My process: Technical details

I have many thoughts about my writing process. I’ve been refining it through the writing of three novels. I’m just starting my fourth novel, and I feel the need to refine my process a little more. I believe that writing and posting about my process will make it easier for me to find the parts that need more refinement, beyond the areas that I’m already concentrating on.

I don’t know if this will be helpful to anyone else. This is *my* process. I’m not arrogant enough to believe that learning about my process will help anyone else. But I also know that I’m interested in other people’s process, I like hearing about how other people do the same thing that I do, namely, this writing gig. So I hope to provide at least a little entertainment, if nothing else.

This part is really all about the technical details of how I write a novel, not the craft.

When I first started, I was petrified about writing a novel, certain I couldn’t do it. So I broke it down into manageable pieces. I couldn’t write a novel. I couldn’t even write a chapter. But I could write a story, and scenes of a story. So I named my chapter files things like “File01”. I didn’t put in chapter numbers until really close to the end. This way, I tricked myself into writing novel chapters. Stupid? Maybe. But it did the trick.

I worked in individual files for most of the writing of my first novel. I didn’t join the files together into a book until the very end, say, maybe a couple of days before I printed out a draft for my critiquers. Then, after I received comments, I continued working in the individual chapter files, not joining them together again until the very end.

I also don’t write in manuscript format. I find it easier to move words around on a page if the page doesn’t look like the final product. Even after I’m finished, sometimes, when doing revisions, I’ll copy out a section or a chapter into a separate file, and take it out of manuscript format to work on it.

I worked similarly to this for the second novel, except that now I could name the files “Chapter_00” (for the prolog) “Chapter_01”, etc. I still didn’t actually put in chapter numbers into the text until I joined the files together, again, very late in the process.

I always end up with notes on each chapter as I write it. I name those files similarly (“Chap_01_temp”) and keep them in the same directory until I’ve finished with all those notes (say, maybe after I do a rewrite.) Then I move them to another directory, and if necessary, start a second batch of temp files associated with the chapters as I continue rewrites.

I cannot write a straight narrative to save my soul. Really. All my novels are told with the chapters alternating between POV or story lines or both. I write the novel from start to finish though. I do not write one story line, then the next. At some point during the revision process I will follow a story line or a POV all the way through.

For the third novel, I worked a little differently. I wrote the separate chapters in separate files. However, as soon as I finished a chapter, instead of driving forward immediately to the next chapter, I spent 2-3 days rewriting that chapter. This wasn’t a big change in my process, but it made a huge difference in how polished the prose was. Everyone who has read a draft of this latest novel says that at the sentence level it’s much better, much cleaner. So it was obviously a good thing to do.

With this last novel, as soon as I finished polishing a chapter, I added it to the master file. When I made changes, I made changes to the master file, not the individual chapter files, which meant they rapidly went out of date. Again, this was a refinement in my original process. Before, I would keep a list of things that I needed to change as I was writing, stuff that I would go back and fix later – things that needed foreshadowing, etc. This time, I did those changes on the fly, while I was writing. Because all the chapters were in one file, I didn’t have to search for where to put the information, which chapter included the scene I wanted – I could just open the one file. It meant I wasn’t always making forward progress, but since I had a running word count on the big file, I could use that to help me feel good about the work I’d done that day.

These are all small things, I know. But they helped me. I plan on doing the same things with this current novel. Individual chapter files for the chapters, joining them together into a single file as I finish them, doing rewrites and polishing on the fly. It means I’m a little slower in terms of finishing a first draft, but not significantly so. (Finished the first draft of the first novel in 6 months, 8 months for the second, and about that for the third.)

Having everything in a single file makes backups easy as well. I have a yahoo email account that I use for backups. At the end of every writing session, I email the one file to myself. On weekends I zip all the files up together and email them to myself.

Keeping an email account for backups means off-site storage. Should there ever be a fire, and everything in my house destroyed, I’ll still have my work. As I’ve never given this email address to anyone, I rarely receive spam on it. As it’s a Yahoo account, I get very little spam anyway. On the weekends when I send the whole zip file, I delete all the old copies of the novel.

I try to write between 500-1000 words per day, taking Fridays *off* (and I’m not going to feel guilty about doing that this time,) and writing more words on the weekends. Part of the process for me is announcing my word count. I may set up a separate LJ just for that for this novel. It’s a way of cheering myself on.

I guess this is the end of the technical details section. Next up – more technical details – the research process.