Whatever Works by Kait Carson

Writing is hard. The longer I do it, the more I understand the Ernest Hemingway quote that describes it as sitting in front of a typewriter and bleeding. Ernest, if I may call him by his first name, is correct. Although he may have been speaking of the creative aspects of the craft, it’s the mechanical ones that have me flummoxed.

 

Authors often speak of their “process.” Some plot, some pants, some vomit out a first draft, some agonize over each word. For every process advocate, there’s an equal, and usually expensive, course. You can learn to write a book in sixty days, or write 10,000 words an hour (I can’t type gibberish that fast, but if you can, my hat is off), or write a book or six in a year. I’ve taken most of these courses, and yes, there is something to learn from each of them. The golden nugget of information that makes the task easier. Each course concludes in the same way: Your experience may vary. Do what works.

 

I’m saving you a lot of money here. You can thank me by subscribing to my newsletter.

 

The secret to writing is to do what works for you as an author. I began life as a pantser, and it was fun, but writing a coherent book took years. Then I plotted and that was great, too. But I got bored midway through and shelved the project. Then I wrote a vomit draft in four weeks and needed to go back to both fill in the blanks and edit extensively. There go another six months. Then I outlined the overall story, just the facts, ma’am, and bullet point plotted each chapter as I arrived. Then I took the systems I’d slaved over and decided one size does not fit all. There’s a thousand ways to tell a story, and an equal number of ways to get those words on paper.

 

As my writing confidence grew, so did my sense of how I worked best. I do not have a long attention span. It’s a fact, and I can give references. Covering the same ground multiple times spells failure in my world. I’ll get bored and move on. It’s happened before, my hard drive is full of half-finished books. I sometimes mine those nuggets looking for diamonds in the rough, so (eventually) I waste nothing. Always a good thing.

 

What did work for me? A hybrid system. When I sit down to write, I spend a week outlining. Not in painstaking detail, but I prepare an overall story outline, determine the approximate number of chapters, and prepare a few bullet points describing each chapter’s action. I use a program called Plottr to do this. Plottr interfaces with Scrivener, my chosen writing software. After that, it’s off to the races with chapter 1 which I write and edit before I move to chapter 2. The goal is not words on the page, it’s a semi-polished chapter that makes me (and hopefully future readers) want to turn the page.

 

I generally write and edit a chapter a day. There are questions, lots of them, and I use Scrivener’s inline annotation button to insert them. When I transfer the draft to Word, the annotations show up as comments so I can address each one as necessary. I also use the annotation function to keep track of clues, red herrings, and red herring resolutions. At the end of the first draft, I have a reasonable work product that I can further refine in a few days rather than weeks. Once I’m satisfied, off the book goes to my beta readers and then to my editor. It works for me.

 

Writers, what’s your process? Readers, do you like behind the scenes looks at process or do you wish we would simply get on with the next book?

 

Let’s catch up:

Newsletter: www.kaitcarson.com

Instagram: kaitcarson2

Twitter: @kaitcarson

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kait.carson.1

Facebook Author:  https://www.facebook.com/kaitcarsonauthor

Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/carson2248

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Kait-Carson/e/B008E76H0I

BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/kait-carson

Linked In: linkedin.com/in/kait-carson-14b24a78