The One Piece of Paper Method

I’ve joined a rolling blog with a group of other authors. Thank you Shirley Wine for inviting me to take part and provide this week’s instalment. Your super-sized rural romances are great reads, and I love the sound of your up-coming Prodigal Sons series.

Okay, I’m supposed to be tackling A Writer’s Process. This sounds a bit too grand for me because my ‘process’ involves one sheet of paper. Or maybe two if the first one gets so scruffy I have to rewrite it. Oh – and the back of a page from a big calendar, so maybe three.

I write in my head. I write in my head ALL THE TIME. It’s a wonder I don’t have traffic accidents or burn the dinner or come out with pieces of my characters’ dialogue instead of sensible answers to people’s questions. And it’s not until I have the whole plot of a novel satisfactorily swishing around in my brain that I put fingers to keyboard. To be honest it doesn’t even happen then. I’ve found it a great help to know exactly who I’m writing about, so I’ll probably go off to the royalty-free photo sites next and see if I can find ‘my people’. I hate reading books where the couple on the cover looks nothing like the pair in the book.

Once I‘ve found my people I buy their photograph and make a collage on the back of the big strong calendar page. And I pin this onto the curtain beside my desk. It’s a very nice linen curtain with enough pattern to hide the pin-holes!

Language
English