A few people have asked either in interviews or privately about my writing process. They’ve wanted to know about how I handled planning and writing Bane of Ashkarith. Some people were surprised by what I shared, and I thought it might be interesting to give my readers a behind-the-scenes on what I do when I’m working on a book. So let’s get started!
Setup
I’m a bit of a neat freak and have strong OCD tendencies when it comes to getting ready to write. I can’t stand working in a messy space. Things have to be organized. I can’t write until they are. I’ll just stare at the screen and the mess around me without writing anything at all.
So my first step is usually to tidy up wherever I’m writing. I need to clear at least enough space to work. So if I’m sitting on my bed, I have to have the covers straightened out even if I’m huddling under them on a cold day. If I’m at my desk, things are more cramped and cluttered because I don’t have much space for things, but stuff still has to be ordered and neat. It’s even more important at the desk because there’s more to distract me.
The last thing I always do when I’m getting ready to write is pull up the spreadsheet where I keep track of the times I’m writing and how many words I got in a session. Yes, I do this. It helps me understand what my best writing hours are and, on average, how long a writing session should be to really start rolling out word count. Besides, it’s a nice feeling to be able to look back at what I’ve accomplished in a given week.
This was the log from a few weeks ago.
The empty slots, by the way, are days where I wasn’t able to do any writing on my current fiction projects.
Maybe now it won’t surprise everyone as much that I was an accounting major.
Planning
So, if the writing log and weird requirements for my writing space weren’t enough to tip everyone off, I’m big on organization and planning. My books are no different. I’m a plotter all the way.
I used to be a seat-of-the-pants type of writer. I just winged it with no plan at all and hoped it worked out well. (It never did.) The method just stressed me out because I never knew anything before I started, and it sucked up so much time to edit it that I quickly realized I enjoyed the process more if I planned first. It’s not for everyone, but it is absolutely for me.
If you haven’t tried plotting before, I would highly recommend you do. I’ll explain in a second what I did for Bane of Ashkarith and what I do now for every book I write, but let me say that plotting doesn’t have to suck all the joy out of everything. There’s room for breathing. You can plot just the bare bones if that’s all you need, or you can go all out.
But not plotting leads to a lot more revisions, rough drafts, and plot holes. So if you haven’t already done so, at least give it a try.
Anyway, for Bane of Ashkarith, I employed a method I hadn’t really used much before. Like I mentioned earlier, I’m big on plotting. But I’d never really bothered plotting past a general idea of the content for each chapter. I knew the big events, but none of the details were really solid in between the events. Writing took a lot longer because I had to think about all of that as I wrote.
With Bane of Ashkarith, I chose to plot out the basic highlights of each chapter and then, in the revision stage, I took it a step further and plotted out the individual scenes in each chapter. The result was that I wrote more words in the same amount of time because I didn’t have to hem and haw about what would happen.
I did all of this on pieces of line paper while in different classes when professors weren’t looking at what I was doing (don’t follow my example, by the way. Paying attention in class is usually a good idea.). As a result, I don’t have the scenes from Bane of Ashkarith. But I’ve done it with other novels, so I’ll share the ones I did for On Anarchy’s Wings, my current work-in-progress.
I apologize for the low quality of the image. I wasn’t able to get a better picture because I wrote with pencil here. I did enhance it so the text would be darker though. The basics of each scene include: listing the viewpoint character, numbering the scenes, and listing down what happens in the scene.
This might sound like a ton of work. I guess it is a little bit overwhelming if you try to do a bunch at once. But I found that I could spend maybe ten or fifteen minutes sitting down before a writing session and jotting down the highlights of every scene in the chapter or two chapters I was going to write without a problem. It didn’t take that much time, and my writing was much more focused.
Writing
Now the part most people would say is the fun part. I think all the parts of writing are fun, but I recognize that I’m not the norm. Regardless, my writing process is pretty simple. I usually pick either an amount of time or a certain length in the novel to write. With Bane of Ashkarith, I usually opted for sitting down and writing until I had finished a chapter, however long that was. But if I’m limited on time or need to work on other projects too, I’ll pick a specific time frame to write, and I’ll work until that time is up.
I’m pretty easily distracted by my phone at the beginning of a writing period or when the scenes are a struggle to write for one reason or another, so I have to keep it away from me while I write so I don’t waste time on YouTube or Facebook. Yeah, I procrastinate just like most other authors I know. I’m normal that way, if nothing else. It’s not really a point I’m proud of since it involves wasting time, but it is what it is.
Editing
With the last part of the writing process, I usually write and re-write for a set time period. Otherwise, I have a tendency to lose track of time and just keep going so I can finish just one more chapter.
Editing is something that I really love. I know… It’s weird. But, nonetheless, I do love it. I can’t decide if I like writing or editing better. When it comes to my editing habits, I go through the work once looking for places where the characters’ voices need to come through more clearly for deep point of view and places where things just seem to drag. If it doesn’t interest me, it’s a safe bet it probably isn’t going to interest the readers. After all, I should be the one most invested in my own work. So if I’m not, why would anyone else be?
After I finish cutting and tightening, adding and re-writing, then cutting and tightening again, I move on to editing for consistency, grammar, and all those little parts of a novel that slip through the cracks sometimes on us when we’re writing. If I didn’t catch it before, my goal is to catch it at this point.
Once I’ve done all that, the last thing I check for is readability and flow. I just go through and make sure everything is said in the best way possible to get the point across. Preferably without being wordy.
Conclusion
This was a bit of a lengthy post, but I hope that it’s been interesting and, even more importantly, helpful to you guys. Writers are always learning, growing, and adapting. I’m no different, and my writing process now has definitely matured from where it was even a year ago. But I’ve found a method that works well for me, so I stick with it and just tweak it to improve the process where it might still be bumpy.
So what about you guys? Do you have anything you have to do before you’re able to focus on writing? What about your writing process? Anything you do that you think others might benefit from? If so, leave a comment and tell the rest of us about it! We’d love to hear about how other writers handle the writing process.
