At this point, I've published eleven books and written something like seventeen (a few are slated to forever remain in the trunk). But despite all that supposed experience with writing books, every time I start a new one, it feels like the first time.
That shiny new idea is always appealing. I'm so excited as I make a Pinterest mood board and a playlist. Then I have to open Scrivener and start actually crafting the damned thing. Fleshing out all the characters and locations, shaping a plot, making sure there's enough drama and that I've also figured out how to resolve the drama, making two characters flawed enough that a happy ending seems impossible, but then somehow give them that happy ending.
This is always the point when I become convinced I'll never be able to write another book again. It seems too complicated! Too hard! Too scary! And yet time and again, I begin. I write a chapter, then two. I erase a bunch of stuff, I decide the whole middle section is wrong, I move everything around, I write some more. And then one day I type "the end."
Of course in publishing, "the end" is really only the beginning. Complete rewrites, partial rewrites, developmental edits, line edits, proofreading....all that's still out there in the future. Right now, all I have is an empty Scrivener template, an idea, and absolutely no idea how I'm going to get it written.
If you're an author, I'd love to hear about your early process. What are the first things you do to turn an idea into a book?
Since the whole point of this blog post is that I don't yet have any new words to share, have a few pics from my Pinterest board instead! Gotta start somewhere!
I dusted off my blog earlier today for the same reasons, and opened my post with a similar recap of my writing history! I find it interesting that we both go through the same process of self-doubt as well--I guess all writers do, no matter how accomplished they are. My process almost always starts with a "what if" question. What if someone completely inappropriate accidentally gets hired by a super secret agency? What if diagnosing disease syndromes and solving crimes makes a veterinarian the perfect amateur sleuth? That sort of thing. Then I spend months daydreaming about the possibilities of that scenario (usually while working on something else) until I pare down the worst of the wackiness into a reasonabl…