Catherine Lundoff's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing-process"
Writing Update - Growing a process from the ground up
xposted from my blog -
I got the two novel proposals done! And submitted! And created a new email addy for "new me" (my pseudonym, about which more later)/
Things I had to learn in the last 3 months - how well I learned them remains to be seen but I'm told I will find out soon:
How to write a novel outline for a book that doesn't exist yet You can still be a pantser and do this, by the way. It just has to make sense, which my first drafts didn't always do.
How to write a novel proposal (maybe). It definitely got easier by the time I got to the third one in a row. I could see where the holes and logical gaps where and where I'd lost track of the formula for this particular market.
Formula? Yep. It's a lesson I learned a while back but had gotten away from. Every genre and subgenre has a series of formulas (try reading bestsellers for examples). It's not written in stone, your work doesn't need to completely tow every line, but marketing and selling as easier if the work falls within the scope of what the majority of genre readers read. This is not necessarily the same as what publishers, publicists or Amazon thinks is the formula for a given genre, just saying. I look at reviews and reader responses when I want to know what readers go far. I also make sure that I'm doing some reading in the genre I want to write.Other writers and editors are often your best teachers. That said, don't follow the formulas if they're not your thing and dare to build your own.
Find amazing beta readers. it helps so much.
What do my outlines look like right now? I think this will be an evolving process. Currently: title, genre, projected length, list of main characters, overview of events. Worldbuilding elements are their own section, as is backstory. I'll post one in a week or so here as an example of a pantser learning to outline.
So now I wait. And write the first book, rigorously applying the outline I said I was following. i realized the other day that I was overdoing it and had lost some humor and spontaneity that I wanted in there. Back to revising to change the tone enough that I liked it better, and so far, I think it's a big improvement.
I got the two novel proposals done! And submitted! And created a new email addy for "new me" (my pseudonym, about which more later)/
Things I had to learn in the last 3 months - how well I learned them remains to be seen but I'm told I will find out soon:
How to write a novel outline for a book that doesn't exist yet You can still be a pantser and do this, by the way. It just has to make sense, which my first drafts didn't always do.
How to write a novel proposal (maybe). It definitely got easier by the time I got to the third one in a row. I could see where the holes and logical gaps where and where I'd lost track of the formula for this particular market.
Formula? Yep. It's a lesson I learned a while back but had gotten away from. Every genre and subgenre has a series of formulas (try reading bestsellers for examples). It's not written in stone, your work doesn't need to completely tow every line, but marketing and selling as easier if the work falls within the scope of what the majority of genre readers read. This is not necessarily the same as what publishers, publicists or Amazon thinks is the formula for a given genre, just saying. I look at reviews and reader responses when I want to know what readers go far. I also make sure that I'm doing some reading in the genre I want to write.Other writers and editors are often your best teachers. That said, don't follow the formulas if they're not your thing and dare to build your own.
Find amazing beta readers. it helps so much.
What do my outlines look like right now? I think this will be an evolving process. Currently: title, genre, projected length, list of main characters, overview of events. Worldbuilding elements are their own section, as is backstory. I'll post one in a week or so here as an example of a pantser learning to outline.
So now I wait. And write the first book, rigorously applying the outline I said I was following. i realized the other day that I was overdoing it and had lost some humor and spontaneity that I wanted in there. Back to revising to change the tone enough that I liked it better, and so far, I think it's a big improvement.
