On Process

[anghara]

One of the perennial questions posed to authors in many many many interviews - right up there with the fabled "Where do you get your ideas?" - is the variously phrased query as to just HOW an author goes about writing a book

Comments

[melissajm]

I guessed 2 and 3. Had the right ballpark on #4, more or less. Haven't read #1 yet.

I think reading this blog gave me an edge, because I remembered some things you'd said about #2.

Looking forward to #5!

On Process

[dalerobertweese]

I tried Method #1, starting with a scene, had some of the same frustrations and failed (so far) to finish the draft. Would you consider revealing which scene you started with?

I cannot say if I struggle writing to outline or not, because I've never started with enough of an outline and always regretted it. So my WIP is an outline, at the moment. I'm finding it painful but I hope to resist the inclination to go write "just a scene or two" until the outline leads to at least one workable conclusion.

Re: On Process

[anghara]

Not at all - the scene I am talking about starts about 3/4 of the way down page 71 in the book "Changer of Days" - the paragraph beginning with "The moors around Miranei..." - and ends at the bottom of page 73 ("Even Blind, no longer.")

This story was of course originally written as a SINGLE manuscript, which got split up into two books for publication purposes. so it took me all 378 pages of what became book 1, "The Hidden Queen", plus damn near 100 pages of book 2, "Changer of Days", before I circled around to the scene which created the entire story...

[green_knight]

The thing about ideas is that if you're a novelist, you need only one or two a year. And you need a constant stream of them, because if you don't have ideas you reach for clichees and bore your reader. Every character, every event, every detail of worldbuilding is an 'idea' in that respect, and they don't all come from the same source.

For me, the best ones happen when you dive into a story and let the characters tell you how their world works, what happened at the market and what so-and-so said about Auntie Gwerrid...