My Writing Process

MY WRITING PROCESS

 

Let’s Talk About It!

 

Writing a book can be a daunting task. You have an idea in your head but no idea how to make it come to life. Where do you even start?

 

The first thing to know if that everyone’s writing journey is different. I can only write about my own experience but know that there is no right or wrong answers, and you should find what works best for you. People say anyone can write a book, but can they really? Writing a book takes a lot of your time, energy, and discipline. Very few people finish the manuscripts they start, and even fewer publish them. This is just to say, if you know you want to write a book, don’t be discouraged. You can do anything you set your mind to.

 

Let’s start with some of the basics!

There are many different forms of writing: fiction (made it), non-fiction (real), poetry, playwriting (for plays or movies), biographies, etc. We’ll be working with fiction.

 

And, under fiction, there are many genres: romance, horror, thriller, fantasy, mystery, etc. Here’s a link with genre descriptions and subgenres to help.

 

 

Now, in order to feel comfortable in the world of writers, we’ll need to go over some terminology. It’ll help us not feel confused or lost. Here’s a list of common terms and acronyms to look over:

 

• Protagonist- main character (i.e. Harry Potter)
• Antagonist- main character’s enemy (i.e. Voldemort)
• Trope- a repetitive theme or plot twist used by authors (i.e. fake dating)
• FMC- female main character
• MMC- male main character
• WIP- work in progress (i.e. what you’re currently writing)
• WC- word count
• Planner- a writer who plans the plot of the story before writing it
• Pantser- a writer who doesn’t plan and writes the story as they go, not knowing where it’ll end up
• World-building- when a writer is giving information to the reader so they know what kind of world the story is taking place in.
• Setting- the time and place a story is in
• Round character- a character that is multifaceted, complex, and change throughout the story (Draco)
• Flat character- does not change throughout the course of a work (Pavarti)
• Info-dumping- when the writer dumps too much information at once and it’s overwhelming to the reader
• Hook- a line intended to get the reader’s attention
• HEA- Happily ever after
• TBR- To be read
• DNF- did not finish
• YA- young adult
• NA- new adult
• CR- currently reading
• TW- trigger warning
• GR- Goodreads
• POV

Also, just for the fun of it, here are some of the common tropes found in fiction:

• Friends to lovers
• Enemies to lovers
• Fake dating
• Marriage of convenience
• Only one bed
• Love triangle
• Second chance
• Amnesia
• Forced proximity
• Best friend’s brother/Brother’s best friend
• Rags to riches
• Forbidden love

 

PART 1: Brainstorming.

 

Let’s organize all the thoughts and ideas you have about your perspective book! The first part of writing a book has very little to do with writing, to be honest. At least for me. I do a lot of daydreaming before I start writing. I have ideas that play out like movie scenes in my head, little bits and pieces of a puzzle that’s all splayed out. So, like any puzzle, the first step is to separate the pieces.

 

As a certified ‘planner,’ I will detail my own process. I like this because it allows me to put ‘Easter eggs’ and foreshadowing in my story. Also, I feel like a plot hole as a pantser is more difficult to fix, but that’s a personal opinion. A ‘pantser’ will not find it useful to plan ahead as I did, so keep that in mind. Personally, I recommend a document like Word, on a computer, that’s easy to edit, instead of paper. It makes it easier to go back and add to, or delete, as you go along. I will give Harry Potter examples as I go, since I think a lot of us have either read the books, seen the movies, or both (spoiler alert, I guess? If you haven’t).

 

Write down:

• The general idea of the story
  • I.e. young orphan finds out he’s a wizard and has to defeat the dark wizard who killed his parents.
• What kind of characters will you have? Form their personality so it’s easier to find what they’d say/do along the plot of the story.
  • I.e. Hermione is very book smart, Draco is self-important, Snape is accusing.
• Your character’s physical qualities. Every detail from their hair color, to the scars on their ankle, their limp, stutter, where they’re from, what they studied, what they do for a living, their past, etc.
  • I.e. Hermione’s dad is a dentist. I’m sure the author mentioned it earlier in the series, but it came up again in book six.
• Dates, cities, countries, addresses, any other small detail.
  • I.e. Diagon Alley, Godric’s Hollow, Number 4 Privet Drive, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney.

 

PART 2: Outlining.

 

Now we have a general idea of what the story will be about, and the characters in it. If this changes down the line, it’s completely okay! The nice thing about being the writer in charge is that you can do whatever you want. What next? Well, let’s learn about the parts of a story.

 

Plot diagram:

• The beginning: Presenting the setting of the story and conflict
  • I.e. Harry is left on the steps of Number 4 Privet Drive, he grows up bullied, until a letter arrives for him. Uncle Vernon takes steps to keep him from reading it.
• The middle: The problem/conflict introduced at the end of the first part keeps progressing until it reaches the climax. This will be the majority of the book.
  • Hagrid finds Harry and introduces him to the world of witchcraft and wizardry. Harry goes to Hogwarts and encounters obstacles in the form of Draco, Snape, and Quirrell. He finds out about the stone and goes to protect it.
• The end: This is where the problem is solved and the HEA is shown.
  • Harry manages to defeat Quirrell, wakes up in the hospital, the stone is secure, his friends are safe, and Gryffindor wins the House Cup. He goes back to the Dursley’s for the summer, but knows he’s coming back home soon.
• There are three types of conflicts, you can have one, or three, or any combination in your story:
  • Person vs person: protagonist and antagonist
  • Person vs self: the protagonist fighting something inside themselves
  • Person vs nature/environment: protagonist has to survive an event of mother nature.

