How I Write: Motivation/ Getting Through the Dreaded Middle Pages

Welcome to another weekly post in the How I Write series. This series of posts is the brainchild of Ansha Kotyk, who--along with the other participants, including Yours Truly--haunts the forums (registration required) of the Romance Divas website. You can go here to find a list of all the participants with links to their individual blog posts. We'll each be posting on the same topic each Wednesday for the next two or three months--longer, if it goes well and we're having fun with it.

This week's topic is Motivation, or Getting Through the Dreaded Middle Pages.

I've mentioned Robert Heinlein's Rules For Writers before. Heinlein, for those of you may not who he is (I find it incredible that anyone doesn't know, but the world is a big place...), he was one of the Grandmasters of science fiction. He began his writing career in the fifties, and his rules are as valid today as they were then:

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must not rewrite except to editorial order.
4. You must mail your story to someone who will buy it.
5. You must keep your story in the mail until someone buys it.

This week's topic clearly falls under rule number two. You must finish what you write.

I'm afraid there's no magic bullet for this. As with so many things worth doing, there's no quick and easy route to success. It require commitment and discipline. If you can't finish what you start, you're never going to be successful as a writer. But how?

I can only tell you how I do it. I've finished two novels now, and the experience has been consistent so I expect it will continue to be so. For me, it goes like this:

I begin a new project with excitement. Or maybe with fear and trepidation. Or both. After all, it's not easy to write somewhere in the range of 90,000 words of story. It's a monumental task. But so is building a monument, or a skyscraper. Or eating an elephant. And in all those cases, you do it one small task at a time.

So the first step is to recognize that this will not be quick or easy. It's going to take time. Anywhere from days* to weeks to months to years, depending on how much time you can afford to devote to the project, and how fast you write. But if you can consistently apply yourself, whatever your time constraints and writing speed, eventually you'll get to the end. If you need something to reassure you on that point, reread my post from last week, Running The Numbers.

But having started, how do you get through the dreaded middle pages? Give yourself permission to be bad.

One of the most paralyzing things a writer can do is allow his (or her) internal editor to get involved in the writing process. Writing is creative; editing is not. Editing can improve the final product--but there must be raw material to work with before editing becomes useful. So give yourself permission to write something awful. It doesn't matter how awful; it only matters that you write the story. When it's done, you can go back and decide what works and what didn't, what to keep, what to throw out, what to modify. More on this in a moment.

As I mentioned, I've completed two novels now, and in both cases I seesawed between the conviction that they were pretty damn good--and the suspicion that they were awful. But part of the permission to be bad trick is that you must commit to continuing the project no matter how bad you think it is. Whether you think you're the next Shakespeare or you fear that your manuscript's best use is as fuel for a fire, you must keep writing. It can be tough to do, I know.

But here's another secret: You are the worst judge of your own work.

Really. You're simply too close to it. This is especially true when you're in the dreaded middle of it, after the excitement of starting something new has faded, and before you feel the thrill of reaching the end. Then it's just the slog of getting from one to the other. You can't trust your own judgment. This is a common reaction of many (if not all) writers. In fact, two writers I know, a married couple who have each sold scores of novels, tell me it's so common that they've made a joke of it. When one or the other comes storming out of his (or her) office to confess that the new novel isn't working and may have to be scrapped, the other asks, "How far along are you?" At which point, the complaining partner remembers what I'm telling you (and they told me), curses, turns around, and goes back into the office to keep writing.

The great thing about this? About ignoring your own feelings of inadequacy this way? When the novel is finished, if you go back to look for the places where you were sure it was crap, you won't be able to tell by reading which parts you thought rocked, and which you thought sucked. The quality of the writing has little or nothing to do with how you felt about the writing. It's all about your craft, your skill. THAT doesn't vary with your moods, or it won't if you're a professional about it. Just like any other professional--doctors, lawyers, cops, teachers--you put your feelings aside and do the job.

Which is basically how I get through the dreaded middle.
On the days when everything's going well and I'm pleased with my work, I write.
On the days when I think the novel is unsalvageable and I hate it, I write.
There's no other way.

*Joyce Carrol Oates wrote about 9,000 words a day! That's a novel every ten days! But even a few hundred words a day adds up.

How I Write: Getting the First Draft Completed/ Setting A Writing Schedule

Welcome to another weekly post in the How I Write series. This series of posts is the brainchild of Ansha Kotyk, who--along with the other participants, including Yours Truly--haunts the forums (registration required) of the Romance Divas website. You can go here to find a list of all the participants with links to their individual blog posts. We'll each be posting on the same topic each Wednesday for the next two or three months--longer, if it goes well and we're having fun with it.

