Writing Process

I’ve talked a lot about stories here through Stories Across Borders - it’s kind of what I do. I’ve deconstructed the writings of others in many different mediums and, typically, every forth episode I’d examine writing of my own - even if I didn’t like it. However, I have never really gone into any detail about what my actual process is. How do my stories come to be?

This isn’t really a topic that would work for SAB, but I want to share it anyway in case it proves useful to any other writers out there. So, without any further preamble, let’s talk about how I write my stories.

Conceptualisation

It sounds obvious to say it, but a story starts from an idea. I’d say that this one is pretty universal. A fleeting thought, a single character concept, a glimpse of a world to explore or a message you want to send to your audience. These early flashes of inspiration eventually become the concept for and premise of your story. It almost feels disingenuous to really label this as a step in the process since it’s the one step every person on Earth has experienced. The only thing that makes a writer different is that we choose to act on it and share it with the world.

Sometimes, the starting idea is actually incredibly vague. Before I had any sort of message or moral crystallising, Domino actually started from a prompt. I was entering a contest and needed to write a story that fit the prompts “drama” and “survival.” From there, I thought about messages I wanted to convey in my writing, stories that I thought people would resonate with and find interesting. Sprinkle in some of my personal frustrations with the world and boom, I had the idea for following a couple of kids in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. I’ve already talked about it on SAB, but for a fairly short story Domino is actually pretty layered with messages I wanted to send. It’s primarily about the consequences of people playing with the lives of others for political reasons. It’s also a story about fear, guilt and the strength of the friendships we make in our darkest hours.

Comparatively, Our Importance and Of Ruination came from much clearer ideas. For Our Importance, I wanted to recontextualise the climate change debate. We tend to think of such a large scale thing as being about the Earth. But, in reality, we aren’t destroying the Earth, we're just rendering it inhospitable for most current forms of life - us included. I wanted to reframe that and remind people that the Earth - and likely life - will persist long after we are gone. We’re only hurting ourselves. That’s why the story is at its heart a morose horror story. It’s essentially climate change as self-harm and our own insignificance in the face of that destruction.

Of Ruination as a poem came from some rumination on the human mind - how it changes and weakens over time. The idea of becoming someone other than me or not being in control of my own body freaks me out. I wrote Of Ruination less to send a message and more to process something myself. Honestly, I think a lot of stories are just as much about processing our own thoughts as they are about sharing them with others. Part communication and part self-discovery.

Worldbuilding

This step is something I find a lot of fun in. I love to come up with new worlds and figure out how they function and what’s going on in them. Sometimes, that means we get a world that is essentially ours - like in Domino or Raising the Stakes - and others it means figuring out something fantastical with magic systems and different natural laws - like The Orchard.

That being said, this step doesn’t always come before the next step I’ll discuss, character building. I usually prefer to do worldbuilding first since characters, like people, are greatly influenced and contextualised by the world that they live in. Some people prefer to build their characters first though and then create their worlds according to the needs of their characters. I’ve known people who create characters and then don’t use them for years until a story that fits them pops into their heads. I don’t think either method is inherently superior to the other. 

As much as I love it, sometimes worldbuilding isn’t even necessary at all. Some stories literally take place in our own world and therefore require very minimal work in this department. Rather, you have to make sure you know the setting you’re writing about well enough. Or, like with Heavy Void or Smiling Into the Dark, the world beyond a very enclosed and isolated setting is so irrelevant to the story that it isn’t really necessary to do much worldbuilding. 

Worldbuilding itself is a complicated affair deserving of its own article at a later stage. A lot can go into developing a world and the more divorced it is from our actual reality the more work that needs to go into creating it. For myself, I prefer to work at a more macro scale when I worldbuild. That is, I focus on large scale things like geography, political climate, actual climate and magic systems and technology where applicable. Some writers like to go all in on things like city maps and precise locations of residences and businesses in a city or town but I don’t think that is generally necessary. Your city can have what it needs when and where it needs it for your story so long as you’re not moving things around.

I didn’t need to chart an actual route through a map that Hector and Eli were taking in Domino, I just needed to know how far away they were from ground zero, from their destination and if they were moving in roughly the correct direction. In actuality though, a lot of the worldbuilding in that book is similarly vague. It’s certainly there, the political situation of Ionia informs everything that happens in the story. That’s how a world works, we are always impacted by our environment. But it wasn’t necessary to go into extreme detail about it all for that story. Hector wasn’t concerned with the political ramifications of the attack, he was worried about surviving it. A lot of the time, there is going to be a lot more worldbuilding that is implicit and unsaid in a story than there is outright explained. Do the work, but be prepared for a lot of it to be hidden in the background. You don’t want to accidentally write an encyclopaedia instead of a story.

Character Building

This is what I typically work on next once I have my world more or less built. It’s also a very important step for me since I believe that characters are the most important part of a story. It doesn’t matter how good your plot or your world are if nobody cares about the characters affected by them.

For most of my stories, I write out short character profiles for the significant players in the story. This usually takes the form of a dot pointed list with each dot point being a sentence to a paragraph long. I note down things like physical appearances, personality traits, age, history, a character’s role in the story and how I expect them to change and grow over the course of the narrative. 

