Writing

[davepoth]

Anybody do it? Anyone published? Anyone still got that opus they wrote after being dumped by their first girlfriend at university stuffed in a shoebox in their wardrobe?

I'm intrigued by the idea and the process.

[davepoth]

It comes in fits and starts for me. On my current project I'm averaging about 100 words a day. Some weeks I'll write nothing. A few weeks ago I was on my way to a stag do on a train with my mates and was inspired for some reason. I spent the whole trip in the vestibule typing a chapter into my crappy phone as a series of text messages.

[davepoth]

Silver said:

As for writing a book, in all honesty, I don't think I have it in me. Over the years I've had a lot of ideas for books but I don't think I'd be able to stretch them into enough material for a book.

That was my big worry. I always tend to undershoot massively whenever I try to write anything (my BSc dissertation was roughly 30% padding; I ended up writing a whole other fairly unrelated essay in effect), but I'm just shy of 2/3 of the way through my first draft and I'm around 5% shy in terms of word count of where I thought I would be by now.

I've found it is a lot like restoring my old car in terms of a project. Sometimes I go down to the garage and I see the bare shell with dusty cardboard boxes piled high around it, and then I just shut the garage and go home again. Looking at it as a big lump, it's quite daunting.

On a good day I'll go down, and look at one of the many spots where something should be bolted to the car. I'll rummage in the boxes for that bit, take it home, fix it up and repaint it, and bolt it back to the car. It's only a small piece; some days it might just be a single bolt and washer.

But each time I do that, the boxes of parts get a bit emptier. One day I'll go down to that garage and there'll be nothing left to bolt on. Hopefully I'll have a working car by that point. Or a book.

[davepoth]

Ayahuasca said:

I have been halfway through a thriller for the last couple of years. Problem is whenever I sit down to write new stuff I end up reading what I have already written and re-writing it. I have written some scenes over and over again, they always end up better and more polished, but I find it hard to think 'enough already!' and move on.

Reading over various peoples' strategies, many people like to go with a planned structure, and then write the book out of order, leaving it to the end to put it all together again.

I didn't bother planning (some people do spreadsheets), but I had an idea in my head about how it was going to go. Every so often when I have been stuck with a particular bit, I've either skipped it, or had a go at one of the bits I had fleshed out a bit more in my head from later on in the book.

Quite often I find that having written some of that later sections, it leaves me with certain things that have to be dropped into the book a bit earlier; however, I have made a pact with myself to not go back and change anything I've already written until I've finished the first draft. That way I think I'll have a good handle on how I want the story to work. I now have a big list of things to change.