way to write but there are plenty of wrong ways.  I know.  I use some of them.

Let me explain.

Writing comes relatively easily to me.  That’s not a boast.  Putting words on a page is something I’ve always enjoyed and always done, long before I ever thought of writing to be published.  I was “good” at writing at school.  In some sense, it came naturally to me.

I find writing a thousand times easier than speaking.  For one thing, I have time to think when I write.  Speech is so immediate and, afterwards, I always think I could have said something better, explained something more clearly.  With writing, I can do that, write down my immediate thought then come back and improve it, change it, delete it... I suppose I’m trying to say that I feel more honest when I’m writing and less inclined to hide.  I certainly feel more eloquent.

So, how does that relate to writing a novel?

A novel is a peculiar kind of writing.  It takes time, anything from weeks to months to years.  The writer may change quite a bit over the course of writing a novel, which invites the danger that what they started with is no longer what they’re interested in.  That means rewrites, possibly on a massive scale.  But it is hard to make major changes to something which has grown as big as a novel, akin to reshaping an elephant into a flock of doves.

So, wise writers start with a plan.  They plot their story.  They define their character arcs.  They research their backgrounds.  They do a lot of work before even attempting to write “Chapter One”.

Only I am not a wise writer and I can’t do that.  I have tried.  But, for me, the quickest way to induce writer’s block is to tell me I have to produce bullet points, a list, any shorthand form of writing.  Because that’s not how my mind works and not how I can get things done.

I start writing “Chapter One”.

I have no plan, no idea where I’m going.  I always start with a character who interests me and I write to find out who they are, what they’re like, what they are going to do.  Things happen.  Unexpected things because I had no plan.  I’m as surprised as my character at what turns up.  Other characters appear.  They are not planned either.  They seem to pop into being as if they already existed and were simply waiting for a chance to show up in somebody’s story.  I love this part.

This part can usually propel me into the middle of a book.  I find things out.  I start to make connections.  A story begins to evolve.  But that’s when I hit a block.  Because starting hares is easy.  I can create problems, twists and cliff hangers happily.  The difficulty is in bringing all these promising ideas to a satisfactory conclusion.  Now, after 40 to 45 thousand words, I have to stop and decide how it is all going to end.

That’s the hard part.  Agonising!  And that’s the point where I have to stop writing by the seat of my pants and start doing the bit I really, really hate.  Plans.  Bullet points.  A beat sheet.  Sensible stuff, that will get my novel finished.  That’s when the work starts.

I look at what I’ve got and I start to try and find the story which is buried in there somewhere.  I imagine it is a process similar to a sculptor modelling clay.  The first 45 thousand words of my story is my clay.  I can’t do my planning in advance of starting to write because I need that “clay” to work with.  Without it, my imagination is barren.

So, I begin a strange process of finding out what I’m writing about.  And one of the most helpful tools I have found to help me with this is to interrogate my characters.  I open a new file, call it “Character Interviews”, and think of questions I want to ask them.  The answers are written from the character’s point of view because I find they usually seem to know more about what is going on than I do!

A brief example.  In my work in progress “First Chance” which is full of twists and people who are not what they seem I needed to tunnel down into the plot to discover where it was going.  So, I asked a couple of characters for their thoughts:

Q: Scott, why do you approach Will at Waterloo?
A: I needed to get a tracker put back on the bastard once he & Ellie had given us the slip.

(I didn’t know that at all as it happens but it made sense in terms of the plot and helped me define Scott’s role in the book, not least by revealing an antipathy which I didn’t realise Scott had for Will)

Q: Lara, why do you need to get Will involved?
A: Will is an outsider - he has more chance of operating under the radar of the informant hidden within our company.

(I had no idea there was an informant until that point but it helped make sense of a lot of problems I was having justifying the complications I had created for my characters)

I used to worry about this split personality approach until I discovered it is a device which actors often use to tunnel down into their character.  If you haven’t tried it, I would say give it a go and see what you think.  I absolutely do not know (in my conscious mind) the answers to the questions I ask but the unconscious mind is a wonderful resource and this interrogation technique allows me to access the hidden parts of my writer’s mind.

Once I’ve straightened out some of the mysteries, it is time to do a beat sheet.  Sensible writers start with this but to me it would feel like a strait jacket if I tried to do this before starting my story.  It has to be sorted out at some stage, though and this is where I find it comes into its own.

For those who don’t know: a “beat sheet” is a sequence of the main scenes in the story.  To start with, these are likely to be merely a collection of scenes.  I must stress - this will not magically give you a plot.  The key to making the beat sheet (and plot) work is to CONNECT the scenes.

Scenes are connected if one thing causes the next.  The way to find out if you have made a causation is to find out whether you can write “but” or “so” between the scenes.[i]

For example: we’re often told that “The king died and then the queen died” is not a story.  But “The king died so the queen died of grief” is.  One thing causes the other.  If scenes are not prompting the next scene then you simply have a collection of scenes which are not forming a story.  The reader will lose interest.  Probably you, the writer, will lose interest.  Because we all want to know why.  Why has this happened?  And what are the characters going to do about it?  We are programmed to try and discover cause and effect and proper stories allow us that satisfaction.  These questions will keep a reader reading. 

Doing the beat sheet is deeply depressing for me, as a writer.  Because it is then that I discover that I do, in fact, simply have a collection of scenes.  No plot!  The hard bit, the blood, sweat and tears bit, is turning these unconnected scenes into a fluent and engaging story.  The beat sheet is a shorthand piece where I can clearly see where the gaps are.  I can rearrange scenes, delete scenes, create new scenes in note form until I’m satisfied the story hangs together.

Then, my only problem is discovering what to do to fill those gaps.  Oh, and rewriting the entire thing so that every scene follows naturally from what has gone before.

Simple!


[i] (my thanks to Janice Hardy at http://blog.janicehardy.com/2012/05/best-advice-on-plotting-ive-ever-heard.html for this simple & clear advice on how to create plot)