Tips & WIPs

The other day, Lacey was asking me about my process of completing a project, so I thought I’d post this here with the hopes that it may help those who suffer from “third chapter blues”.

To give a bit of background: I was one of those people who never could complete a story. I would rewrite the first three chapters until I choked my characters with my plot and then dropped the whole thing.

Then I discovered Angela Knight and while reading through her blog (http://angelasknights.blogspot.com/) I found the invaluable piece of advice that moved me from sometime writer to published author. That advice was – and I’m paraphrasing here — “don’t look back at what you’ve written until you get to the end.”

I started out as a big time pantser and through the past few years became a plotter, but through it all, I adhere to AK’s advice – write until you finish before you even think about rewriting.

So here’s my process: (Note to pantsers – if the thought of plotting scares your muse away, skip over the prewriting steps and jump into the writing part.. the end result is the same)

I do a ton of prewriting. To be honest, sometimes it’s irrelevant because the characters take over – if I’m lucky – or the muse will come out and throw a curve ball at me.

Regardless I do the following:

1. I fill out the steps from Karen Weisners book – First Draft in 30 Days. It’s a LOT of preplotting. (By first draft they mean an outline, but this works really well). By the end of this stage I seriously know my characters, my settings and my plot.
2. I also fill out The Story Plan Checklist from Karen’s follow up book From First Draft to Finished Novel. (Ok – honestly? I’d say you need one or the other. Lately I’ve preferred the Story Plan Checklist, but doing both – especially if you’re a die hard plotter – gives you a really good grip on your novel.
3. I use a little outlining tool I read about in Fire in Fiction Now – I can’t say I loved the book, but this one nugget was worth gold: Before I actually write, I outline each scene with the Internal/External conflicts, and Internal and External Changes (The changes are what moves the story from scene to scene and chapter to chapter). I’m also considering adding sexual tension as part of the outline – influenced by Mary Buckham’s course on Sexual Tension (http://www.marybuckham.com/)

Then comes the writing. I usually keep step 3 open to ensure I adhere to the conflicts and changes in each scene.

Depending on the amount of time I have for the project and the desired word length, I figure out what I need to do each day (2k, 3k, etc)

My usual MO is to go through three drafts.

The first draft is all about fitting some semblance of story into the daily word count. I don’t look back at the mess I’m leaving behind – I power through my outline until I finish it. That first draft is usually crap – raw and rambling, but as the Great Nora says, its easier to fix a bad page then an empty page.

Second draft is usually the hardest. This is where I come face to face with the mess I didn’t look back on in the first draft. Its usually slower, and accompanied with WTFs and wondering who the hell wrote it. This is where the most polishing takes place: I remove a lot of unneeded crap (like notes to myself), fill in things like emotions/body language/scenery/etc. By this point, this is somewhat readable.

Third draft just flies. By this time the hard work is done, so usually its just a question of logistics, grammar, spelling, making sure sentences don’t run into each other, et etc.

At this point I send this out to my Critique Partners and steep on something else. (Or watch Netflix).

My apologies for rambling on – but I hope it might be useful for some of you. If nothing else, these are awesome writing books to checkout. Again – this is what currently works for me, and every author is different. I’d love to know YOUR writing process, regardless if you’re pantser or plotter. Got any tips?