How I Write
Now that I’ve completed posting my impromptu novel, which is really just a collection of fanfictions for legal reasons, I figured I’d go over my system for writing novels regularly. The entirety of A Place to Belong was little more than a writing exercise that blew up, but still followed my usual system for writing. The funny thing is, the Displaced Novels are actually a departure from my typical writing style, though not a far one.
If this looks familiar to anyone, you probably went to elementary school in the nineties, but the reason it was taught for so long is because it works. The stages of writing anything is built entirely on preparation.
Outline
The first thing I do is I write an overall outline of what I want to create. This usually includes several aspects: an overall story arc (beginning and end being most important), important characters with the understanding that more may be added later or some removed or combined, and finally any scenes that popped into my head that I thought were cool and deserved a place in the book.
Lots of times these ideas are disjointed and messy. Looking back at my old notebooks that I had originally used as a means of organizing these thoughts, there were scene snibbits, printed pictures stapled in the pages, and research that lined the columns. Nowadays, I use digital documents, but even though the mess is no longer in my chicken scratch, it’s still a mess. That’s what brings us to the organization stage.
Chapter Organization
I go through my overall arc and write out events and ideas that fit in each chapter. I also accept that this document will change over time, but it has become one of the most important documents in the entire process, and is usually in Excel or Sheets, and looks a little something like this:
Chapter # | # of pages | # of words | Description of chapter and useable ideas
At the bottom, I have the entirety of the pages and words totalled so I can keep track, as a written work is only ever considered a novel when it reaches 50,000 words. It also helps to keep a running record of this, because if I notice a chapter getting too long, I can split it, add a row below the chapter that I’m working on, and redistribute the values where they need to go. I was inspired to use this system when I started using NaNoWriMo, something I no longer do, at least not through their website, but my spreadsheet allows me to track my progress just as well. This document follows me from beginning to end, and even gets updates after editing to ensure that I know fully how many pages and words I’ve written for each book. But this is just data tracking, what about the book itself?
Individual Documents
When I was in high school, an English teacher at my high school who’d taught both my sisters retired and became a priest at the church I grew up in. I actually enjoyed some of his sermons, despite my disconnection to anything religious at the time. He did a sermon on C.S. Lewis and his Chronicles of Narnia, which I don’t remember almost 20 years later, but I do remember enjoying listening to it.
You would think that I’d have learned something of great value from him to be bringing this up in this section, and are wondering what incredible wisdom he shared with me. Well… he didn’t share it with me in the way you may think. One day, a family friend who knew him was describing the book he was writing on Les Mis and the importance of the priest at the beginning of the story. Apparently, the teacher turned priest opened the word document, and our family friend watched in horror as Microsoft Word chugged along, nearly crashing as it tried to open all 600+ pages of the working manuscript. It took fifteen minutes to open.
Sure this was in the early 2000s, but the message was loud and clear: Do NOT make your manuscript one document, or at least don’t make it the ONLY document. We’ll get to that one in a second, but every single chapter I write is its own separate document. There are a multitudes of reasons as to why this is good advice, and not the least of which is it takes far less time to open a 10kb file than it is to open a 347kb file (or in the priest’s case, over a thousand kb file).
Beyond that, having each chapter as its own entity allows me to have the chapters open next to each other for reference without having to open another copy of that large file and scrolling to find what I need. And with that document describing what can be found in each chapter, I can easily reference it to find the chapter I need.
Full Manuscript
Though sometimes that system falls short, and information can get lost in the sauce. So when I complete a chapter, I do have a single document where I copy and paste the completed chapter. This gives me three more benefits that keeping them all separated doesn’t. Primarily, with the Displaced novels, I share the completed document with my players, so they always have access to the living document to give me feedback. They can leave notes on their characterization, any errors in grammar, spelling, or continuity they find, or sometimes just jokes and comments.
Having everything in one document also allows me to Control F my way to answers I’m struggling to find. Quite often I use these for character descriptions that I wrote a long time ago in different books so I can go back, find what I wrote about them then, and update it in the most recent book to ensure continuity in their appearance, while also allowing them to grow and change over time.
Finally, it makes final edits a lot easier. I can edit the document as a whole once it's complete and upload it to my printing service from one final location, knowing with confidence that things are in the correct order and nothing has been omitted by accident.
Editing and Publication
I put these two together because they’re really the icing on the cake. I think it was Ernst Hemingway who said write drunk edit sober, and while I tend not to drink while I write, the idea still holds firm that I don’t spend a lot of time editing and revising while I’m actually in the process of writing. The most important thing to accomplish at that point is to get the ideas onto the paper. Once they’re there, move on and get the rest of the ideas down. Keep doing that, and by the end you wind up with a whole book.
Then comes the hard part, the actual editing. For me, it's as simple as sitting down and reading what I wrote. While I read, my mind starts to pick out the mistakes and I fix them as I go. Sometimes it even helps to read what I wrote aloud. As I hear the words in the open rather than just in my head, any clumsy lines or mismanaged sentences start to pop out at me and make it easier to fix. This is also where revisions happen. Something sounded good or right when I was writing this originally, but perhaps I got onto a kick with a certain phrase or word and found myself repeating it a lot. I can go in and edit it into something else or something clearer as I read. It also gives me the opportunity to expand on anything I’ve already written that now feels to be lacking.
Then finally comes the publication. Something I don’t do often, but I take a great deal of pride in as I’m manually entering the book into the printing software. I have to make sure that each page is in its proper place, and each chapter is present and accounted for. This can be stressful work, so it tends not to be something I rush. Usually I take a few days, get everything in place, and look it over a few times, even streaming my screen to my friends to see if they can catch any errors before I pull the trigger… and then there ya go. The whole process in a nutshell.
The hardest part of writing is finding the time to do it. Though, as I sit here at my desk, I realize that I’ve probably written at least fifty pages today just working on blogs and reflections. If I were able to do that with a book (which I physically can, it's just time management), I could have a book done in a week. Now, I’m powered by AuDHD and hyperfixation, but even without that I’m confident anyone reading this can write their own book using a similar or adapted method of what I showed you above. Good luck out there and get writing!
