Lots of process questions, so I’m going to tuck them together into one and answer different aspects of questions people have asked! Lola & Anne just want straight-up process discussion, which you’d think I’d have covered with the posts for the last couple of weeks, but you’d be wrooooong. :) Then Kat Bonson follows up with How does your writing process work (e.g. do you write specific # of pages a day or is it a hit & miss kind of thing)? How does your agent/editor fit into your process?…
Tag: process
evolving process
Following up somewhat on last week’s process post… Recently on Twitter Tobias Buckell mentioned he was 6K into a 10K synopsis for a 55K book. Kate Elliott chimed in to say that in December, she’d managed 4K a day for 2 weeks straight–far above her usual writing average–due to having a supremely clear idea of what had to happen in the book at that point. I myself have become increasingly aware that the more I outline, the more smoothly the book goes. Particular cases in point were THE PRETENDER’S CROWN,…
Reader Questions: process & projects
Joliene asks: [What] drives your writing and keeps the juices flowing? What are the project ideas you have in the works, now that The Walker Papers is being put to bed??? Occasionally what my publisher is looking for drives my writing ideas–that’s what prompted the Strongbox Chronicles, for example, and it’s behind one of the projects I’m putting together now. Far more often, though, it’s a random comment or thought that ends up getting terribly out of control. :) I’ve mentioned before that the Walker Papers were born out of…
jumping around
In the last several books I’ve written, I’ve noticed a tendency that as I approach the end, I leap ahead, write the end, then come back and fill bits in. I have been doing that for this whole bloody book. Now, I know people who work this way as a matter of course, but I don’t, and I don’t like it, and seriously, what’s that all about anyway? This evening I realized that it’s because I’m writing the end. I mean, yes, the end happens to be 100,000 words long,…
process is always a revelation
So I got up to work this morning but still wasn’t feeling the love. There are scenes in this book that I suspect are snowstorms, which– –years and years ago, my writing partner Sarah/ and I wrote a book together. I wrote a wonderful snowstorm scene. It was a chapter long. Sarah cut it to two pages. Then it got cut to a page. In the end, it was two sentences. My beautiful snowstorm! So: in writing terms, a snowstorm is a scene (often a travel scene, as the snowstorm…