#also plotting and brainstorming and So. Much. Editing. stressing out over words and sentence structure. it takes so much time out of your | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

plague-of-insomnia · 6 years ago

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🍋 🍌

Thank you for the ask 💕!!

🍋 Your descriptions are transportive

Wow... 😶☺️🥰 Thank you.

🍌I want to pick your brain about your creative process.

This will be a long post, FYI.

Chaos.

Haha, I’m joking.

Or am I?

Honestly, I’ve tried a lot of different things over the years, including outlining, and it never works for me bc my characters control the story. I really am just their interpreter, putting their lives and words onto virtual paper.

I’m a “character first” kind of writer (as opposed to a “plot first”), and that means I could probably tell you what any of the main cast of my stories ate for breakfast on the morning of their 8th birthday, but I couldn’t tell you what happens in the end, or sometimes even in the next chapter, bc I don’t know until I “get there.”

I’ve done my best to break my process down into 8 steps.

Step 1: The Idea

When I first get an idea, it usually comes to me in terms of a really vivid scene, like the chapter in Where Demons Hide called “Spark of Madness.” Usually that scene ends up in the beginning of the story but not normally the first chapter. Sometimes it’ll give me some story/plot to help me begin to flesh out the idea more, like in that example, where the main antagonist/conflict is introduced, though normally I have to work at it a bit more.

Step 2: Flesh Things Out

This is where I brainstorm, usually thinking about the main characters, who they are and what their flaws might be and what they might want to help me “find” the story. Sometimes I’ll make a character sheet (normally I don’t if I’m working alone bc I don’t have to). I do normally make a file for notes where I’ll jot down possible ideas about the characters and where the story might go.

I’ll be perfectly honest and say while this process does get me jump started, most of the notes I jot down I don’t end up using bc as the characters and story formulates, they both tend to change from my original ideas.

Step 3: Research

This can often be tied in with #2 and it’s not as if it just stops here. But as I often write about disabilities, mental and chronic illness, I like to make sure I can get as much info about the disease/condition I want to represent as possible so that I can:

represent it appropriately and accurately and

so I can find story/character details along the way.

For example, in my novel UnConventional, I was able to talk with a friend who is not only an orthotic user (and has been for years) but is an engineer of sorts so he understands very well *how* they work. By talking with him about various orthotics and his own struggles with them, I was able to find new plot and character details that help make the story more vivid and real and also allowed me to drive it in directions I may not have been able to otherwise.

Step 4: Write, Write, Write.

Two things you need to know about my writing process:

I usually do better when I write out of order.

I need to visualize the scene in my head to write it effectively. My “writers block�� comes from not being able to see things in my head

My method isn’t the most efficient, but it’s how my brain works, and I’ve learned to go with it rather than fight it.

I brainstorm with myself (or a friend or my husband if possible) when necessary, or sometimes I’ll just close my eyes in a quiet place to allow myself to “see” the next series of scenes. Before I can forget the vivid movie I saw in my head, I do what I call a “scene sketch.”

I call it a “sketch,” bc just like a sketch is usually the foundation for a piece of art, mine are the basic structure for a completed scene. I do this also if I have a pretty solid idea but don’t have the time to write or I’m too tired or something like that, bc sketches allow me to simply sit down and flesh them out to create a completed scene.

They’re kind of like what an outline might be for other writers but less organized. Sketches are like a little treatment of a scene, including the basic setting, an idea of POV, and even dialog and body language, but jotted down really quickly without quotes or dialog tags. Sometimes there’ll be things like “maybe this happens” bc once I actually write the scene I’ll know if that idea feels right or not.

Here’s an example from a rejected chapter of WDH (I ended up going in a slightly different direction):

Seb answers when room service knocks. Bard is hovering, maybe bc he heard Seb’s scream. He sees the bad bite on Seb’s bare chest, sees he’s trembling and drowning more than ever, his eyes almost pleading for rescue. But when Bard asks if he’s OK he smiles and says yes, sir. Takes the food from the room service person and says he’s been ordered to wait on the guests personally. Shuts the door in Bard’s face.

