Forum: Author Hangout

In this thread I am not talking about the mechanics of how to write or what style of writing, but the processes you use in creating the story.

I'm a great believer in the 'finish the story and edit it before you publish it' crowd. That means I usually have a number of partly written stories I'm working on at times.

While it's a good idea to plan out the whole story from start to finish then just get in and write it in a few sittings that rarely happens with me. I'll often think of a good plot, or a good character, or a good situation for a story and then I write that down while I remember it. Later I'll go back to that and work on expanding it to be a full story by adding extra parts along the way. To further muddy the waters I'll often be working a story down Path A when I find my characters want to go down Path B and they won't co-operate until I take that path too.

The result is I now have 38 part written stories for 688,000 words, none of which tie into each other well, so I can't stitch them into a one story. I have had other ideas that I have been able to add on to an existing part written story and that makes up for that issue. Of those stories 11 are sequels to existing stories, plus there are a few other stories I'd like to write sequels too but have not yet started on. There are also a couple of stories which started life as 'what if I take this story in another direction' and I then worked out ways to make a new story based on the old plot but going off in another direction - that can sometimes be hard in coming up with a new way to establish the situation and characters. I do like to come up with an interesting character then put them in an intriguing situation and see what I can develop from that.

Thus I now have some stories where I have the middle written and am working out how to get there, some with the end written and I am working on how to get there, some with the start written and am not sure where to go right now, and some where I have a character who is interesting but not yet sure what I'm going to do with them, and some that's a mix of two or more of these.

When actually creating there are times I can write anywhere between 20,000 to 100,000 words in a single sitting, and others where I'm lucky to end up with 500 to 1,000 words on the page - often actually typing four or five times that number due to making changes.

I'm sure that of the 4,756,000 words in completed and published stories I actually wrote nearer 14,000,000 words to settle on what is in the current published versions.

Anyway, the point of this thread is to let people know there are many ways to start and work on a story, and to not be discouraged if your way is not what you read others say is the way they use. Each author should write in the way they see is right for them and that includes the way they create the story and the characters as well as how they write the story.

If anyone has other thoughts on this or uses other processes, please feel free to post a response stating them.

Anyway, the point of this thread is to let people know there are many ways to start and work on a story, and to not be discouraged if your way is not what you read others say is the way they use. Each author should write in the way they see is right for them and that includes the way they create the story and the characters as well as how they write the story.

My stories are written on the go. Nothing is pre-planned.
Forty years of work and hundreds of varying personalities encountered, it's practically written itself.
Tried a scifi story, but it got a bit out there so I abandoned it.
My advice is to stay as close to your wheelhouse as you can. I don't know shit about a lot of things, but the things I do know, I know well through living it.
Characters can come from real life personalities you've meet and know with some slight modifications. Especially those lively characters with a gift for bullshit.

If you've been in the military, it's only natural that your characters would reflect that. Sailed a boat? The same.

My advice would be to take an event in your real life and write about it. You might find yourself surprised at what you turn out. I sure as hell did.

Generally, I'll have an idea. If the idea interests me I'll play with it a bit and a few scenes will develop from it. I haven't written anything yet. It's still all in my head.

If I like the idea and scenes, but don't feel like pursuing it at the moment it goes onto a list as a tentative name and brief description. It stays on the list until I do become interested enough to write it.

If I like the new idea enough to write it I arrange the scenes I do have in chronological order. These scenes are considered set in stone. I then do research and play 2000 questions as I begin weaving a narrative between the scenes to connect them.

I rarely substantially change the set in stone scenes, The scenes in between them shift and mutate depending on both what I think will work and what the characters will agree to. Once I feel I've told the story I find a good stopping spot I'm done.

I'm a great believer in the 'finish the story and edit it before you publish it' crowd. That means I usually have a number of partly written stories I'm working on at times.

With me, it depends on the story.

My longer form ones I often write over a year or more, and use feedback to adjust how the story may go. If I get positive feedback on a character, I may involve them more. Or the reverse if they are not liked.

But my shorter stories I write then post it all together.

My process was to write my first book entirely, edit it, then post it. It turned out that my editing needed more editing, so it was less 'done' when I started posting it than I thought it was, but it was done enough that, had other editors not joined the project (and improved it), it would've been in good shape.

I needed to do that to prove to myself that I could finish the damn thing and not leave readers hanging.

Since then, however, it's been write on deadline ahead of publication. Whether that 'sticks' or not, I'm not sure. I'd rather not stop publishing unless I find that my writing process has become broken and quality is suffering.

I have the luxury of writing a long-form story that, by its nature, allows for an extremely wide variety of outcomes. I'm unlikely to write myself into a corner and have to leave it unfinished. If it needed to reach a conclusion in a certain number of pages, my process would have to be different.