This doesn’t have to be binding if your ideas for a character evolve as you work, but I do think it’s a good idea to have a starting point like this going into a story. It means that you always have something you can come back to and reference to make sure that your characterisation is consistent. I’d suggest that even if your character does change in ways you didn’t originally plan for as you write, you should come back and edit their profiles to reflect that so you still have a reference point to come back to.

Of course, the amount of detail you actually need to include in profiles will change depending on what you expect you might need in the story too. I think that the length of a story plays a big part in how much information you write down. I wrote a lot more character information for Domino than I did for Raising the Stakes even though the latter has more characters. 

I definitely recommend writing out character information like this, but there’s no need to fill it out with a bunch of superfluous information that will almost certainly not come up in the story in advance. I skipped this step entirely for Our Importance because that story has only a single character who is quite intentionally an empty husk with little personality. After all, the story isn’t really about him. If something does come up that wasn’t originally planned, that’s when you add it retroactively to your character notes.

Outlining

There are people out there who write entire series flying by the seat of their pants. I am not one of those people. If pantsing is the method that works for you, that’s great. But I think for most people it’s much better to have a clear idea of what your story is and where it is going in advance. Especially if you don’t want to have to edit out plot holes a few million times. Granted, you’ll likely have to edit out plot holes either way, but having a clear outline can help limit that sort of thing.

Outlining is a step with multiple stages for me, although the amount of steps is dependent on how many chapters the story gets broken into (if any). The first part is expanding upon the concept and world until I have a more detailed idea of what the story will be, a synopsis more than a premise. For Domino, the premise I ended up with was described above. For the synopsis, I wrote a more general overview of what the characters were going to experience. They would meet each other, gather supplies, start seeking out a hospital, encounter the Romans and so and so forth. For The Orchard, I had less to figure out here, it was more about considering what the average day in Karsten’s life would be up to the confrontation near the end of the story.

Once I have that synopsis done, I expand it out further until I have a more detailed overview of the story as a whole. At this point, this isn’t just a checklist of events, it also talks about how this affects the characters and the plot going forward and how it changes dynamics between characters. It’s basically the whole story but without the extra details and in short form. For short stories with no chapters like The Orchard, this is the last step in outlining. For chaptered stories like Domino or my current long form project, the process continues.

With longer stories, I then repeat this process again for each individual chapter. I think that chapters should be constructed much like miniature stories in their own right with a clear, beginning and end - or at least that’s how I prefer to write. So they get the same treatment as a full story. Working off of my overview, I then create a synopsis for each chapter and expand that out until that chapter has a full overview. Eventually, I end up with a more detailed summation of the story as a whole broken down by chapters.

I have yet to plan a sequential series of novels. The series I’m working on right now is all related, but the follow-ups are spin-offs not sequels. However, I would apply a similar logic to writing a series as I do to chapters. I would start with the overview of the whole series, then for each book. Then, I would do each chapter in the book I was working on the same as described above. Once that was done, I’d repeat the process for the next book until the entire series was outlined in reasonable detail. 

Again, not everyone is going to be comfortable having such a detailed overview to work from. I do think that much like with character profiles though, it is important to note that your overview doesn’t have to be static. If something doesn’t end up working right in your story or things end up playing out differently than you originally planned, you can edit your outline to reflect that and maintain that consistency to work from. If that’s not your method, that’s fine, but I’d recommend giving this a try because once I developed this workflow for myself I realised I couldn’t go back to what I was doing previously.

Writing the Story

Once I have my outline, it’s finally time to actually write the story. This is a two-part process as well. First, there is actually writing out a manuscript, then there’s editing. 

There isn’t actually much that I can say about the first part of the process though. Writing the story is pretty self-explanatory. I could sit here and tell you about schedules or whatnot, but realistically every author is going to have a different writing schedule to work with because we all have different responsibilities outside of our writing work. Many of us have whole other jobs or families to look after. For me personally, I try to get at least a little work towards my writing done each day but it often doesn’t work out that way. Which is okay. It doesn’t necessarily matter how fast your progress is so long as it’s progress.

Editing is something I can talk about a little bit more. From what I have seen, my editing method isn’t very common among other authors. A lot of others seem pretty content to rewrite things entirely. Comparatively, while I do keep a copy of the first version of a story just in case, my drafts are living documents. I prefer to alter what I can see in front of me until it works instead of starting from scratch every time. I think there are definitely advantages to starting from a clean slate for each set of revisions, but I would find that process really demotivating. I feel better watching the story grow into something better than I do erasing it and starting over and I think a good mindset is good for the quality of the story. 

I organise my chaptered stories in folders with a separate document for each chapter and then go through and edit document by document, repeating the process until I’m happy with the end result. In the case of Domino, I then hired an editor as well and repeated that all again with her assistance until I had the final product. It was only after that I created a document with all the chapters within together and started formatting for publishing.

I do much the same thing for my short stories too, just without separating them out into multiple documents. I like to think that I work with my stories much like working with clay on a pottery wheel, manipulating their shape as I move back and forth over them until I end up with a nice vase.

Once all that is done, I’m left with my finished product. Whether that’s a book to go up on Amazon or a short story that gets published directly here. While I do have my set process, the actual specifics of it are fairly flexible. I like having guidelines to work within, but I also like to be able to move freely within those guidelines. I think that’s why my methodology ended up being what it is. Hopefully, you found this to be either interesting or helpful.