Sometimes these sketches can be very detailed, other times it’s more of a general, quick jot of what happens or the scene I want to set. It depends on my brain and the scene.

I like to set goals based on scenes (or sometimes chapters), and do my best to complete a scene in its entirety if possible before I stop. If I can’t bc of time, then I’ll write a really brief sketch so I know what I need to do when I pick back up again so I won’t forget.

I’ve been writing and editing long enough that depending on the project I’m able to self-edit as I write. That doesn’t mean I don’t revise or edit later, but it saves some time overall as I am more aware of certain things than I used to be.

Because I write out of order, my process often entails being a puzzle master and piecing things together. Especially for something like Where Demons Hide, which has a lot of flashbacks, since I write those separately from the main story, I then have to figure out where they “belong.” I’d say 98% of the time for this fic I have already written the flashbacks before the chapter(s) they end up in.

My original serial fiction I write in a similar fashion, where I often will write scenes out of order and then assemble them into chapters later. So sometimes I’ll make a kind of ��outline” of plot points that I need to cover. It’s not so much a fixed thing as a memory aid and place for me to put notes of ideas that might come to me that aren’t completely fleshed out.

Step 5: Rest

Once I’ve completed a chapter, I try to let it “rest” for at least a few days, if not longer. Especially if it was a long chapter or something that was difficult to write and took me awhile so I’ve been working on it for days or even weeks at a time.

I do this for three reasons:

“In process” brain lies often and says a scene/chapter sucks and I should just burn my computer/phone and take up accounting instead, and that the pacing is awful and it’s boring and lots of similar untruths.

Especially if the chapter took me a long time to finish because it’s lengthy or complicated or has difficult subject matter or whatever, it means there’s a good chance I’ve been working on it for days or even weeks and I’m SICK TO DEATH of it and never want to see it again, so taking a break from it is a welcome relief. It’s like taking a vacation after you’ve been working overtime for months. Sometimes I’ll do writing-adjacent things during this time, like reading, organizing/typing my notes, jotting down things I need to work on, reading/watching stuff that will energize and inspire me. Other times I work on another project or other scenes/chapters in the same project. Sometimes I’ll just take a break if I’m feeling burnt out or stressed.

I can come back to the project with fresh eyes, so that I can read it and see what things are actually good (suck it, in-process brain) or what things may still need work in a way I couldn’t do so soon after finishing.

Step 6: Revise

I revise in different ways depending on how much I feel something needs fixing. The first revision is my chance to see how the puzzle pieces knit together, work on scenes that I noticed aren’t pulling their weight or that need to be fleshed out. Sometimes this means I will completely, totally rewrite—and by that I mean “retype.” I open a fresh document, and referencing the original, start over. This allows me to streamline and better hone my language and ensure each scene is working hard.

This is something I do if I feel like a scene isn’t working as-is or I have a shit-ton of notes and comments on the first draft and it’s so chaotic I feel like I can’t focus anymore. This is especially helpful for dialog.

Other times the revisions are less drastic. Sometimes I means moving a scene around or deleting one that isn’t working. Sometimes it means finding all the times I’ve repeated the same word and fixing that, or fixing places where I’ve used the same sentence type too often.

Revision can be a very long process, depending on the quality of the first draft and what my goal is. If it’s just fan fic I’m doing for fun, then I don’t obsess too much: usually 1-2 read throughs and adjustments are OK. If it’s something I’m going to submit for publication, then that’s a different story bc the quality of the edit of your submitted draft makes a good impression (or a bad one).

Step 7: Beta Reader

If I have one, which I don’t always, then this is where I’ll send it to them. Usually what I want in a beta reader isn’t stuff like proof or copy editing, but rather “big picture” stuff. I want them to tell me: “this scene isn’t working” or “this feels contrived” or “I don’t like the main character.”

