I love this video - thank you for sharing! I applaud your ability to both have a day job and manage to write a book. I teach at a university and the only things I write are academic papers, so the whole endeavour is very structured - but I loved learning about your process. The passage you read was beautiful -
I pretty much follow the same process though I am not a fan of it. I am in a very juvenile phase and I know I am making a lot of mistakes, so the learning curve looks pretty steep but I don't have any benchmark to really judge how I am doing. I have a spreadsheet - no, actually, I have six spreadsheets. Each sheet is for a particular type of ideas or information that I think is usueful to the piece I am working on. Then, I also randomly scribble ideas, which I transfer to those sheets as time allows. All the information doesn't necessarily end up in the main work but it helps. There is also a rough working sheet, just like we used to have when solving Math problems in school. Coming from a background that depends on a logical workflow, I feel a lot of vagueness and volatility. Since, a lot of things are work in process at the moment, and I am still learning the English language, being a second language to me, I have decided to keep on writing without worrying about what I will end up with because I know I'm going to rewrite all of it.
Ansar that sounds like a fantastic combination of planning, organisation and allowing the inherent messiness of writing to do its thing. It *is* vague and volatile, but that's ok and we learn to live with that, whilst also keeping one eye on the overall picture, and periodically nudging it along in a more logical direction. Good luck.
I loved hearing about your process. What a great, sneaky way to get your overanalytical left brain out of the way. I'm tempted to try it sometime and see what happens. I wrote a novel a while back that I didn't pursue publication for, and for that one I did not plan much at all. It was for a master's degree so that pressure helped keep moving in any case. The structure came out pretty well. These days I'm writing mostly short fiction and long, memoir essays. I don't plan the short fiction at all. I just try to find some idea or prompt that sparks a potential story and start writing. Or an idea just arrives. When I have tried to plan stories they have failed, probably under the weight. I agree that there's something a little magical about the best writing. Of course, that doesn't meant it won't be honed and revised and edited, but its basic form needs a free space to get itself out there. For the long essays I brainstorm a lot and then essentially freewrite based on what comes up in that exercise and create a number of passages that I eventually look for the best way to fit together.
That sounds quite a lot like my process - brainstorming, but then free writing. It's completely different from when I wrote my doctorate. For that I planned, got my points in the right order, chose the quotations I wanted to use, put them in order, and only then sat down to write a chapter.
I love this video - thank you for sharing! I applaud your ability to both have a day job and manage to write a book. I teach at a university and the only things I write are academic papers, so the whole endeavour is very structured - but I loved learning about your process. The passage you read was beautiful -
I really enjoyed making it as well. More to come soon...
I pretty much follow the same process though I am not a fan of it. I am in a very juvenile phase and I know I am making a lot of mistakes, so the learning curve looks pretty steep but I don't have any benchmark to really judge how I am doing. I have a spreadsheet - no, actually, I have six spreadsheets. Each sheet is for a particular type of ideas or information that I think is usueful to the piece I am working on. Then, I also randomly scribble ideas, which I transfer to those sheets as time allows. All the information doesn't necessarily end up in the main work but it helps.
There is also a rough working sheet, just like we used to have when solving Math problems in school.
Coming from a background that depends on a logical workflow, I feel a lot of vagueness and volatility. Since, a lot of things are work in process at the moment, and I am still learning the English language, being a second language to me, I have decided to keep on writing without worrying about what I will end up with because I know I'm going to rewrite all of it.
Ansar that sounds like a fantastic combination of planning, organisation and allowing the inherent messiness of writing to do its thing. It *is* vague and volatile, but that's ok and we learn to live with that, whilst also keeping one eye on the overall picture, and periodically nudging it along in a more logical direction. Good luck.
I loved hearing about your process. What a great, sneaky way to get your overanalytical left brain out of the way. I'm tempted to try it sometime and see what happens. I wrote a novel a while back that I didn't pursue publication for, and for that one I did not plan much at all. It was for a master's degree so that pressure helped keep moving in any case. The structure came out pretty well. These days I'm writing mostly short fiction and long, memoir essays. I don't plan the short fiction at all. I just try to find some idea or prompt that sparks a potential story and start writing. Or an idea just arrives. When I have tried to plan stories they have failed, probably under the weight. I agree that there's something a little magical about the best writing. Of course, that doesn't meant it won't be honed and revised and edited, but its basic form needs a free space to get itself out there. For the long essays I brainstorm a lot and then essentially freewrite based on what comes up in that exercise and create a number of passages that I eventually look for the best way to fit together.
That sounds quite a lot like my process - brainstorming, but then free writing. It's completely different from when I wrote my doctorate. For that I planned, got my points in the right order, chose the quotations I wanted to use, put them in order, and only then sat down to write a chapter.