Every time I sit down to write something the process is different. I guess you could say that it's different upon what's being written as opposed to the current situation at the time. I used to start off ONLY writing with pencil and paper but I've slowed down on that once my hands started giving me trouble (when you have MS, your body doesn't always do what you want it to do). So I end up doing a lot more typing now, it seems less stressful on my fingers/hands. I still text things to myself; I have a couple of stories still in progress via text. I'll text large portions of it to myself before I cut & paste them to emails (to myself) and then flesh them out on the computer (well, now the laptop). Not all the stories are like that, BUT if I start them off in such fashion then I'll continue for that specific story. I wrote "Dream of Me" in texts to myself and I have a few others as well. The pieces you've seen of mine, posted by my good friends over at 52 Weeks of Horror were done the same. I wrote them to myself with nowhere to put them and I sent them to my friends who were gracious enough to post them for their 140 Story series. I hope to do more for/with them in the future.
The poetry in Gun Control for Polar Bears wasn't written with the idea of a book; they were just little pieces that kept coming to me over the years and so I felt compelled to write them down. When I did my solo horror anthology, they were all rewritten from screenplays I'd previously written. When my wife and I began to co-write our horror anthology, it started as a mix of a few screenplays I had previously written based on stories by both of us, and a story or so we'd started prior. After starting we started writing a few new ones to add to it. We wanted ten stories so it would often start with "We need another story, what if...?" And then a little nugget of an idea would become a story. When my friend and I's project came about, it started about as natural, if not more so, than ever. However when it really got started, we started to brainstorm on how it would actually work and then through natural conversation it started coming together and we just let it flow. Each screenplay I've written, each comic book script I've written all come from a singular idea and then I start to work and sometimes they'd change midcourse. Sometimes one would start off another and then change. When Dennis & I met, we instantly started to work on what would become Tourniquet. Right off the bat it was "What do you like?" "Monsters. You?" "Same." And then based off of our love of monsters it just started rolling and the book continued to change while we were creating it. Side note - while other co-writings started WITH friends, Dennis and I started with work and then we became good friends. Nowadays our conversations are about our personal lives more so than strictly brainstorming/creating a world and then at the end of the conversation comes "What if they do this...?" Art's interesting that way.
Every story starts differently and usually it will stay with the method it started in, usually. I'm so used to the cycle of "writing, sending, writing, sending" hearing "no, no, no, yes, no, yes but, no, no" that I'm hit with something new while writing my first sci-fi project. When I wrote the initial draft of "Last Rites of the Capacitance" it was a mere 75 pages and it was all meant to be one style/format. I sent it in and I got it back with notes on it, which I've spoken about before. So now I'm going through the rewrite process; one I'm not used to. Again, I'm used to writing and sending and not so much of having to go back over or through. I love learning and growing. I want to do so with each project. I never want to hit a point where I feel I "know it all" or I get stuck in my own routine. I enjoy the ever changing process. The notes helped me realize some of the things I'd done wrong such as glossing/passing over something interesting and rambling nonsensically about things that don't matter.
I talked to a good friend of mine yesterday and we were asking each other how are days were and such and I had told her that I'm doing rewrites on this book and it's driving me bananas. I laughed and said I never really needed to put this much effort into what I do. She asked if it felt wrong. I never thought about it, never been asked that about anything I've worked on. I told her it didn't feel wrong, it was just new to me. It's a feeling of "Oh this is what real writers do" so I'm having to put on my big boy writer pants and get down into it. I actually love the notes and I love where this book is going. I can already tell, kind of like at the beginning of a work out or something, that it will be good for me.
Instead of doing a whole pass through it making changes, which will be significant, I'm tackling it piece at a time; 10 pages +/- 1). After I rewrite the first ten pages (which just got done yesterday), I'm going to go back and flesh out those ten pages to enrich them the best I can. And then I will continue from there. Despite agreeing with the notes, when I looked at the book as a whole and thinking of what needed to be done, I froze looking at it excited but with a thought of "How in the hell am I going to do this? How am I going to make this outline (essentially) into a great book?" And, like I said about the process that constantly changes, that's what I had decided to do - break it up and just attack it bit by bit.
I'm looking at each project as a step towards something bigger; not to mean current or near-future projects don't really matter, just meaning I want to grow with each one. Of course, I think that's what everybody wants when they create, so what I'm saying is nothing new.
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