 

There are a LOT of people explaining how they break this down even further, but I like to keep things simple, so I just use this format. I typically try to refrain from info-dumping in the first part. Give the readers just enough information, and leave little bits and pieces of information as you write the story. You could even keep a checklist of what the reader already knows and what they don’t.

 

Here, you’ll write out the plot you imagine for your book. This will allow you to focus on each scene part by part so you’re not trying to focus on 20 things at once. To come up with things in the middle of the book that further the conflict, think about what kinds of obstacles your characters will have to face to make the change from who they were in the beginning, and who they will be at the end of the book. What obstacles will make that big an impact?

 

I.e. for plot:

• Harry left with Dursleys
• Dudley’s birthday, go to zoom, snake escapes, Vernon angry
• Harry gets letter, Vernon takes it away, other letters come in
• Vernon goes crazy, takes them to hotel, sleep in house in small island, Hagrid breaks down door
• Harry goes with Hagrid to bank and buy supplies. Meet Quirrell. Etc.

 

 

 

STEP 3: Write first draft

 

The day is finally here! You’re staring at a blank page, metaphorical pen in hand, ready to pour your story onto the page. And…. Just do it. I promise, nobody is looking over your shoulder, judging you, or cringing at what’s on the page. Any writer, most writers, hate their first draft. Burn it. But it’s the first step to making that book. This will not be what’s published. Nobody will read this version, so just write what you want.

Here are some do’s and don’ts for your first page/chapter:

• DO include a hook
• DO include a problem/conflict
• DO include the MC’s personality
• DON’T include clichés like waking up, ‘good morning, how did you sleep, well, thank you, and you’ kind of talk.
• DON’T include too much information/characters, it can be overwhelming to the readers.

 

Be patient with yourself. This is a long process but keep working on it. You can do it! Be part of the top, small percentage of people that finish their manuscripts. Your characters literally depend on you. Once this part is done, you’re ready for the publishing journey.

 

MY PUBLISHING JOURNEY

 

 

Steps four and five of my writing process were done through my publishing company. Let’s talk first about what the steps are, and then about the publishing process.

 

STEP 4: Content Editing

 

What even is content editing? It’s revising and improving he overall organization, flow, and cohesiveness of a draft. This means the content editor will check the sentence structure to ensure it flows well, re-organize paragraphs, let you know what works well for the plot and what doesn’t. Furthermore, the content editor will let you know about plot holes, errors in the manuscript (like a character having blue eyes in one chapter, and green in the next), or if anything is not clear. In short, it makes the manuscript readable.

 

It is such an important part of the process because this is something that comes with difficulty to the writer. Since we wrote it ourselves, our eyes often skip the parts that don’t make sense because we know what it’s supposed to say. We already have the story in our heads and can’t see the missing pieces.

 

I highly recommend hiring a content editor to help with this part of the process. This is not something a computer can do, it takes a human eye to catch any errors in the plot, or any awkwardness. You’ll want to make sure it’s not just anyone. Ask them what they’ve edited before, and who they’ve worked with so you can have feedback from previous writers. You may also want to choose someone who will show you their work by editing the first few pages or first chapter for free to make sure you’re a good match. Lastly, if you’re looking for a content editor yourself, you’ll want to look up a contract for content editors. There’s a lot to cover before you hand over your manuscript to them to make sure you get your money’s worth in a timely manner and still protect your book.

 

 

STEP 5: Line Editing

 

Line editing is the most arduous process, in my humble opinion. You can reply on humans, like I did for the first two books, but I think a computer program would actually work better. A computer will catch all of the small errors humans can’t, because to be human is to err. And that’s okay, just not for our books. Be better than me. Take your time. There are line editing softwares that you can buy and input your book one chapter at a time, I’ve heard these are very good.

 

As a side note, there are many things that have a connotation and are not grammatically correct, those are okay to keep. Don’t let your book lose personality because you think it has to be grammatically perfect. For example, «where did she go?!» instead of, «where did she go?» I shouted. I will never judge a book for a «?!» Do what you think is best for your book’s narrative.

 

 

Publishing Routes:

There are three different ways to get published. Duly note: You still have to do your own marketing in any of the three ways.