It can be frustrating and disheartening to get feedback that means I have to go back and do some major revising, but that’s why they’re there, bc often it’s either things I couldn’t see bc I’m too close to the story, or stuff I was in denial about (lol). Listening to my betas always leads to a better draft.

Step 8: Proofreading/Copyediting

The last step. I’ve done this professionally so I’m usually pretty good at finding typos and inconsistencies myself, but some people will hire someone like me to do that work bc they don’t have the skill or the time. Even if it’s “just for fun,” proofing is important bc it affects readability, and it’s embarrassing to me if I post something with glaring proof errors 😶.

~~~Anyway, that is roughly how my brain works. I don’t know if this is what you were expecting or wanting, but here it is!

#my answers #my writing process #positive feedback #ask chie

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arthur36domingo · 8 years ago

Text

J.K. Rowling’s Top Tricks for Working Magic With Your Writing

One of the most miraculous aspects of J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world is that it’s just so darn big. If you’re an aspiring author, you may wonder just how Rowling managed to crank out so many books, use so much imagination, and keep the ideas flowing.

Here’s a secret: she didn’t just wave a magic wand. She wrote every single one of the 1,084,170 words in the Harry Potter series (and lots more in her other books, plays, and movies). How does she keep churning them out? Will the wizarding world ever stop growing? And what’s the real trick to becoming a bestseller?

Before you stop reading and start googling “Hogwarts School of Writing and Wizardry,” here are eight steps for diving into your writing, creating a routine, and not giving up—even when it seems He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named and all the forces of the Dark Arts are against you.

1. Believe in Magic.

Okay, not literally (at least, unless you do). But this tip is just about believing in yourself as a writer, the content you create, and your ability to keep going. Take it from J.K.: she had always wanted to be a writer, and she kept inventing stories until people read them (and boy, did they read them). To make it as a writer, you have to believe you’ve got the magic it takes to make words come alive on the page.

It all started out as a dream for J.K. Rowling, too. Hear the world-renowned author talk about her pie-in-the-sky idea of becoming a writer.

youtube

2. Treat writing like it’s your job.

This is true whether writing is, in fact, your job, or whether you just want it to be. Treating it like a job means setting aside time to finish what you need to do. Some authors give themselves strict daily word limits (Mark Twain averaged right around 1,800).

J.K. hasn’t talked about giving herself a word limit, but she has made it clear that she puts in her time. Since she hit the big time with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Sorcerer’s Stone, in the American edition) and managed to make it her full-time gig, she’s careful to put in her eight hours a day—even if that sometimes means working through the night. But before that, when she was a single mom on social assistance, sometimes it was all she could do to snatch a spare moment to scribble a stray idea.

In her words:

You’ve got to work. It’s about structure. It’s about discipline. It’s all these deadly things that your school teacher told you you needed…You need it.

3. Treat writing like it’s not your job.

Yes, that’s the opposite of Step 2 and no, you’re not reading it wrong. It’s important to set a routine, make yourself fill quotas, and be serious about this gig, but if it’s too much of a job, you risk losing the magic (remember Step 1?).

That said, don’t over-stress about things like words per day if it’s not your style. For some writers, tallying up those numbers is a big motivator. But for other writers—and also for certain projects or stages in creating a new project—it’s not all about hitting a word quota. It’s about brainstorming, coming up with lists of names and ideas, making a chart of how your story will unfold, or doing research about the history of wizards in Europe. That sort of work feels a lot more like a game.

4. Inspiration can strike at surprising times. Be ready.

If you chain yourself to your desk and stare at a piece of paper hoping for words to appear on it, they’re probably less likely to materialize than if you mix in a little bit of Step 3. But sometimes a lightning bolt strikes—and you’re suddenly imagining a kid with a lightning-bolt scar on his forehead.

For J.K. Rowling, the idea for that kid “fell into” her head while she was staring off into space waiting for a train from Manchester to London. No, she didn’t happen to be on Platform 9 ¾; she just happened to have an idea. But unfortunately, she didn’t have a pen.