This week's topic is Getting the First Draft Completed, or Setting A Writing Schedule.

I've already mentioned this in previous posts, but my technique is pretty simple. I keep a kitchen timer on my desk. On writing days, I set it for sixty minutes. Once I've opened up a new file, or reopened a work in progress, I start the timer--and I start writing.

For the next sixty minutes I write. I am not allowed to delete anything I write, or edit it (other than to back up and fix a immediate typo or missing word). I am not allowed to stop and think. I must simply write for an hour. When the timer rings, I take a brief break, then do it again. And again. As many times as I can in a day. The object is, as much as possible, to get out of my own way and let my creativity flow.

The less I allow my conscious mind (filled with rules gleaned from grade school, high school and college literature courses, books on writing, and so forth) to interfere, the better.My subconscious knows everything my conscious mind knows--and plenty more besides. It's also less constrained by rules and regulations. Once the first draft is done, I can go back and consciously apply the rules of fiction to improve the work.

But what I really want to talk about is numbers. I plan to write four novels in 2010. I've written two, and I have two more to go. (In fact, I just sent the second novel out to five publishers yesterday.) That's an ambitious goal, but not nearly as ambitious as it may sound. Your average novel tends to run between 70,000 and 120,000 words. There are exceptions. Some category romance novels clock in at 60,000 words, maybe less for some epublishers. But to the best of my knowledge, something much less than 70,000 words or longer 120,000 words is going to have trouble finding a home in New York, while 90,000 words is right in the sweet spot.

So. A manuscript page is roughly 250-300 words (double-spaced with one inch margins). Let's go with 250 words as the baseline. If you can write--not type, mind you, but write--reasonably fast, you can produce a manuscript page (250 words) every fifteen minutes. If you're slow, it might take you an hour.

If you write 250 words a day, every day, for a year, that's [250 x 365] = 91,250 words--or an average novel. That's a novel a year for between fifteen minutes and an hour a day. (That doesn't include any revisions you'll do, but bear with me.*) Think you can squeeze out fifteen minutes of writing time every day? You could write a novel in a year.

Say you can produce 1,000 words a day (in an hour if you're fast, four hours if you're not). That's 365,000 words in a year--or four 90,000 words novels. But that's too much work, you say. You want to take weekends off. And have a two week vacation after laboring over a hot word processor for between one and four hours a day. There are 52 weeks in a year. Strike two for vacations. That leaves fifty weeks. Five days a week x 50 weeks is 250 working days per year. At 1,000 words a day, that's still 250,000 words. That's 2.7 novels. Bump your writing up to 1200 words a day and you're producing three 90,000 word novels a year.

Let's say you can afford to spend the time to write an average of 3,000 words a day, (either because you're being supported by a spouse** or you're spending your evenings writing after a day at the office). If you write five days a week, that's [250 days x 3,000 words] = 780,000 words in a year***, or eight and a half 90,000 words novels. And you're still getting weekends off. (Now do you see how Nora Roberts, for instance, can publish so many books so fast? If she considers writing her day job--and she does--and spends hours writing every day, the words pile up very quickly.)

I'm only trying to write four novels this year. I'm an absolute slacker compared to Nora Roberts. She's not just a better, far more experienced writer, she's also a demon when it comes to productivity. Practice makes perfect, and boy does she get a lot of practice. We could all learn from her example.

As you can see, setting a writing schedule is mostly a matter of discipline. The numbers don't lie. If you can apply yourself, there's no reason why you can't produce a novel in a reasonable length of time--by which I mean, a year at most. The faster you can write and the more time you can devote to your writing, the shorter the time needed to finish a novel. So I'll be writing two more novels this year and getting them all out to publishers. And then four more next year, and the year after that. Maybe they'll sell, maybe they won't. But all that practice will be teaching me to write more effectively, and eventually they will start to sell.

Next week: Motivation--how to keep slogging away when your enthusiasm/confidence/muse deserts you.



*If you're spending only fifteen minutes to an hour a day on producing new words, I think you can find time to edit during the day as well.

**Who no doubt expects (or at least hopes) to be kept in the manner to which he intends to become accustomed once you become a rich and famous novelist, as in my case.


***If, as John D. MacDonald famously said, you have to write a million words of crap to get to the good stuff, that puts you three-quarters of the way there in ONE YEAR. Two if you dawdle.

How I Write: Starting A New Work - How Do You Begin and Tools You Use

Welcome to another weekly post in the How I Write series. This series of posts is the brainchild of Ansha Kotyk, who--along with the other participants, including Yours Truly--haunts the forums (registration required) of the Romance Divas website. You can go here to find a list of all the participants with links to their individual blog posts. We'll each be posting on the same topic each Wednesday for the next two or three months--longer, if it goes well and we're having fun with it.

