Tuesday, September 13, 2011

What Is Your Writing Process?

What is your writing process? How do you get the idea in your mind started on the screen/blank page?

Over the years as I write and my craft improves, my process has changed. When I wrote my first book, Crashing Hearts, I had an idea and just started writing. Very little plotting, I just went with my gut and let the characters lead the story. That particular story was very near and dear to me as it has a lot of real life emotions in it. Having had an autistic son myself, the book was very therapeutic for me to write. The more I wrote, the more my own heart healed from hurts and disappointments in my own life.

As I started my second book, I started with doing skeleton character sketches, but again let my characters decide the course of the book. With my third book, I plotted even more -- doing more in depth character interviews and plotting out different scenes that ran through my mind.

Does that mean one book I wrote better than the other? I don't think so in the meaning of plotting style. Yes, my craft has improved and with each book I would like to think my writing gets better and better. However, I think with each book the plotting style, or lack of, has been based on my personal needs and life events that shape the way it is written.

As you go through life, does your style of plotting or being a panster change? What is your writing process?

2 comments:

Joan Leacott said...

Hi Emma, It's always interesting to see how others do the job. My first book was a pantser. I wrote 80K in five weeks, then spent 3 years revising and learning and revising some more. I swear I wrote 250K altogether! Now I write a detailed back story for all the characters that hit the plot. That way I know why everyone is doing what they do. Then I write a high level outline consisting of scene event and outcome. Once I've got that sorted, I start writing. With my last book, I wrote about 92K to get 88K--much more efficient.

Josie said...

Sigh . . . I'm a true-blood pantser, so I guess my writing style is simply sitting down and seeing where the characters take me.