You gotta have a system!

It’s been painfully slow on book two of the Powerless series, and I only just realised why: I had changed the way I was writing.

For Powerless I would write a paragraph here, a couple of lines or scenes there and sometimes I would even get the urge to write two or three pages in one go. For the sequel I had been trying to write it in sequence, partly because it’s more complicated than the first book and also because I had to spend a great deal of time planning the plot and chapter order, so I guess I felt I had to tackle it in ‘read’ order.
But it was killing me creatively. I didn’t have any enthusiasm to start writing. Even when I made myself sit down and write, I would only get a couple of lines and some ideas done and give up in frustration and/or boredom.

It was only last weekend I became aware I was making myself tackle it in this way, so I jumped ahead twenty chapters and wrote something in the middle that interested me. Then that made me think of something for an earlier chapter. Then that spurred me on to start writing the introduction chapter of a new character. Creatively lit from that I was now able to tackle an emotional scene elsewhere that I had been dreading/putting off for a while.

That’s how I work, I flit around to what interests me at the time. And it’s not scattershot or disorganised, I’m actually laying out, little pieces at a time, a framework of scenes, of emotional beats throughout the book that I slowly build up and then flesh out as the work progresses. This is what I did on Powerless despite always having a nagging voice at the back of my brain saying “This isn’t how ‘proper’ writers do it!”.

Like many things (apart from surgery) there is no ‘proper’ way to do anything, it’s what works for you and as long as you understand why it works for you, you will be comfortable and happy with the way you create.