Hello!
I’ve spent a lot of this month doing what I hope are the final edits to my novel that will be out next year. Well, when I say final, I mean final editorial ones – there will still be the proof reading, where the copy editor checks all the spelling, facts and punctuation. But it’s made me think about my process. Process is something that writers talk about a lot and I’m sure you’ve seen those videos on social media about how to write a novel. The truth is, there is no one way to write a novel. It really is a case of what works best for you being what works best.
I used to, well in fact still do, think my process is deeply ineffectual. It certainly takes me longer to write a book than other writers I know, but it’s not something I can get hung up on anymore. I’ve tried different approaches, but they’ve made the process slower because they felt uncomfortable to me. Although I’m pretty sure my process would make a lot of writers feel uncomfortable as well.
In case it’s helpful, my (and it doesn’t have to be yours) process is:
- Idea: this is something that usually takes ages to form. I’m always thinking about ideas and writing down snippets of thoughts in a notebook. This could be anything from something I see or read, to a new story that catches my attention, or an over-heard conversation, a painting, and a million things in between. This happens quite a lot and, as I’m inevitably in the middle of another project, I write it down and let it sit in my brain. Mostly these ideas disappear, but occasionally they’ll start to take root and I start to think something like, ‘what if women became so sick of waiting for men to change they took matters into their own hands’. (One of the Good Guys). The idea can also start with a character. As in, what if a person boarded the Titanic so unhappy they already wanted to die. (Hidden Depths)
- Thinking: it’s amazing how long the idea and characters sit in my head while I’m working on other things. I don’t actively even think about them, but somehow up they pop and I’ll jot a few more things down in my notebook.
- Plan: now for me this stage is very vague. But one day I’ll think that I need to start committing to this story. I used to dive straight in with a blank page, but over the years I’ve modified this a bit. I’ve tried to really plan – buying post-it notes and white boards and fancy pens, but what I’ve learnt is that at this early stage I don’t know enough to write a detailed plan. So what I do is a vague plan. I know where I want to start and end and a few of the larger plot points. More importantly I’m starting to understand my characters and why they’re in this particular novel. Because there’s no point in writing 300 pages about a fire-fighter who loves fires. Isn’t it much more interesting that they’re terrified of fires. Why are they terrified? Why on earth have they chosen this job? What’s the fire they have to put out? Etc. Etc.
- Start: the first draft for me is I suppose really an extended plan. I just go for it. I don’t worry about prose or getting my characters spot on or if the plot hangs together. I don’t do much reading back of what I’ve written and I certainly don’t edit anything. Sometimes I put a line of xxxx in lieu of a sentence, or write myself a helpful note like: put a scene here where she learns why she hates fires. But it doesn’t matter because I’m not showing this to anyone.
- Plan again: at the end of draft one I usually feel in a much better place. But I’m nowhere near a novel. So I plan again. This time, I know my characters and I know the bones of the plot. Honestly, plot never bothers me that much until right at the end. My basic rule is that you can never make your characters serve the plot, it has to always be the other way around, so there’s no point in really worrying too much about what’s going to happen. Also, we only care about what happens because of how it’s going to affect the characters. Now, I know this sounds unlikely, but even block-buster movies put character before plot – we don’t really care that the world is about to end, we care what’s going to happen to the protagonists when the world ends.
- Write again: I know a couple of writers who delete everything at this stage, but I’m not brave enough for that. That said, I don’t try to edit the document I have, I start a new one. But I now know the characters and the world so well, it’s much easier to write a new draft. One of the funny things about writing is how it makes you realise how much your mind works without you being aware of it. There will be things that I randomly put in the first draft which now make sense. This is something that keeps happening through all the drafts.
- Edit: when I say edit, the first couple of times I do this it will be quite brutal, but it’s not starting again. I will also have sent draft 2 to my agent and she will have come back to me with notes that will make me re-think the book in a different way again. We’ll work on it together and then we’ll send it to my editors, who will again have notes that will make me re-think again. This a long part of the process. Lots of eyes on the work, lots of ideas, lots of re-writes. Again, it’s never a full re-write at this stage, but it can result in big changes that can take many weeks, often months, to resolve.
- Final edit: when everyone has had their say I’ll go through it line by line again. Often I’ll see places where I’ve missed something important about a character, or a way to make the plot tighter, or how to make a sentence read better. You’d think it was just the odd word here and there at this stage, but in fact, I often change a lot, but within the structure of the novel. If I suddenly thought something like, the middle has to be at the beginning, it would worry me because all those big edits should have happened by now.