I have to admit it: I’m one of those writers who doesn’t really do much of anything until I absolutely fall in love with an idea—anything from a character to a scene to a setting. My ideas come from dreams, friends, books, movies, TV, etc. But until an idea really grabs me, I can’t sustain my interest enough to spend three or four months on drafting.
But man, when that idea strikes, it’s hard to make myself do the normal day-to-day, keeping-the-house-clean, being-a-mom stuff. All I want to do is write, and yet no matter how fast I write (my record is 5000 words in a day), it’s not fast enough. The rest of the book stretches out in front of me, scenes and lines and snippets that threaten to slip away before I can get there. So I race on.
An idea struck three weeks ago. So far, I’ve gotten down almost 23,000 words. (Woot! Check out my progress bar in the sidebar.) I’m excited to be drafting again (first time since April), and if I finish the draft by October 21, I’ll have drafted three books in a year. That’s pretty cool.
It’s interesting how different each book is, you know? Not just plot-wise or character-wise (although these three books have the same hero/heroine), but process-wise.
This time around, I’ve accepted that what I like to get in there are people, action, dialogue and plot twists. Cool. On my last MS, I tried to get everything in there on the first draft—sensory details, settings, character descriptions, etc. etc. This time, I’m embracing my favorite parts—I mean, I’ll put in the other stuff as needed, but if a scene is all dialogue/action, and it takes place in a vacuum, I’m not going to cry about it in this draft.
For me, that’s stuff I can add later, in each layer of editing. In fact, I’m taking this week off drafting to go back to the first MS I wrote during this year to add in more of those descriptions and sensory information, since the second half of the book is rather bereft of those (silly me, thinking all the character and setting descriptions were established in the first half, and we wouldn’t need anymore after that!).
How about you? What inspires you? Do you try to get everything in one draft—and if not, what do you leave out to add in later?
This week is probably going to be a bit of a catch-all week as I try to get things done between editing bouts and housecleaning—and, of course, working on the PDF from our website series. But next week, we’ll start another new and awesome series. I think 😉 .
Photo credits: matches—Kicki; inspire—Mark Brannan
