by Susan Taylor Brown
I really hate to admit this, but I have lousy writing habits. I'm disorganized, my of-fice is a disaster zone, and I never seem to approach a project the same way twice. My mother tried for years to help me get more organized, but I just don’t think my DNA is programmed for organization. I have books and pens (I’m very picky about them --- just ask my husband) and scraps of paper everywhere and in every room in To be quite honest, I don't know if I could work any other way.
I write everywhere...in the car, on the couch, at my desk, in bed, and even in the bath. I love to play with words, which makes my fun and not just work.
Because I do several different kinds of writing, I work in a variety of ways, but they all seem to start with 3 things: an idea, a piece of paper, and a pen. To me, there's something physical about writing, and I almost always start a new book, story, or article in longhand. Later, when I go to transfer it to my computer, it seems to grow all by itself. When I hit a rough spot in the writing, I generally go back to pen and paper. I'm partial to steno tablets, since I can carry them easily with me back and forth to my day job or anywhere else I might go. I also like their size because I don't get intimidated seeing so much blank space around me, waiting for words to fill it up.
Like all writers, I spend a lot of time thinking. People who don't write often think we're just wasting time, but we're not. If I try to write before an idea has simmered properly, I have a much tougher time of it and I turn out a crummy piece of writing that usually doesn’t go anywhere. So I sit and think. A lot. I spend many hours sprawled on the couch with my dog or curled up in bed with pillows all around me. I jot down any ideas, no matter how crazy they might sound, that have to do with the project at hand. Sometimes this goes on for days or weeks or months, depending on the project.
That's why I work on many different projects at the same time. When one idea isn't working for me, I can turn the page in my notebook and work on something else. I'm always forgetting what notebook I started in, though, which is why I have so many of them all over the house. And sometimes I get ideas when I don't have a notebook with me, so I have scraps of important things to remember on the back of napkins, deposit slips, and grocery receipts. These usually land in a basket in the office for me to sort through later.
When the thoughts are coming almost too fast and too intense for me to write them down, that's when I move to computer. This is where it gets sloppy. If I'm writing by hand, my letters get huge and loopy. If I'm on the computer, I'm punching the keys hard and fast. It's the big adrenaline rush I'm after, and I want to nab as much of it as I can before it disappears. When I'm first racing to get everything down, I don't worry about spelling or punctuation or much of anything else. Some people call this free-writing. I just spew words on paper without thinking about whether they're the right words or what someone might say or think. The meat of the story is what I'm after. Later, after the heat of the moment has passed, then I go back and clean it all up, rearrange, add, delete, and rewrite. I do this no matter what I'm writing — fic-tion or non-fiction, books or articles. There are times when, rereading what I wrote fast and without thinking, I am absolutely amazed by what I've written. To be hon-est, there are just as many times when I reread it and know that it's not very good, but that's okay. The important thing is that I finally have something down, in some sort of order that looks like a story.
The second run-through is usually the toughest for me. That's when I see all the holes in the story that need to be filled in. When I don't know what happens next, it's back to the couch to think some more. This is usually when I start second-guessing myself, sure that what I thought was such a great idea is now nothing but garbage. It takes a lot of tough-love for yourself to keep writing at this point. At least for me. Depending on what I am working on, and what kind of a deadline I have, I repeat the above process over and over again. Sometimes it’s a matter of days, sometimes weeks, and with books, it could be years. (Yes, you heard me right – some books can take me years to write.) If I'm working on an article, I'll often go to the Internet to do some research on the topic, looking for experts in the area to give me some meaty quotes. That's usually enough to get me back to the computer to finish up the article.
If it's a book I'm working on, and I'm trying to fill in the holes or decide what hap-pens next, it can often be a lot tougher. I try bouncing ideas off a writing friend. I do a lot of brainstorming and mind-mapping. I play outlandish games of "what-if," hop-ing to jumpstart my brain in a different direction. Sometimes I'll grab a stack of in-dex cards and write a single sentence describing each scene I have already, on a separate card. Then I shuffle through the cards and see what my mind fills in by it-self. We writers are great procrastinators. Mostly it all comes down to just applying the seat of my pants to the seat of the chair and doing it.