This week's topic is wide open: Starting A New Work--How Do You Begin, What Tools Do You Use?

This is a difficult topic for me. I have two novels and a number of short stories under my belt (published already or written with intent to be published), in addition to hundreds of thousands--if not millions--of words of fiction (including fanfic) written for my own amusement before I Got Serious about writing professionally. And most of it was written off-the-cuff.

I'm a seat-of-my-pants writer, or "pantser" as some folks put it. I don't work out plots and then write to an outline. I don't even create an outline and then find the story diverging from the outline when actually sit down to write. I've tried that and it has never worked for me. I start with the seed of a story and find out the shape of the story as I write it down. That sometimes involves cutting and pasting, and tossing away parts of a story that lead to a dead-end. The end result is a workable story--but the plotting and planning occur, for the most part, down in my subconscious, where I have little access and less insight.

I have a notebook full of story ideas, or story concepts. One-line pitches that I hope to turn into a completed story someday. (And it's nice to leaf through the notebook occasionally and see the ones I've actually written--and sold--crossed out. It helps, on the days when I feel uninspired, to remind myself of my successes. I also have plenty of incomplete stories on my hard drive, anything from a few pages to ten thousand words. I open them up occasionally and look at them, and from time to time I find inspiration in one and finish it.

But on a purely technical level: I sit (or stand, as the mood takes me, my writing desk being at a height where I can stand or sit on a stool) in front the computer, open a blank file, and start writing. Sometimes I have a killer opening line. Sometimes I have a scene I want to start with, or a scene I want to get to. Sometimes I have only a vague idea of what kind of story I want to tell.

Flying High began with a visual of my (super)heroine seizing the hero by his shirt and flying high into the sky, where she proceeds to have her way with him. Writing the story consisted of figuring out to get to that scene, which involved deciding who the characters were, and what would motivate her to do that.


Fast Friends began with the notion of making the hero's pursuit of the heroine a literal pursuit. The characters changed considerably over the course of writing that story. It began as another superhero story, but along the way I abandoned that as an unnecessary complication. In the end, hero and heroine are runners--but completely human.

The science fiction novel I just finished (not a romance) came about when I read an article about a man who makes his living repossessing airliners when the owners default on their payments to the bank. It occurred to me that there'd be a need for a similar service in a universe where starships are common. I started with a list of tricks deadbeat starship owners might use to hang onto their vessels, and tricks my hero might use to retrieve them. I had an image of my hero in mind, but very little more when I started the novel.

My hero's personality changed and deepened as I wrote my way through the novel. He acquired a love interest along the way (which I had not intended when I began). One of his targets early on became an ally and eventually his best friend--another unexpected twist. I worked out the geography (astrography?) of the universe, the details of FTL starship travel, and the legal systems of several worlds on the fly.

Not all of it hung together, of course. I had to cycle through the novel a few times, cleaning up inconsistencies. I had to cut most of a very steamy sex scene that ultimately didn't fit the rest of the story, but which I had fun writing at the time. I had to go back and tweak the names of people, places, and starships to get rid of the sorts of amusing, self-referential or joke names I tend to throw in as placeholders when I'm writing on the fly. "Al Mondroca", for instance, became Al Martinez. It scans the same, but it's no longer a joke.

When I began the novel, I had no idea what the final shape of it would be. If that sounds nerve-wracking, well--it is. I've written two novels to date, and both of them involved ping-ponging between confidence in my writing and a conviction that I was kidding myself, that I'd do better to scrap what I'd written and start over on something else. But my toolkit helps with that. I have two very important tools I use whenever I write.

First, a kitchen timer. I set it for sixty-minute intervals. Once I start it, I must write for an hour, without pausing more than momentarily, and without editing or deleting anything. That discipline prevents me from making repeated false starts, or dithering about how best to write scene (and thereby giving my internal editor a chance to interfere). I must simply write. Once I've written, then I can edit. But not before.

My second tool is my copy of Robert Heinlein's Rules For Writers, about which I've written before, both here and elsewhere. Following them won't guarantee success, but failing to follow them will almost certainly assure failure. The rules are:

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must not rewrite except to editorial order.
4. You must mail your story to an editor who will buy it.
5. You must keep your story in the mail until it sells.

Each and every one of them a pearl of wisdom, and I'll have plenty to say about them as this series progresses. But for now, that's a glimpse into how at least one "pantser" starts new works.

