What is My Writing Process?

My high school English teacher used to tell me that I needed to plan out my writing projects. I always knew planning wasn't my style but for a long time, I believed planning was the proper and only way to write.

That thinking was so off-the-mark for me. For those who are unfamiliar with the world of writing, there is no prescribed writing process. There are “plotters” (planners) and there are "pantsers", a.k.a. discovery writers, which means these authors don't lay out their story structure and plot beforehand and instead write by the seat of their pants. I am a full-on discovery writer, with zero planning involved.

The most I did when writing my novel was to create a timeline of events, mid-process, since my characters don't have normal milestones to keep track of time. I stopped tracking names because it was bogging down my creative thinking. It's a bit unfortunate because I don't entirely remember why I chose all the names I did, but it is what it is. (The book's appendix came later.)

So I write based on gut instinct, even though I'm a planner in all other aspects of my life.

I can hear it now: "How in the world did you write Imperious Realm without any planning?"

I don't know. I suspect some form of lunacy was at play.

For Imperious Realm, there were times I created whole scenes solely because I felt I needed a bridge between sections. Some characters evolved into having a greater role because their backstory was intriguing to me. Other characters almost entirely disappeared because their story just didn’t feel "right", was redundant, or didn’t serve the intended purpose of what I was trying to achieve. The process is liberating in my mind but there are several drawbacks that come with the "pantser" approach.

Editing requires skill and self-editing is difficult. I can’t count the amount of times I had to shift around exposition because I introduced new elements to the story. Discovery writing is about finding inspiration along the way and developing the story as you go, but this writing style can result in some pretty outlandish ideas needing to be pulled back. While I believe I ended up with a cohesive story, how I got there was kind of a nightmare. I was able to let go of the over-writing, removing unnecessary passages and sentences, but that took a long while to do. It wasn't until I was done what might have been my fourth (?) draft that I mapped the story structure. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I didn’t have to make any changes in the general story structure because my gut instinct had been right.

And then I made even more changes with the feedback I got from professional editing, for the betterment of the book. I'll probably dedicate a future blog to professional editing, so I'll leave this be for now.

All of this will sound normal to an experienced writer but this was new to me as a debut author, and I've committed in this blog series to share my learnings. If I can encourage a new writer to grasp hold of that desire to start a writing project, then that's cool.