I got asked the other day how I wrote my book. I shrugged, I shrug a lot. It just happened, my husband went riding, I was bored and trawling through Amazon for another book to read. But nothing caught my eye, and this was before Kindles and free downloads.
I done what most virgin writers do and wrote straight from my crowded, noisy, brain onto a blank word.doc.
This worked for all of 5 pages. Then I realised that 3 days a week, I sat on bus for two hours a day to go to work, looking out the window daydreaming while listening to music. So I swiftly bought a folder, A4 pad and 6 pencils. I don't know why but I discovered very early on I like writing in pencil. I worked out that if I had 6 freshly sharpened ones, I could get roughly 2 hours of writing from them.
I wrote on the bus, I wrote on the back of the sale tickets and scraps of till roll when I was at work. I had no idea where my story was going, all I had was an idea, a few characters, and some pretty intense scenes inside my brain. Music played a huge role in my writing, songs would be the soundtrack to scenes, they would set the tone for where conversations went, sometimes I find that lyrics have crept in between the quotation marks! My musical tastes have changed, hell even my characters musical tastes have changed, they had their own favourite songs! But I still find writing, imagining, creating, editing needs to be done to a musical score of some sort! I mostly like music without words nowadays...something I have acquired from my husband. Those BMX videos had to infiltrate my life somewhere!
I never wrote chapters as such. Just big blocks of writing which only recently got chopped up into chapters. I was writing without an end in sight, at one point I didn't know the end, I didn't know what was going to happen to the characters, they were essentially going on their own journey and I was a mere spectator taking notes in the back ground! Somehow the story wove itself, things happened that I hadn't intentionally "Set up". Then an ending was born! It reached a nice organic end, and the characters still don't let me rest, there is more to be told.
As far as publishing goes, as far as "Giving birth to your creation", putting it out there for all to see. I sat on this baby for a loooong time. I never liked the idea of selling it to someone who didn't want to read my book, they wanted to sell my book. So I did nothing. Then self publishing happened, and I said "Hell yes!" to that. It's terrifying, almost like getting naked in front of folk you don't know. They don't care about you as a person, so they can say whatever they like about your weird mole, or wonky nipple.
In April I had a bit of an early thirties crisis. I was all whiney "I haven't done anything with my life!" then I realised I had, but it was in my wardrobe and I needed some closure on this bad boy!
So that is the edited version of how I wrote a book.
