I’ve just sent off my next 10,000 words to Elizabeth Diamond to critique. This means I am now a third of the way into the book. It doesn’t feel nearly as daunting as it did in the beginning. I’m well into episode 3 of 7.
I have bullet point notes that I made after each episode to jog my memory when I came to write it. I knew after the first episode that I would write this book. That was 18 years ago. I pick out a few bullet points that will get something important across and move the story along and I paste them into a blank page. Each bullet point becomes a scene in that chapter.
Scene by scene, I take myself back to a specific moment in time and write from there. So it is all in the present tense. For the reader it is happening right NOW. Then I go back over it and write it better. Then I go over it again and think about how it will be for the reader to experience. Then another memory pops up to be written and I add a scene before the one I’ve just written. Word by word, sentence by sentence, the book is filling out.
Cool insight into your writing process 🙂
Thanks Jack.