Over the past few months, I’ve been playing around with my writing process and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. It’s a relatively slow process with a little bit of fine-tuning here and there between every day life. I’m doing a deep dive of my process and playing around with what works and throwing out what doesn’t.
So I figured why not blog the process from start to finished project.
(Is a project ever truly finished?)
Every project I’ve started, every spark of an idea that has gone anywhere, whether finished or not, started with notes. The idea would come, wherever I was at the time, or what I was doing doesn’t matter, but writing the idea down did matter. Writing the idea down ensures I will return to it later and with any luck flesh out the idea.
Sometimes, an idea starts as a simple question like: What if?
Other times, I’ll be listening to music in the car or the shower and an idea will simply spring forth and I’ll rush to find a safe and dry space to write it down.
The last novel I finished was an experiment to see what I could emulate from one of my favorite books/movies and a deep dive of taking elements I liked and putting my own spin on it. The project turned out much better than I had hoped and expanded way past the original work. It’s been one of my favorite projects yet.
No matter what the idea, big or small, novel or short story, it all starts with a notes page in my writing program. I currently use Ulysses, but have used Google Docs in the past. The idea is still the same. I take the page with the original idea and I put all of the ideas, little scenes I can see or hear, the ideas for the ending and anything else relevant to the story for as long as it takes to feel comfortable enough to start the story.
Everything ends up in one place, one spot where all the ideas live and work out on the page. Sometimes it becomes a super loose outline where I’ll have the beginning, the end and maybe some small parts of the middle. Most of the time it’s a jumbled mess of: “I like this name” and “THIS IS THE THEME!” Or some other wild notes.
One of these days, I’ll do a greatest hits of the weird things that end up in my notes (whether while writing the piece or before)
Here’s one of my favorite notes in one of my pieces.
I’ve only started doing this process in the last 6 months or so. Before, I would start novels and pieces with such high hopes and lose traction and once again find myself in the loop of the “shiny new project” syndrome.
Looking back on a few projects before notes, perhaps they lost traction and stalled because I didn’t have enough notes or direction of where I wanted to go, or it wasn’t my idea in the first place. Someday we’ll talk about my tendency to think I can write an entire novel based on an album (but not today).
Not every small idea has enough traction to become a successful or finished idea, but most of the good ones so far have started with a notes document or an entire notebook.
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