There are as many ways to write a story as there are grains of sand. I’ve done a lot to try and read about different techniques of writing. It’s not like math where if you are shown a way to do a formula, that way works and it works for everyone. A creative act like writing isn’t the same. You can be taught a technique and it may work for some people, if it is a very good technique, it will work for a good many people, but it won’t work for everyone. Some techniques are so specific they’ll only work for the one person who thought of it.
Where do you start? Do you start with plot as a good many authors do? Do you start with the characters and see where they take you? Do you start with an idea of what you want and go from there with the plot or characters? Where does it start? Where can it start?
That’s really the question, isn’t it? Where does the process begin for the writer, for that particular writer, for this particular time. Some coaches, not all of them though, will tell you to write first thing every morning, before you do anything else, before you get your day started. I am not a morning person. I have a tough time to remember how to put my pants on much less sitting down and getting my thoughts down on the paper. I’m not sure it would do me any good to write in the morning. My brain hasn’t really switched on and it is still in sleep mode. I’m at my best at the end of the day, when I can process what has happened during the day, get those things down on paper.
What seems to have worked for me is to find a desire and go from there. Characters need desire, they need something to drive them forward and reach for. Once the desire is there, all sorts of things can happen. With that desire, you can start to shape that character in your mind a bit better, start to give him or her shadows to cast. And of course, that deep desire is begging for all sorts of obstacles in the way.
Without desire, needs and wants, characters are pretty dull. They’re just filler, people who sit on the sofa and live day to day until they die. All they do is exist. Nothing more. You want to have a person with drive, otherwise what’s the point.
That was the big problem with my last book. My main character was rudderless for at least half of the book and when he actually decided to do something, it was fairly unmotivated. To be fair, nearly all of my characters were terribly unmotivated.
At least that will be corrected this year in my sophmore attempt at NaNoWriMo. I’m looking forward to it.
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