KNOWING HOW YOU WRITE
As someone who has been writing for more than half my life, I think it's a good idea for any writer to know how they work, to know what their way of doing things is. I've always been someone who mostly doesn't plan. I have a minimal plan, always have, otherwise I get lost along the way, but I rarely follow it to the letter. I allow for a lot of discovery along the way and to be honest, I don't think I'd have written half the books I have if I tried to plot and outline them the way other writers do. No shade, you gotta do what works for you, and that's completely valid.
But if you're new to writing, or you're trying to find a new way of working, I think it's important to have some idea of how you write. I started writing when I was 19, though I had written 'books' before then, they weren't very good and they haven't ever been looked at since. I knew that I had this idea brewing in the back of my mind for the past five or so years and I was desperate to get it onto the page. And I did, ten days later, I had a novel.
The point there is not to try and toot my own horn, but to lay the groundwork for what I'm about to say: I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea how I personally worked, and it showed. It showed when it came time to revise and edit and eventually publish that novel. I thought that I would always write books in days, but nope. My second book took me about three years to get out because I'd not put together any kind of plan. I didn't know how I worked, I didn't think about all the steps I should take, I just put pen to paper and got writing thinking that it would all sort itself out.
Spoiler, it did not. I wrote myself into a corner because I didn't have a chapter plan. I was just taking one character and having them go through the whole thing discovering the information. Some of it was vaguely in the back of my mind, but because it took me three years, and I didn't write half of it down, I forgot a whole lot of it. Because of that, I struggled to even finish, let alone revise and edit!
One of the big things I learnt from that was you have to know how you personally write. Whether that means trying all the different outlining methods you can find, or trying to pants, or even just doing a mix of the two like I do, it's so important that you work that out. While yes, it can change from project to project. Like for me it's been mostly the same, but I do outline extensively when I revise, the core components will guide you along your path and allow you to find a way to both get the book written, but also set yourself up for success when it comes to future projects.
I started writing before the internet was as big as it is now, before things like google (yes I'm old) and before social media, so there weren't as many resources around for me to try and learn, but there are now and that's very much a good thing. It means you can watch things like Authortube, and you can find blogs like mine, and you can work out what works for you, because it's the biggest hurdle, to me at least, to finishing your book.
I did, eventually, fix the issue with that second book. I worked out what needed to be done, and then when it came to writing the next one, I did my minimal outline because I had learned from my mistakes. Of course that book took me about the same amount of time - years - because I was still struggling to work out how to plan my time, but that's a story for another day.
Take the time to find out how you write, to find out what works best for you, you will thank yourself later! And good luck!
Any questions? Lemme know in the comments!
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