Samhain Publishing Ltd Weblog

Bianca D'Arc's World: The Writing Process

So it’s my day to say something wise and profound on the Samhain blog. Sorry, I’m fresh out of wise and profound. I think I used it all up writing my next book. ;-) What I can talk about is writing itself – the process in particular. So what follows are a few observations on the writing life and my writing process in particular.

My writing process is a little different than most people, I’m sure, but I’m a firm believer in the idea that we are all individuals with individual needs. What works for some, won’t work for others. I do, however, believe there is definitely something to be learned from what other people do, so I try to listend carefully whenever an author I like shares his/her process. I try to find things in their success to adapt to my own habits, to make my process better, if possible.

For one thing, my life doesn’t have a whole lot of structure anymore. Time was, I knew where I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to do and what I was supposed to wear at just about every moment of the day. Since I started working for myself, that kind of structure is just about impossible to recreate. I had always looked forward to “freedom” but now that I have it, I find it very stressful!

My solution was to try to impose structure on my day, but with frequent travel, having to now do all my own secretarial work and a fickle muse, I haven’t been too successful with that. Rather than let the frustration bubble, I try to just go with the flow. I try to write a few thousand words per day. I find that if I leave the writing to the afternoon or evening, other tasks crowd it out and I feel guilty and rushed. So my ideal plan is to get a few thousand words written each morning, before all the other daily chores take over.

When I’m on a roll, I write reasonably fast. I can knock out 2000 words in about an hour. When I’m really cooking, I can do about 5000 in twice that amount of time. Every once in a while, I’ll come up against a point in the story that makes me pause, stuck. When that happens, I try to work through the stoppage, but if all else fails, I’ll skip it an move on to the next point in my loose outline. When I go back later, I usually find some easy way to bridge the two scenes or realize that my earlier direction was a little off and the “blockage” was just my mind telling me to stop and redirect.

On outlines – I don’t do strict outlining, but after a substantial part of the book is planned out, I put in small reminders to tell me where I’d planned to go next. Sometimes it changes as the story evolved, but not often. Like I said, going with the flow seems to work best for me. Now of course, this is only my process. Different personalities will need different methods, but I hope something can be gleaned from learning how I do it. I’d love to hear your thoughts – or if you’re a writer – how you structure your workday, so please leave me a comment!

Oh, and for those who are interested, in a few days I’ll be starting a series of posts on my own blog I’m calling “The Craft” – little tidbits on the writing process that relate specifically to my upcoming books. I’ll take you through some of my decision making processes on how I structured certain sections of the books. I’d love to hear your opinions and generate a little discussion on the topic, so be sure to drop by my official blog (http://biancadarc.com/blog/) in the next week or so. (And for readers, I’ll be posting little excerpts from upcoming books, so stop by if you like sneak peeks!) I hope you all have a great week!