This might sound like a cautionary tale against not being ready for inspiration striking. But being ready isn’t just about carrying a pen, post-its, or an iPad: it’s about being prepared to let the ideas flow. Rowling says of the experience:

I simply sat and thought, for four (delayed train) hours, while all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn’t know he was a wizard became more and more real to me […]Perhaps, if I had slowed down the ideas to capture them on paper, I might have stifled some of them.

There you have it: a delayed train and lack of writing utensil were all it took to conceive of one of the greatest literary franchises in recent history.

And it wasn’t the only time she found herself short of materials, either: another famous anecdote tells of Rowling scribbling down the names of the characters on a barf bag on an airplane. Luckily, it was unused. That’s why Rowling says:

I can write anywhere.

It doesn’t mean you should deliberately forget to bring stuff to write on or with when you’re traveling from point A to point B. The lesson here is to keep your mind open to ideas that drop into it.

5. Plan ahead. Way ahead.

The idea for Harry Potter may have fallen into J.K. Rowling’s head in that train station in 1990, but actually writing the story took a lot longer. Over five years, Rowling mapped out the entire series, book by book. She had the plot developments, characters, names, and rules that governed the wizarding world all figured out before she so much as considered the words “Chapter One.”

That shows the importance of planning. Readers learn the word “Horcrux” for the first time in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince—six whole books into the series—but by the time they’re fully explained, you realize that they’ve been showing up ever since the very beginning. (Note: that wasn’t a spoiler, in case you haven’t read the books. Maybe you know to look out for Horcruxes, but just try figuring out what you’re looking for.)

Anyway, by planting a seed early in her series that would become central to the plots of the later books, J.K. shows the vital importance of planning before you write.

And here’s the kicker: this doesn’t apply only when you’re writing a multi-book series. One book, one story, an article, a blog post, you name it: create an outline, determine when you’re going to incorporate key details, and don’t start at the beginning without knowing the ending.

6. Kill your darlings.

This quote isn’t from J.K. Rowling; in fact, it’s most often attributed to William Faulkner.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

The gist: be willing to leave stuff out, even if you think it’s good. In other words: edit, edit, edit.

This is an important one after Step 5: you may have made a thorough plan that looks really solid in bullet-point form, but once you start turning it into prose you might find out that some details don’t work as well as you thought they would, or a scene leads somewhere unexpected, or maybe doesn’t lead anywhere at all. It can be agonizing, but willingness to adjust your plan and edit your writing is key to success.

Our author of the hour, J.K. Rowling, is no exception. She wrote, re-wrote, and re-worked the opening chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone not one, not two, but fifteen times. Here’s what she has to say about those early drafts:

You have to resign yourself to the fact that you waste a lot of trees before you write anything you really like, and that’s just the way it is […] It’s like learning an instrument, you’ve got to be prepared for hitting wrong notes occasionally, or quite a lot, cause I wrote an awful lot before I wrote anything I was really happy with.

Be willing to make changes, and know that you might end up cutting out words, sentences, and entire sections you thought belonged. The reason? You might love those little darlings, but to a reader they might just be unnecessary details. Which leads us to…

7. Write like a reader.

J.K. Rowling says she didn’t have a particular target audience in mind while writing Harry Potter; she just thought of what she would want to read.

Ask yourself questions like these: Are you giving away a juicy detail that could come later? Including a “darling” idea that you’re proud of, but doesn’t really advance the plot? Telling what happens, instead of ending the chapter (or book) on a cliffhanger?

This ties in with planning: keep the excitement and the mystery by not giving away your secrets too early. J.K. Rowling says she had finished her first draft of the first Harry Potter book before realizing she’d included some key plot elements that shouldn’t show up until much later in the series. So it was back to the drawing board.