After I feel I have a complete story, then comes my favorite part. Revision. I love to polish my manuscript, sort of like rubbing a genie's lamp and knowing something wonderful is going to be the end result. In the process of revision I ask myself a lot of questions. Do I use strong, picture words? Does one chapter flow into the next? Do my characters act and react consistently throughout the story? Is my plot inter-esting, filled with enough conflicts to make the reader want to keep turning pages? Each chapter of my book should be filled with questions. When you answer one ques-tion, you need to ask another one. Once you've stopped asking questions, the reader has no reason left to turn the pages, and the story is over.
Everyone wants to know where writers get their ideas. Ideas are everywhere and all around you. I have so many ideas, I think I have to live to be 157 before I can write about them all. My ideas come from watching and listening to the things happening in the world around me. Like a lot of writers, I'm usually the quiet person in the back of the room, not the life of the party. Everywhere I go, I watch people and observe how they react to the world around them. In New Orleans I used to love to ride the ferry back and forth across the Mississippi river, just to people-watch and to write in my notebook. Ideas can come from TV shows that don't end the way I want them to, stories my kids share with me about school, conversations at parties, a line in the newspaper, or from entries in my journal. And a lot of my ideas come from those scraps of paper I have tossed all over the house, in my purse, on the floor of my car, and tacked up on my bulletin board. Ideas are the easy part...it's the writing that makes all that hard work.
It's a long process, from thinking of the idea, to getting it all down on paper, and then finally, hopefully, seeing it in print. Even after a book is accepted, it can take quite a while for a publisher to actually bring it out. This is especially true for picture books, since the publisher doesn't start looking for an illustrator until after your book has been accepted. Then, and only then, does the illustrator begin to work on your book, and all those pictures. Most of the time, the illustrator has other work to finish first before they can start on your book, so it is not at all uncommon for a picture book to take two or three years to actually appear in print. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, beginning writers have no say in who illustrates their books.
Many books are rejected again and again before they are published, if ever. My first two easy readers were rejected 27 times before they sold. You have to have a healthy dose of perseverance and stubbornness to survive the writing business. Re-jections are a part of the business. Learn to roll with them and don't take them per-sonally. Pick yourself up and start over again. The more you write, the better you write.
How I write is just that, the way I write. If you find some ideas here that work for you, that's great. If you write in a completely different manner, that's great too. If you want to be a writer, the important thing is to write. And if you want to sell your writing, then you have to take your chances and submit your work to publishers. No one's going to come knocking on your door begging to see your latest novel. It's up to you to get it into the hands of those people who can help you bring your dreams to life.
Write on, right now!
I write everywhere...in the car, on the couch, at my desk, in bed, and even in the bath. I love to play with words, which makes my fun and not just work.
Because I do several different kinds of writing, I work in a variety of ways, but they all seem to start with 3 things: an idea, a piece of paper, and a pen. To me, there's something physical about writing, and I almost always start a new book, story, or article in longhand. Later, when I go to transfer it to my computer, it seems to grow all by itself. When I hit a rough spot in the writing, I generally go back to pen and paper. I'm partial to steno tablets, since I can carry them easily with me back and forth to my day job or anywhere else I might go. I also like their size because I don't get intimidated seeing so much blank space around me, waiting for words to fill it up.
Like all writers, I spend a lot of time thinking. People who don't write often think we're just wasting time, but we're not. If I try to write before an idea has simmered properly, I have a much tougher time of it and I turn out a crummy piece of writing that usually doesn’t go anywhere. So I sit and think. A lot. I spend many hours sprawled on the couch with my dog or curled up in bed with pillows all around me. I jot down any ideas, no matter how crazy they might sound, that have to do with the project at hand. Sometimes this goes on for days or weeks or months, depending on the project.
That's why I work on many different projects at the same time. When one idea isn't working for me, I can turn the page in my notebook and work on something else. I'm always forgetting what notebook I started in, though, which is why I have so many of them all over the house. And sometimes I get ideas when I don't have a notebook with me, so I have scraps of important things to remember on the back of napkins, deposit slips, and grocery receipts. These usually land in a basket in the office for me to sort through later.
