My process
It's been a little bit quiet on the critting front today - so I thought I'd give a little talk about my process.
Specifically, how do I get my ideas? And how do they turn into books? What happens in between?
I don't know about you guys, but I get my ideas at the most inopportune moments. I think it has something to do with relaxing one part of my brain and engaging another. Frex, boring meetings are a fertile birthing ground for ideas, as are long drives ( the hours I'm not driving, that is), other, um, relaxing moments ( which are the worst, because I can hardly stop in the middle and quickly scribble down my great idea, can I? So those are mostly lost…), almost falling asleep. For the last moments I have a little notebook beside my bed, but it's hard to wake yourself up out of that wonderful dreamy state where the whole idea spools out in front of your eyes.
Anyway. Once I have them, I write down what I have in a file and put it in a folder. Sometimes I have a scene, sometimes a background, sometimes a character. For my first novel, an urban fantasy about werewolves called High Moon, I had my heroine on a summer night on a Paris square, and the climax scene, a huge fight somewhere on the North Pole. I don't recommend that, actually. Already knowing the ending is hell on the writing process. As a writer, you're much better off not knowing so many details about the ending, because then you can give your characters free rein. What happens, happens, and I've learned to trust my own ingenuity: I always think something good up for the endings.
For the novel I'm presently revising, The Wan, I had a small idea years ago. It was about a King who was killed/changed/turned by his brother. He was forced to live in the underground world and for the longest time he couldn’t accept that he would never be king again. Something I didn't know yet would happen to make him accept that. It was set in an old city, a cross between ancient Rome and Conan the Barbarian.
When I looked through my folders last year, casting around for my next novel, I chanced upon this really old idea and it felt right. I started working on it, writing down the things I knew, the events I knew would certainly happen. And then, as if often the case, the story started to shift. He wasn’t a vampire anymore, but something different. He started exploring the secrets of those creatures, helped by a guide.
Tthat guide later became Ing - the second protagonist. The original antagonist, the King's brother, almost disappeared from the book, changing into the opportunistic but not especially evil sister Aranaz. The creatures became the Wan, ancient Rome became a far future world without technology and little land mass. Frog, now second or maybe even primary protagonist, was completely accidental! I wanted the reader to have an outside look at a Wanning, so I wrote in a throwaway slave that I planned on drowning herself. But Frog took over, announced that she was not to be that easily got rid of, and insinuated herself into the plot at every turn. Talk about characters taking over….
The big bang came about when I read a scientific article about bamboo species coming into bloom, once in centuries, all over the world at exactly the same time. The rest is outlining, knowing when not to follow the outline, trusting your instincts in the first draft and then weeding out all the excess loops and wordage my right brain throws out when it doesn't quite know what comes next.
So, in a nutshell: the first germ is right brain. Allow the left brain to be distracted and the right brain can throw out a good idea. Then the left brain takes over, figures out the setting, the plot, the characters, and writes an outline. Then the right brain is set free to spew out 100,000 words without stopping…
Tell me about your process! How did you get your idea, what happens next, do you outline, what kind of first draft do you produce?
Specifically, how do I get my ideas? And how do they turn into books? What happens in between?
I don't know about you guys, but I get my ideas at the most inopportune moments. I think it has something to do with relaxing one part of my brain and engaging another. Frex, boring meetings are a fertile birthing ground for ideas, as are long drives ( the hours I'm not driving, that is), other, um, relaxing moments ( which are the worst, because I can hardly stop in the middle and quickly scribble down my great idea, can I? So those are mostly lost…), almost falling asleep. For the last moments I have a little notebook beside my bed, but it's hard to wake yourself up out of that wonderful dreamy state where the whole idea spools out in front of your eyes.
Anyway. Once I have them, I write down what I have in a file and put it in a folder. Sometimes I have a scene, sometimes a background, sometimes a character. For my first novel, an urban fantasy about werewolves called High Moon, I had my heroine on a summer night on a Paris square, and the climax scene, a huge fight somewhere on the North Pole. I don't recommend that, actually. Already knowing the ending is hell on the writing process. As a writer, you're much better off not knowing so many details about the ending, because then you can give your characters free rein. What happens, happens, and I've learned to trust my own ingenuity: I always think something good up for the endings.
For the novel I'm presently revising, The Wan, I had a small idea years ago. It was about a King who was killed/changed/turned by his brother. He was forced to live in the underground world and for the longest time he couldn’t accept that he would never be king again. Something I didn't know yet would happen to make him accept that. It was set in an old city, a cross between ancient Rome and Conan the Barbarian.
When I looked through my folders last year, casting around for my next novel, I chanced upon this really old idea and it felt right. I started working on it, writing down the things I knew, the events I knew would certainly happen. And then, as if often the case, the story started to shift. He wasn’t a vampire anymore, but something different. He started exploring the secrets of those creatures, helped by a guide.
Tthat guide later became Ing - the second protagonist. The original antagonist, the King's brother, almost disappeared from the book, changing into the opportunistic but not especially evil sister Aranaz. The creatures became the Wan, ancient Rome became a far future world without technology and little land mass. Frog, now second or maybe even primary protagonist, was completely accidental! I wanted the reader to have an outside look at a Wanning, so I wrote in a throwaway slave that I planned on drowning herself. But Frog took over, announced that she was not to be that easily got rid of, and insinuated herself into the plot at every turn. Talk about characters taking over….
The big bang came about when I read a scientific article about bamboo species coming into bloom, once in centuries, all over the world at exactly the same time. The rest is outlining, knowing when not to follow the outline, trusting your instincts in the first draft and then weeding out all the excess loops and wordage my right brain throws out when it doesn't quite know what comes next.
So, in a nutshell: the first germ is right brain. Allow the left brain to be distracted and the right brain can throw out a good idea. Then the left brain takes over, figures out the setting, the plot, the characters, and writes an outline. Then the right brain is set free to spew out 100,000 words without stopping…
Tell me about your process! How did you get your idea, what happens next, do you outline, what kind of first draft do you produce?