I get a lot of emails every day, certainly every week, asking me what the process is for writing and publishing. I've been privileged to have written more than 100 books, but people like to tell me that my personal journals don't really count. Are you kidding me? I go through a 300-page handwritten diary every six weeks. They do count. I may not have them published, but they do count. The process of writing is simple, you grab a book and a pen and you start unloading everything inside your head. You don't stop just because the clock says it's late. You get the thoughts OUT of your head. Then, because no one really rewrites their diary or journal, you move forward to the next day. I have always dated my entries, and I even say what time I'm writing, where I am, and what the weather is. Who knows, someone may someday want to use my writings to prove something. Did you know that most of what we know about Blackbeard the Pirate comes from his own journals? Truth.
Well, the process of writing is that you write. You get it out of your head either on paper or on the screen. You just write. Prewriting is easiest because you can either just write without a direction, and say absolutely anything, or you can start off with an idea and build on it. I tend to have an idea if I'm writing a book. I don't jump in willy-nilly. I think I may end up writing a book about writing a book. I could do that.
The prewriting can last as long or as short as you want it to be. You can write and add to it, take away from it, split it up into sections, make an outline, build on the skeleton of what you think you want to say, and then add the flesh. You dig into it piece by piece, and you get a GIST of the story in place. That can be Phase 1 if you don't count the prewriting as Phase 1. When you've got it written, and I prefer to do it longhand first, you can add it to your Word documents either as an idea and/or as a sort of loose story with a sort of loose timeframe or plot. You put one foot in front of the other until the story is told from front to back.
Phase 2 can be the meat of the story, the details, the truths, the lies, and the part that proves or disproves whatever it is that you set out to say. You use the skeleton to find the words you want to flesh out the bare bones of the story. You start with Chapter 1 and you build it until you're finished telling that part of the story. Chapter 2 is the next part of the story. This goes on until you've reached the end, but you can take the chapters and move them around later on to fit the way you want them to fit. By breaking them up one chapter at a time, you can easily move them about. They don't always have to be in chronological order as long as your readers don't have issues with going from one part of the story to the next. I've seen books that have three separate main points, and they are told in A, B, C style. Chapter 1 is A, and Chapter 2 is B, and so forth. Then you do it again.
Phase 3 is the part where you find all the fluff and stuff. You find points, bits, and details, and you put these into the story by telling little stories inside the other stories. You may do it in paragraph form, or you can take an entire chapter to dive deeply into a sublevel character who may interact with the main characters, or maybe they give background. With my latest book, I created several side characters and gave them really interesting features, facts, folly, and fun, just to be able to stretch the book another 30-40 pages really, to give the reader a break from the same old story they were reading, and keep their mind thinking about the overall tale, not just the details about the two or three main characters. I fill my books with historical facts, fun facts, lies, and discoveries, I don't want it to be boring or mundane.
Phase 4 is the part where you sit back and clean it up. You go through it for comma issues, misspellings, word choices, and overuse of words. Let me tell you, you may be inside Phase 4 for a good while!! You clean it, pick at it, tweak it, and then you mull over it a few times to be sure you got it all. You never get it all. You have someone else read it a few times so they can find your mistakes. You correct your mistakes. Then you send it off and you know you screwed up and you can't wait until it comes back to you so you can fix what you know you missed.
Phase 5 is the last phase. You've sent the book off. The publisher has formatted it, and has sent it back to you. You've gone through it with a fine toothcomb. You make the final changes. You list all the errors, or they may let you go into the original manuscript yourself to correct them, and send it back. Once it's done, and you are really sure it's done, you send it back again....and YOU WAIT. You wait on the cover art, and you kick yourself for all the times you made people read the galleys before they were complete, and before you had gone through them 188 times to be sure you hadn't used the same words a gagillion times; like I did. You panic because you think you misspelled Chapter. You panic because you can't remember if you put quotation marks on the inside or the outside of the punctuation mark. You panic because you just wrote a book and everyone is going to know you wrote it...and you ask yourself if that's really what you wanted to say. Then you decide to write a sequel to be sure you got all of the stories told.
That is the writing process folks. I'm in Phase 5. I'm waiting for the interior proof to be done again. Whew....and then when it is done, I can say it's a book, it's done, it's going to be great - - and I can't wait to start the sequel.
Photo Credit: Praxis.com
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