When the thoughts are coming almost too fast and too intense for me to write them down, that's when I move to computer. This is where it gets sloppy. If I'm writing by hand, my letters get huge and loopy. If I'm on the computer, I'm punching the keys hard and fast. It's the big adrenaline rush I'm after, and I want to nab as much of it as I can before it disappears. When I'm first racing to get everything down, I don't worry about spelling or punctuation or much of anything else. Some people call this free-writing. I just spew words on paper without thinking about whether they're the right words or what someone might say or think. The meat of the story is what I'm after. Later, after the heat of the moment has passed, then I go back and clean it all up, rearrange, add, delete, and rewrite. I do this no matter what I'm writing — fic-tion or non-fiction, books or articles. There are times when, rereading what I wrote fast and without thinking, I am absolutely amazed by what I've written. To be hon-est, there are just as many times when I reread it and know that it's not very good, but that's okay. The important thing is that I finally have something down, in some sort of order that looks like a story.
The second run-through is usually the toughest for me. That's when I see all the holes in the story that need to be filled in. When I don't know what happens next, it's back to the couch to think some more. This is usually when I start second-guessing myself, sure that what I thought was such a great idea is now nothing but garbage. It takes a lot of tough-love for yourself to keep writing at this point. At least for me. Depending on what I am working on, and what kind of a deadline I have, I repeat the above process over and over again. Sometimes it’s a matter of days, sometimes weeks, and with books, it could be years. (Yes, you heard me right – some books can take me years to write.) If I'm working on an article, I'll often go to the Internet to do some research on the topic, looking for experts in the area to give me some meaty quotes. That's usually enough to get me back to the computer to finish up the article.
If it's a book I'm working on, and I'm trying to fill in the holes or decide what hap-pens next, it can often be a lot tougher. I try bouncing ideas off a writing friend. I do a lot of brainstorming and mind-mapping. I play outlandish games of "what-if," hop-ing to jumpstart my brain in a different direction. Sometimes I'll grab a stack of in-dex cards and write a single sentence describing each scene I have already, on a separate card. Then I shuffle through the cards and see what my mind fills in by it-self. We writers are great procrastinators. Mostly it all comes down to just applying the seat of my pants to the seat of the chair and doing it.
After I feel I have a complete story, then comes my favorite part. Revision. I love to polish my manuscript, sort of like rubbing a genie's lamp and knowing something wonderful is going to be the end result. In the process of revision I ask myself a lot of questions. Do I use strong, picture words? Does one chapter flow into the next? Do my characters act and react consistently throughout the story? Is my plot inter-esting, filled with enough conflicts to make the reader want to keep turning pages? Each chapter of my book should be filled with questions. When you answer one ques-tion, you need to ask another one. Once you've stopped asking questions, the reader has no reason left to turn the pages, and the story is over.
Everyone wants to know where writers get their ideas. Ideas are everywhere and all around you. I have so many ideas, I think I have to live to be 157 before I can write about them all. My ideas come from watching and listening to the things happening in the world around me. Like a lot of writers, I'm usually the quiet person in the back of the room, not the life of the party. Everywhere I go, I watch people and observe how they react to the world around them. In New Orleans I used to love to ride the ferry back and forth across the Mississippi river, just to people-watch and to write in my notebook. Ideas can come from TV shows that don't end the way I want them to, stories my kids share with me about school, conversations at parties, a line in the newspaper, or from entries in my journal. And a lot of my ideas come from those scraps of paper I have tossed all over the house, in my purse, on the floor of my car, and tacked up on my bulletin board. Ideas are the easy part...it's the writing that makes all that hard work.
It's a long process, from thinking of the idea, to getting it all down on paper, and then finally, hopefully, seeing it in print. Even after a book is accepted, it can take quite a while for a publisher to actually bring it out. This is especially true for picture books, since the publisher doesn't start looking for an illustrator until after your book has been accepted. Then, and only then, does the illustrator begin to work on your book, and all those pictures. Most of the time, the illustrator has other work to finish first before they can start on your book, so it is not at all uncommon for a picture book to take two or three years to actually appear in print. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, beginning writers have no say in who illustrates their books.
Many books are rejected again and again before they are published, if ever. My first two easy readers were rejected 27 times before they sold. You have to have a healthy dose of perseverance and stubbornness to survive the writing business. Re-jections are a part of the business. Learn to roll with them and don't take them per-sonally. Pick yourself up and start over again. The more you write, the better you write.
How I write is just that, the way I write. If you find some ideas here that work for you, that's great. If you write in a completely different manner, that's great too. If you want to be a writer, the important thing is to write. And if you want to sell your writing, then you have to take your chances and submit your work to publishers. No one's going to come knocking on your door begging to see your latest novel. It's up to you to get it into the hands of those people who can help you bring your dreams to life.
Write on, right now!
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