My Writing Process
When I found out that Sourcebooks had
offered my “process for writing mystery, historical fiction, and romance” as a
potential topic to blog sites, I emailed a panicked message to my critique
partner. Jennie, I wrote. What process? I don’t have a process!
After three years of working together, I can say that
for certain that you do popped up in my inbox the next morning.
Exasperated
that she hadn’t spelled it out for me, I merely typed two question marks in
response.
All
I got in return for my peevishness was one word. Think.
So
I did. And you know what? I do have
a process.
I write in ripples.
To understand what I
mean, let’s start at the beginning.
When I wrote the very
first sentence of my manuscript, I was completely lacking in the craft of
writing. It should come as no surprise,
then, that my novel didn’t begin with a premise, or even a concept—those terms
weren’t even part of my vocabulary at the time.
I’m a visual critter, so, instead, it began with an image in my
head. Picture two women—one a young,
modern day San Francisco eccentric with a penchant for Victorian clothes, and the
other a cantankerous, old schoolmarm living in turn-of-the-century Kansas wheat
field —pen pals who get off to a rather rocky start, depositing their correspondences
in a brass letterbox that stands in some common magical ground between them.
With
that image lodged in my head, I plowed ahead full throttle, throwing together a
stream-of-consciousness compilation of badly written words in a little over two
months—four-hundred-fifty pages in all.
Looking
back on it, this was not writing. Not to
me. Not in the sense of craft. But if you think visually, like I do, it
provided a sketch over which I began the process of “adding color,” or as
others call it, revising.
And
that’s where the ripples came in.
I’m
not a linear thinker, so I can’t write in a straight line, progressing from
scene to scene.
Instead,
I learned to ask myself questions, the first one being: what if Annie (my protagonist) reads
about a murder that took place over a hundred years ago on her time line, yet will
take place in three days on Elsbeth’s?
That
question was like a pebble dropped in a pond.
It was the cause, and the answers I
When
I answered that question to my satisfaction, I simply asked another, dropping
another pebble whose ripples expanded from the point of origin while also
impacting the ripples created by the prior question.
I
kept asking questions with one purpose in mind.
How could I raise the stakes for my protagonists? More to the point, what obstacles could I put
in their way to trip them up, both within the landscape of their inner journeys
and their outer journeys? If a question
didn’t challenge them to the breaking point, I discarded it.
I
came up with enough questions for my manuscript to look like the surface of a
puddle during a spring rain in which the expanding ripples intersected, and
crashed over one another.
And
here’s the interesting thing. I
discovered that there wasn’t a question I asked that didn’t affect every other
question, changing its answer, in some small way. My manuscript was becoming layered.
But
how does this technique related to genre writing, you might ask. In the most basic way. For me, at least, genre writing was less
about the process, and more about the type of question.
Website: scottbwilbanks.com
Twitter: @scottbwilbanks
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