 

1. Traditional Publishing
   1. Pros: you don’t have to pay any cost upright, you have professionals work on your manuscript to make it the best it can be and the excitement of being chosen by a publishing house.
   2. Cons: You keep a small percentage of the royalties of your own book, and they can change just about anything in the book. Not that they necessarily will, but they have the power to transform it into something completely different.
2. Indie Publishing
   1. Pros: You get to keep 100% of the royalties after printing and seller fees. You can keep the original story as you see fit. You can make it cost efficient by taking on a lot of the work yourself. Faster to publish.
   2. Cons: You have do it yourself. Find a way to do line editing in a software, pay a content editor, pay a cover designer if you so choose, formatting, availability on Kindle, get your own ISBN, etc.
3. Hybrid Publishing:
   1. Pros: Professionals do the editing, the cover, the ISBN, the formatting, the kindle availability, etc. You just have to approve all the changes, and you get to keep creative rights.
   2. Cons: It’s not at all cost effective. For full transparency, I had to come up with $4k to publish my first book. It was not lose change, and hard to come up with at the time. However, I knew that I wanted to be a published author more than anything else, it’d been my dream since I was 11, and I did not want my first book to not be great. They did also have humans do the line editing, so there were still some grammatical errors even after all that.

My opinion on my hybrid publishing journey:

 

I wish I had known then what I know now. I was very timid and didn’t want to demand too much, I was nervous about being a pain in the behind, even though I was the one paying for their service. At the time, it also made perfect sense to me that they got to keep 10% of the royalties. Compared to traditional publishing, it’s great. Thinking back on it now, though, why should they keep even 10% if I’m paying for a one-time service? They are no longer editing or working on my book, yet every sale still makes them a profit. They had zero investment, because I covered the cost of the content and line editing, cover design and everything else.

 

The first step once I had submitted my manuscript to my hybrid publishing company, was content editing. The feedback that I got from the content editor on the first book was helpful because I had written, and re-written the manuscript so many times, it was practically Frankenstein’s manuscript. Bits and pieces of all of them. I had written a lot of it as a 15-year-old and it desperately needed revisions. The second book, not so much. The feedback that I got on the second book was more vague, and the story line didn’t change at all.

 

It then went to line editing, where two people read over it and sent back the change they’d make. I had to go through one by one and approve all the changes. It was truly a humbling process. I hadn’t noticed how many times, in my quick typing, I had put down ‘wonder’ instead of ‘wander,’ or how I had a tendency to write ‘there’s’ instead of ‘there are.’ But again, there were some mistakes missed, and I think a computer could have done a better job than any human.

 

The cover design was my favorite. I sent the designer a blurb of my book, an idea of what I imagined on the cover, and he sent me back 10 options to choose from. On the second book, I asked him to merge two of the options, and I got what was the perfect cover for my sequel. This, I still don’t know how I’d replace if I went a different route.

 

They then took over and worked on formatting it, presented me with the final product and off it went to printing and publishing. I did also notice after these two had been published, that I could have added so much more. I could have had a map, or adornments on the chapter pages. They didn’t tell me what I could add, and I didn’t know to ask for it. They did their job, and met the minimum requirements, and didn’t offer anything else.

 

They do have packages that you can purchase for audiobooks, website, and marketing, but of course, those cost more and I could not afford them. Instead, I have managed to slowly get everything myself. I love seeing new authors on BookTok share their new books and they have so many questions that I also had before, so I felt this would help aspiring authors. I still have questions! It’s a learn-on-the-job process, and that’s okay.

 

There is no such thing as failure, and I definitely don’t regret my journey so far. It was a learning opportunity, and my future books will be so much better for it. Eleven-year-old me would be so proud.

 

Here are some tips to keep in mind:

 

• You’ll become a better writer the more in read
• You don’t have to write in chronological order
• You don’t have to write «I saw a red car pull up.» If you’re writing in first person POV, you can just write «a red car pulled up» and it’ll be implied that the MC saw it, or he/she wouldn’t have noticed. It helps the readers stay immersed in the story instead of getting pulled out by distancing them from it.
• It’s useful to have similar/steady chapter lengths.
• Too long chapters can be tedious for the reader.
• Use section breaks!
• Start new chapters on a new page.
• Start a new paragraph when someone else starts speaking.
• If you are financially able to, I recommend buying the Office 365 program that you pay for once and it stays in your computer forever, instead of the yearly subscription. I think I paid a little over $100, definitely less than $200 for it.
• If you do get Office 365, I used the OneNote program for all my notes. It allows me to use separate tabs and keep everything together.

 

How to help writer’s block:

 

Writer’s block can last a few hours, to a few years. It’s important to note that no longer how long it lasts, you’re still a writer a writer on your days off. Stress, adulting, and everyday circumstances affect our creativity deeply, don’t be too hard on yourself. You and your mental health come first every time. Here’s a couple things that have helped me when the creative juices have dried up.

 

• Read
• Exercise/ Walk (make sure you bring something to write along with you or take notes on your phone)
• Self-Care
• Meditation
• Simply take a break from writing, it’s okay!
• If you can, plan the space and time to work on your book.
• Write another book/short story to get your mind off your WIP. Sometimes taking a step back to look at the bigger picture helps.
• Write, even if you don’t like it. You can edit tomorrow.
• Look up the WC for your genre and try to stick to the average range so it’s acceptable, if you’re trying to go a more traditional route. You also don’t want the book to be too long. We all know Tolstoy, but few have taken on the challenge of reading Tolstoy.