I'm Not Alone

[scribblemyname]

Behold! My writing process in the words of Kristine Rusch:

I mentioned in my first blog on this that there would be a lot of sausage-making in these posts. I don’t write in order (I wish I did) and characters tend to surprise me at times. So, I often have to work out how they got from point A to point YY. Some of that stays in my office forever, and some of it either becomes other projects or goes into the book.

In other words,  I don’t just write a book, I assemble it from pieces. On my very first novel, I printed out the chapters, then spread them on the floor of my office like playing cards, and put them in piles until they made sense. I can mostly do that on the computer now, with my own weird version of a spreadsheet, but it’s the same process.

A friend of mine calls that “writing into the dark” and whoa, boy, is she right. Sometimes I shed a light on a part of that darkness, see a maze, and slam the door closed. Sometimes I shed a light, and realize the room was bigger than I thought. And sometimes I shed the light, and realize what I thought was a room was really just an unimportant shadow. But I need to go in deep enough to turn on the light in the first place.

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Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.