Plot and pacing are the meat and potatoes of writing for your readers, but it’s also important to work in time for some sweet, sticky candy to keep your readers addicted. Rowling does this with things like fun-to-say names (Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans), out-of-this-world concepts (earwax flavor), and characters that real-live humans can truly empathize with (no, not Bertie Bott—Harry and his friends). Her ability to capture readers’ imaginations and hearts is as much about the details of the wizarding world as the sequence of events in the series.

Hear Rowling talk about where some of her ideas come from—the blend of influences from her life, pure invention, and human motivation is exactly the reader-focused recipe we’re talking about.

youtube

8. Read inspiring quotes about writing.

The overarching tip here: love what you write and don’t give up. But we’re going to give the last word (or words) to J.K. Rowling. Sometimes all it takes is a push from a role model to get you rolling in the right direction, so keep these mood boosters nearby if you’re feeling down on yourself or writing. Believe us: J.K. knows what she’s talking about.

Can you make that kind of transformation with Polyjuice potion?

Failure is inevitable—make it a strength.

A step up from writing for your reader: being your reader.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself.

Maybe you thought you are what you eat. Not according to J.K. Rowling.

What you write becomes who you are…So make sure you love what you write.

If you’re waiting on publishers, agents, or other forces beyond your control, you just have to let those forces do their thing. It’ll work out in the end.

Wait. Pray. This is the way Harry Potter got published.

How could you not feel inspired?

We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all of the power we need inside ourselves already.

In the end, we can’t promise that these tips will snag you a Pulitzer Prize, but setting a writing schedule and letting your imagination run free are important first steps.

The post J.K. Rowling’s Top Tricks for Working Magic With Your Writing appeared first on Grammarly Blog.

from Grammarly Blog https://www.grammarly.com/blog/rowling-work-magic-with-your-writing/

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ber39james · 8 years ago

Text

J.K. Rowling’s Top Tricks for Working Magic With Your Writing

1. Believe in Magic.

It all started out as a dream for J.K. Rowling, too. Hear the world-renowned author talk about her pie-in-the-sky idea of becoming a writer.

youtube

2. Treat writing like it’s your job.

In her words:

You’ve got to work. It’s about structure. It’s about discipline. It’s all these deadly things that your school teacher told you you needed…You need it.

3. Treat writing like it’s not your job.

4. Inspiration can strike at surprising times. Be ready.

There you have it: a delayed train and lack of writing utensil were all it took to conceive of one of the greatest literary franchises in recent history.

I can write anywhere.

5. Plan ahead. Way ahead.

Anyway, by planting a seed early in her series that would become central to the plots of the later books, J.K. shows the vital importance of planning before you write.

6. Kill your darlings.

This quote isn’t from J.K. Rowling; in fact, it’s most often attributed to William Faulkner.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

The gist: be willing to leave stuff out, even if you think it’s good. In other words: edit, edit, edit.

7. Write like a reader.

J.K. Rowling says she didn’t have a particular target audience in mind while writing Harry Potter; she just thought of what she would want to read.

Hear Rowling talk about where some of her ideas come from—the blend of influences from her life, pure invention, and human motivation is exactly the reader-focused recipe we’re talking about.

youtube

8. Read inspiring quotes about writing.

Can you make that kind of transformation with Polyjuice potion?

Failure is inevitable—make it a strength.

A step up from writing for your reader: being your reader.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself.

Maybe you thought you are what you eat. Not according to J.K. Rowling.

What you write becomes who you are…So make sure you love what you write.

If you’re waiting on publishers, agents, or other forces beyond your control, you just have to let those forces do their thing. It’ll work out in the end.

Wait. Pray. This is the way Harry Potter got published.

How could you not feel inspired?

We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all of the power we need inside ourselves already.

In the end, we can’t promise that these tips will snag you a Pulitzer Prize, but setting a writing schedule and letting your imagination run free are important first steps.

The post J.K. Rowling’s Top Tricks for Working Magic With Your Writing appeared first on Grammarly Blog.

from Grammarly Blog https://www.grammarly.com/blog/rowling-work-magic-with-your-writing/

0 notes