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Awesome, I'll stalk your work through your profile, I'm addicted to good scifi. I've mostly written poetry for the last 15 years, but I've been meaning to tran

Awesome, I'll stalk your work through your profile, I'm addicted to good scifi. I've mostly written poetry for the last 15 years, but I've been meaning to transition into long form writing. I'm wondering if you could share your process? Do you sketch out a plot then fill out the gaps? Are you creating situations then letting your characters grow the story organically? This is the bit I'm sort of stuck on, so hearing how other people approach the strategy of longform writing might hopefully jolt me into action.

eslaught 4y ago
I'm happy to talk about my process, though "process" is being pretty generous because it's very haphazard. Where it starts for me is the feeling when you get to the end of a good book, and you keep telling yourself stories (about the characters, the world, the situations, etc.). That's how I feel when I'm writing, except instead of applying it to some other book, I apply it to my own worlds. But the basic impulse is the same. I don't outline, in the sense of writing a bulleted list of plot points that I fill in. Honestly, I have never been able to do this and I don't understand how anyone else does either, despite having read some books about how people supposedly do so. I tried the Snowflake method too, and that didn't work for me either. The hardest part, I think, is getting started. Unfortunately, I didn't take a lot of notes during this time, but I did a bunch of noodling around. I wrote a bunch of stuff that didn't stick: characters, situations, places. I even tried some different storytelling styles. Once I had characters and a world that felt right, I spent about 5 years rewriting the opening of the book over and over. This part sucked because no matter what I did, it always felt wrong. Eventually I threw in the towel on that. But rather than tossing the project entirely, I had the idea of writing a prequel. This was actually brilliant, because it sidesteps the process of generating the characters and world from scratch (part of what takes so long in the first place, especially as a first timer). So it was much easier for me to create situations that I knew would drive the characters to interesting places. Somehow, this clicked for me and I basically wrote the first draft start to finish in a single pass. At least for my first book, I found I didn't need to outline. Because I knew where the characters would be going (I had already written the opening of the "real" book to death), I wasn't too afraid of getting lost. In practice, how things worked out was that I spent the time between writing sessions coming up with what would happen in the next chapter. So it wasn't literally seat-of-the-pants writing, because usually I knew what would happen a chapter or two ahead, but I wasn't planning the entire book out all at once either. Hope that helps in some form, at least to kickstart ideas. And happy to answer any questions (can find my contact info via profile).

eslaught 4y ago

I'm happy to talk about my process, though "process" is being pretty generous because it's very haphazard. Where it starts for me is the feeling when you get to the end of a good book, and you keep telling yourself stories (about the characters, the world, the situations, etc.). That's how I feel when I'm writing, except instead of applying it to some other book, I apply it to my own worlds. But the basic impulse is the same. I don't outline, in the sense of writing a bulleted list of plot points that I fill in. Honestly, I have never been able to do this and I don't understand how anyone else does either, despite having read some books about how people supposedly do so. I tried the Snowflake method too, and that didn't work for me either. The hardest part, I think, is getting started. Unfortunately, I didn't take a lot of notes during this time, but I did a bunch of noodling around. I wrote a bunch of stuff that didn't stick: characters, situations, places. I even tried some different storytelling styles. Once I had characters and a world that felt right, I spent about 5 years rewriting the opening of the book over and over. This part sucked because no matter what I did, it always felt wrong. Eventually I threw in the towel on that. But rather than tossing the project entirely, I had the idea of writing a prequel. This was actually brilliant, because it sidesteps the process of generating the characters and world from scratch (part of what takes so long in the first place, especially as a first timer). So it was much easier for me to create situations that I knew would drive the characters to interesting places. Somehow, this clicked for me and I basically wrote the first draft start to finish in a single pass. At least for my first book, I found I didn't need to outline. Because I knew where the characters would be going (I had already written the opening of the "real" book to death), I wasn't too afraid of getting lost. In practice, how things worked out was that I spent the time between writing sessions coming up with what would happen in the next chapter. So it wasn't literally seat-of-the-pants writing, because usually I knew what would happen a chapter or two ahead, but I wasn't planning the entire book out all at once either. Hope that helps in some form, at least to kickstart ideas. And happy to answer any questions (can find my contact info via profile).