Annie Types – On How I Type

Rae told me today that we need to blog about why or how we write.  The easy one is the how.  The how would be on a computer, very slowly and often with great difficulty.  What did the first writers do when they wanted to change something?  Re-chisel it in the rock?  How did Shakespeare, Austin, Ben Franklin manage?  Just cross out a word or several words or a whole paragraph with their quills?  For that matter, before the age of the PC how did anyone manage?  (I love spell check.  The only thing worse than my spelling is my lack of understanding punctuation.  I cannot grasp the comma.)

But, back to how do we start?  Who can say where the ideas come from?  I remember an afternoon when Rae and I were with our grandmother and we ‘wrote’ a story.  It wasn’t written down, we just each thought of a sentence.  A round robin sort of thing.  We did something about a pirate ship down in the mangos as I lay there thumbing my nose.  Maybe we should have written it down.

Anyway, when it comes to the Bittersweet Hollow stories one of us has the initial idea.  I think it’s always Rae.  She leads in the cozy mystery writing, I only follow.  You would have to read her blog to see how she thinks of these things.

Another thing Rae does very well is outline the story.  A good outline is half the battle.  You really need to know where you are going and what is going to happen and how the whole thing is going to end before you write a word.  Rae and I wrote a couple of stories before Final Sale and we didn’t outline so about halfway through we were stumped.  Not that it stopped us.  It just took us longer to finish because we had to stop and do an outline.

The outline can be done on the computer but I think we both outline on paper.  I do anyway.  I just free associate most of the time.  I have always been a list maker so I like to take a problem or situation and write several different cause-and-effect scenarios.  I guess writing is like construction.  Whether you construct a building or sew a dress or bake a cake you follow a set of steps.  And like any of the above there are setbacks and delays and obstacles to overcome.  And the reason we do it with writing books brings us to the Why and that question is for another day.