My Basic Process

So here's my first blog about my process. As the title of my blog indicates, what I write here will most likely be half thought out and subject to change. Although I think about this stuff a lot, my views shift regularly. Furthermore, there's a decent chance I won't always bother to check these posts for grammar, typos, etc. After all, these thoughts are only half thought out, so if they're a little rough, so be it.

To begin I'll simply outline my basic process, and in future posts, I'll get down to what I'm specifically working on at the moment.

PREWRITING: Typically a story idea has marinated for months or even years in my head before I set it down, although sometimes I get an idea and then begin writing it that very day. The length of time thinking about it tends to correlate with the length of the project. I toss a novel around for years before setting anything down on paper whereas a flash fiction piece might go straight from idea to a draft.

DRAFT 1: Once I have notes and some good idea what the overall scope of the piece is I start writing. When I have the time, I like to go regularly and shoot for 2,000 words each day, but I can't always manage the time if I'm busy with other things in my life. So I might go well for a week and then not get anything for several days. Or I might go straight for two months hitting my daily goals. Anyway, once I have a first draft I put that aside and let it sit so I can get some perspective on it.

READING: After a few weeks or even a few months I return to it and try to read the whole thing as quickly as possible. For a full length novel, it will probably take a couple of long sessions over a couple days, but I don't want to read it the way I might read other things--a chapter at a time, or a few pages on the toilet, or whatever. I make minimal notes as I go through it, but not on the small things like grammar or spelling; those wait until the end. This read through is to get an idea of whether the story works, if it flows, if it even makes sense. From here I take a small step back and let it return to my brain for a bit, so I can just ponder the whole thing some more.

REWRITING: Then I make more notes and I do a complete outline. I find that outlining at the rewriting stage is even more useful than outlining from the beginning. It's a way for me to see the whole scope and how chapters fit together and if the basic arc of the story is coming together. This outline begins with what I actually have in the first draft, but then it evolves into what I want it to be in the revision. So the outline itself goes through multiple drafts as I continue to rewrite. Now is when I begin actually creating a second draft. This involves going through a hard copy with a red pen. I cross things out; I write in new things. Sometimes I'll hand write multiple new pages or X out whole chapters. This is not even revising. This is REWRITING. By the time I'm through, the hard copy is so marked up that I don't even attempt to update these changes on my computer. I go through and I retype the entire thing. This way, I not only include those changes I wrote in by hand on the hard copy, but I also make additional changes as I go. I almost think of this as two separate new drafts, the red ink hard copy is draft two, and the new document on my computer is draft three. By the time I have a full new version, a few more months have passed, and I'm ready to set it aside and hopefully gain some more perspective and then return to the reading.

REVISING: When I return to the rewritten draft, I want to get the same sense I aimed for after the rough draft: Does the story flow? Are there glaring errors? Do the characters make sense? Etc. But I also want to focus on the language and precision. Am I going onto tangents that are unnecessary? Is there repetition that can be trimmed? I have a tendency to expand in the initial rewriting stage, and here is where I tighten. This draft is about trimming the fat.

EDIT/POLISH: Finally, once I've been through the above steps, perhaps circling back multiple times and repeating them, I am ready to just edit. This is the tedious step. I love the other stages of the process, but here is where it comes down to putting in the hard work that will hopefully make something publishable and ready for the world. Again I print out a hard copy and pull out the red pen. I go through the entire thing sentence by sentence. Some places might jump out at me that need larger revision, but typically the story is solid at this point and it's simply a matter of finding errors, fixing awkward phrases, and making sure that it flows, not only from the scope of the overall story, but in the actual paragraphs and sentences. It's a pain, and I can never catch absolutely everything, but it's unavoidable.

I've written two novels using basically this process each time, with some variation. And I didn't mention in here showing the work in progress to others, workshop classes, writing groups, teachers, friends, but that happens as well. It looks pretty straightforward the way I have it described in this blog, but in practice it took me about a year to generate the first draft of my first novel, and then two years to finish the final draft, at which point I decided it was a great learning experience but not anything to attempt to publish. The second novel was at one point conceived as a collection of interlinked short stories, and so I began working on sections of it years before I started drafting the whole thing as a novel, but from the point I began in earnest, I probably wrote the first three chapters or so during a busy spring semester and then completed the rest of the first draft over the summer, so about six months total. Then I took the next two years to rework it. I currently have a draft that I felt was done, but then I got some good suggestions from one of my early readers, so it now has a few additional changes to undergo, but it's close. Unlike the first novel, I hope to publish this one, and I'm seeking an agent for it.

There's more to write here, of course. I haven't mentioned anything about what I'm doing currently, or the unease I feel when I'm not solidly in the middle of a project, but that will have to come later.