Writing Ray - How I Write

This year is my year to write like I've never done before. The last time I seriously wrote for more than an afternoon was my Nanowrimo attempt of 2010 (y'all who followed my blog back then know what happened after that) and I want to finally get a whole story out of my head and onto paper and/or computer screen.

So far in the past month I have managed to write just over 19,000 words on a Fantasy story that had been slow-brewing for a while in my mind. I've almost done a quarter of the story maybe although there is still a loong way to go with it. If folk are interested in reading snippets then I'm not sure what to do cos everything I've written so far is from about a third of the way through the story up towards serious spoilerific sections. Hell I may have to start writing a beginning. *sigh*

But I kinda wanted to talk a little about how I actually write and the odd little things I need while I'm writing. I know a lot of authors post pics and whatnot of their writing spaces and talk about their routines so why the feck shouldn't I?

Mah writin' prooocess 
Ok so if you didn't just read that with a Scottish accent then I don't even know what you're doing here, sheesh. *ahem*
I have come to realise that with my writing I simply cannot write linearly - basically I come up with the idea for the climatic third of the story and then have to figure out the feck I got there. The first scene I wrote on my current WIP is from around the end of the first third of the book and is the first time my two POV characters meet. It basically kicks off the main journey of the story in a rather dramatic style but I've yet to plot out what the hell got my MCs to that point in the first place. I have vague ideas for my male MC but my female MC is currently being a cheeky lass and not bothering to let me know what she's been up to.

I also have found that I plan out scenes in my head as if I was a film director, replaying little shots of a scene over and over as I work out the details and dialogue. Eventually I may actually get those scenes out into proper words but until then it's rather a favourite pre-sleep activity to play out a scene in my head, I have a climatic scene from a different fantasy story that I've been mulling over for something like four years which I often play out. My brain is a crazy place.

I do most of my planning and plotting (for this WIP anyway) in a plain journal that I got a few birthdays back and also in a yellow legal pad I bought while I was in Florida in either 2011 or 2012. For some reason I've only used pencil in the legal pad and my Parker Jotter in the journal and I've taken to lugging them around with me recently in case I get a free moment to scribble something. It's alerted a few people at work to what I'm doing so I have to be all coy and hope they never try to nick the notebooks off me.

The main body of writing I'm doing with this rather fabby word-processing program that I discovered when I did Nanowrimo. It's called Q10 and is a free program that you can download here and it's so awesome; it has a great uncluttered interface and you can program it to autosave your work, set alarms to do wordsprints and there are spellcheckers as well. But the best thing and obviously the main reason I got it was because it makes typewriters noises as you write. Amright?

I do then transfer the text document into Word to check spelling and shout at my computer as it complains about my word and grammatical choices (fuck you I don't care what you think of my verb usage Word). Eventually as I get more scenes done and work out the overall order of the story I'll start combining the word docs into one MASTER FILE which will be rather fun to watch the word count grow and grow.

Now this post is getting rather long and I reckon that I should leave the other quirks of my writing process for another day. If anyone *is* interested in knowing more about what I'm working on please leave me a comment and I shall try to see what snippets I could put up without risking spoiling stuff.

Have a Good Saturday afternoon!
Ray