Writing, like everything, looks fairly simple on the surface. All you have to do is sit down, have a few ideas, and start typing, right?
So you start, get a little way in, and then the worries begin to manifest themselves.
You become aware of the complexity of building a story that needs to hang together. That knowledge looms over your shoulder like the literary equivalent of Jaws, complete with ominous music.
That’s when people start giving up. There’s a growing realisation that you need to understand your characters, their motivations, where the setting is, and the timelines. On top of that, you need to have some idea on how to structure, deliver, and pace the story. The more you think about it, the deeper you get pulled into decisions. All of that is tough!
And then there’s speculative fiction.
While every genre has its own quirks and difficulties, I do think speculative fiction adds a few extra layers to the process. You’re not only trying to craft a narrative that makes sense and engages the reader, you’re trying to do it in an environment that differs from the one everybody knows. That means you need to provide enough detail on the societies, geography, technology, flora and fauna, magic, and everything else needed to create a thrilling world that grabs people’s imagination. No wonder fantasy and science-fiction books tend to end up longer than those in other genres! (I tend to ‘write long’, so this is what I tell myself…)
Because the books are long, their creation process tends to be a bit more involved.
So, I thought it might help to go through the process I’ve settled on in the hope it helps spark ideas for anyone writing, or planning to write. Whether that provides new insights, or helps you decide what not to do, either is fine by me!
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I first started off writing in a vanilla text editor like Word on Windows or Pages on Mac. That approach worked well at first. I was just sitting down and capturing my thoughts in a linear fashion to form the story.
But I quickly found that it didn’t offer the flexibility I needed once the story started getting a little bigger. For example, there wasn’t any sort of visual overview of the story structure. All you see is page after page of text. This is a problem if you’re trying to reorganise scenes to improve the narrative flow. When doing this in a longer document, it becomes error prone as you cut pieces from one area and move it around to change the structure.
I needed a different way of approaching writing, and that started the complexification of my creation process!
Now I structure my approach into multiple phases. Although it looks like a clean, linear process when laid out this way, it’s actually fairly organic during the main creative parts. As I write, I move back and forward between different stages as I encounter challenges or find new opportunities. This is done collaboratively, which produces a better result and is more fun.
- Ideation: The process of creating a book starts with collecting the ideas that go into the story. This is a pretty nebulous process, to be honest, and it can last a long time. Things occur to me and I need to capture them in the moment, and in a way that’s useful later on.
- Plotting: The second stage is putting the gathered ideas into a sequence. It starts with building a framework that captures the major developments within the story, along with its ending. Then I flesh it out with all the quirky thoughts I had. This leads to subplots and the first level of story enrichment.
- Writing: The next stage is writing. This is where you bring the details to life and add another layer of enrichment. That’s pretty self evident, but what’s not so obvious is it’s not the longest part of the process.
- Editing: The fourth stage is editing. Not the most enjoyable part. Also, cruelly, the longest part.
- Feedback: The fifth stage is sending the story to my beta readers to see what blank spots I’ve missed because I was too close to the plot, and integrating their feedback.
- Proofreading: The penultimate stage is doing read throughs, and trying to remove the last pesky typos. This is an almost impossible task. It seems to be some sort of unwritten rule that the day after you create a final formatted file, you’ll discover a typo proudly sitting in the middle of the page.
- Formatting: The final stage is the formatting of the story for different publishing methods.
As you can imagine, there’s a lot of detail within each of those steps, so I plan to go through them over the next few posts. Hopefully, this helps somebody out there!
