Sometimes, when people learn that I like to write, they ask what my process is. As a textbook pantser, I have to laugh when that happens. Here's my understanding of how it works:
Hahaha ... until the day came when I actually hit those question marks. At that point, there was a lot of feeing around in the dark. Revising didn't come easily to me, since it felt a lot less like writing and a lot more like work. For a while I fumbled around on my own, trying things like character sheets and outlines-after-the-fact. Some of these helped a little, but mostly they frustrated and hampered me. I made a million writing boards on Pinterest and pinned things I never looked at again.
The last thing my laptop sees
Along the way I discovered several awesome blogs that I came to rely on for giving great advice, including Helping Writers Become Authors, Now Novel, Well-Storied, Cooks & Books, The Novel Smithy, and Mythcreants. Each of these blogs came at similar problems from a slightly different angle, and seeing their approaches helped me to understand and refine my own. I realized that I needed to stay flexible and approach the novel as small, bite-sized pieces, rather than trying to tackle the entire thing in one go. After way too long (like seriously, an embarrassingly long time) and a couple thousand drafts later, I finally felt like I knew what I was doing.
Captain Cool, reporting for duty
And then ... I hit a wall. I had been feeling really confident, getting feedback from my awesome beta readers, certain I could handle anything they threw at me. In a giddy whirlwind of hubris, I even went through my manuscript cutting filler words, taking it from 160k to 100k! But then I read the book again and I couldn't figure out how to fix the things that needed fixing. I needed help, and no amount of Pinterest pinning was going to help. I needed to get serious. I needed a professional editor.
After consulting my favorite blogger, I queried several likely-looking editors until I settled on Dario. Not only was he friendly, knowledgeable, and accessible, I also felt like he understood my writing better than the other editors I approached. And when he sent his suggestions for improvement, I was very impressed with how useful and insightful they were. It was exactly what I needed to get over the finish line with a book I was happy to send out into the world.
Now that my book is published, I have a new writing process:
To summarize: the writing process is different for everyone! Sometimes it's going to take a while for you to figure out what works best for you. That's completely normal. And if you need help, there are awesome people who are available to help fill in the gaps.
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