Process: An Author's Unmentionable

Sometimes I wonder if people write novels the way I do?

I’m talking about the process here, not the final result or stylistic choices or character developmental arcs. Just the grind it out, get the word count up process.

When I’m under contract to write a book of a determined length, with a determined ending (happily ever after and happily for now endings are a must in the romance market I traverse), with a required amount of hot, sexy times and studmuffins being the only teams in town, it can get a little tedious.

Now, before anybody starts tossing rotting, squishy vegetables at me, I am once again talking the process here. The imagining part of the storytelling is never tedious, droll, or blah. (Being a god-like tyrant of your own made-up world can be a heady rush. That part of authoring is always fun.)

But the process can become a bit stale.

750 words a day, every day sounds… *whispers here*… “almost like a real job.”

Oh, the horror, right?

*chuckles*

Maybe it would seem like less of a task if I actually wrote these contracted novels from beginning right through to the end, you know, in order?

I don’t.

I pick and choose whatever I’m in the mood to write that day. (At this point, the book is already outlined out into chapters, events, plot twists, all that kind of stuff, so I’m not really writing completely on the fly.) But humor, sex, action, location shoots, romance, any and all are in the cards for me every day. Deciding which subject I’ll dive in to takes place only as a type that day’s first word.

This “process” generally works great for me.

It caters to my moods and that particular moment’s strengths.

But what I’m left with at the end of a month’s dailies is a mishmash of half-finished scenes that look NOTHING like a novel.

It’s frustrating… right up until that last week before the book’s deadline.

Then it’s magic!

I weave all the good stuff together, toss out all the junk, add embellishments and “BOOM!” I’ve got a novel.

Process.

I think mine is weird.

Everything else about me seems to be weird, so I guess this follows.

*grins*

Until tomorrow…

Chloe