I Was Supposed to Have a Writing Process?

 I recently had my first book launch event, courtesy of the wonderful folks at Shepherd’s Scarborough Library. I read a bit from The Minstrel and the Prophet and then talked a little about how it came to be (much of which was in my last post). After that, I took questions from the people there. One of the students in attendance asked me about my writing process.

No one told me that I was supposed to have a process.

And I really didn’t have some formal process. I had no set time of day that I would dutifully sit down at my computer and write. Sometimes it would be days between writing sessions. Sometime more. Sometimes I’d write more than once a day. The demands of my day job cannot easily be set aside. There are only 15 weeks in a semester, and you simply can’t extend the work past that. Everything has to be done pretty much right now.

What I wrote wasn’t always material to forward the narrative. Sometimes it was a scrap of the history of my world. Sometimes it was (another) revision to the outline of the trilogy. Often, I just went back over previously written material to polish it.

I will, however, offer one tip, but before I do, I’ll say a bit about why I’m offering that tip.

I was lying in bed one night shortly after turning out the lights. I was thinking about book one and the perfect title came to me. It was absolutely brilliant, so amazing that I thought about getting up to write it down. But I was snug and comfortable, and the title felt so right, so perfect that I told myself that I’d surely remember it in the morning, and I let myself drift off to sleep.

That, of course, was a mistake.

As a psychologist, someone who studies human memory, I knew that the odds were that I wouldn’t remember something that came to me right before sleep like that.

All I remembered the next morning was that I’d thought of a perfect title, but I had no idea what it was.

So, my tip: if you think of something for your writing, write it down.

I started carrying a small blue notebook with me. It’s full of scraps of dialog, thoughts about things I needed to do, and some complete scenes. It was really handy to have around, and a great deal of good material would have been lost if I hadn’t had it with me.