How I Write: Research - How To Research & Knowing When To Stop

Welcome to the third installment in the How I Write series. This series of posts is the brainchild of Ansha Kotyk, who--along with the other participants, including Yours Truly--haunts the forums (registration required) of the Romance Divas website. You can go here to find a list of all the participants with links to their individual blog posts. We'll each be posting on the same topic each Wednesday for the next two or three months--longer, if it goes well and we're having fun with it.

This week's episode: How I Research, and Knowing When To Stop.

Let's start with the latter question first. How do you know when to stop? Ultimately, when it's time to sit down and write, the time for research is over. Research, like endlessly revising a manuscript or trying to create the "perfect" opening sentence, paragraph, or chapter is really just procrastination dressed up as perfectionism. Research, like creating character bios, timelines, plotting, and so forth, exists to help you write a better, more entertaining story. It is not an end in itself. When and if it starts cutting into your writing time, you've done enough.

When I stand in front of my computer to start my dailing writing session, I put aside research. If there are questions that need answering, I either fake it (and plan to come back and put the real facts in later) or I just make a note to myself to "insert researched data here"...and keep writing. Letting myself get sidetracked by chasing down information during my writing time is a great way to waste a day. If I really need to do more research, it will get done some other time. In the evening, when I'm done with my writing for the day.

If by "knowing when to stop" you mean how do you know when you've accumulated enough data about the topic at hand...that's when the rule of diminishing returns comes into play. While a few well-chosen nuggets of historical/technical/cultural data can be just the thing to make your story real, too much of it bogs your story down. You'll invariably dig up a lot more information than you'll be able to use in a given story, though you can always use it later, in other stories. If you're collecting trivia? You've gone too far.

Ah, but how do I research?

I start with Wikipedia and Google. Wikipedia (a user-edited online encyclopedia, if you've been living in a cave for the last few years) is a great starting point. It's almost useless for politics and any other hotly-contested subject, but otherwise it's fairly helpful in getting an overview of a non-controversial topic, but its primarily useful for the citations to original sources. You needn't take anything for gospel--you can follow the links, or search out the sources with Google to confirm them. And in many cases, a quick overview, maybe some descriptions or pictures of the plants, animals, architecture, weapons, tools, or whatever are all I need.

If I need more, though, Google is a godsend. I remember sitting at home as a child (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth) thumbing through our encyclopedia (which got more out of date with every passing year), or trolling through the local public library or school library. It was a crapshoot whether I'd find much of anything about whatever topic I was obsessed with at the time. Now I type search terms into a computer in the privacy of my own home and can find out as much as I want to know on any conceivable subject. If it exists at all and it's online, I can find it quickly and easily, more often than not. If it's not online, well, that's what Amazon and other sites are for. I can find an actual book on the subject, buy it, and have it delivered to my door.

Once I've found my sources, it's simply a matter of determining how deeply I really need to delve, and then making notes of the salient points. As I said, less is often more. A smattering of details for flavor, backed up by research to assure that I don't make any egregious errors, is what my research is all about.

How I Write: Plotting and World Building

Welcome to the second weekly post in the How I Write series. This series of posts is the brainchild of Ansha Kotyk, who--along with the other participants, including Yours Truly--haunts the forums (registration required) of the Romance Divas website. You can go here to find a list of all the participants with links to their individual blog posts. We'll each be posting on the same topic each Wednesday for the next two or three months--longer, if it goes well and we're having fun with it.

This week's topic is wide open: Plot, character arcs, and world-building--whatever we want to tackle.

I'll start with plotting. Mostly, I don't. That is, I am a seat-of-my-pants writer. I've tried plotting out my stories beforehand and it never works for me. I haven't given up on trying--I think it would be a useful tool for my toolbox, but so far it's never worked. I get an idea and try to flesh it out, but I keep spotting holes in the plot, so I tinker and tinker with the plot until it dissolves like wet tissue paper and I give up on it.

What does work for me is making up the story as I go along. I start with a scene conflict--usually the opening scene, but not always--and just start writing. As events unfold I discover what the plot is. This often involves going back and adding scenes earlier in the story to lay the groundwork for a later conflict. Sometimes it means reworking a scene or throwing one out entirely. Such scenes go into my "cut scenes" file, where they may eventually be recycled, in whole or in part, in another story.

*I should point out that I'm not really 'discovering' anything. I'm making it up, but it often feels like a discovery because a lot of the work goes on in my subconscious. I don't like it when people disown their agency, when they speak of having a muse, or of muses speaking to them--or deserting them. Own your creativity, people!

As for world building--I repeat, I'm a seat-of-my-pants writer. I've written superheroes, fantasy, science fiction, and contemporary fiction. Just like when I start a story with minimal plot, I start with a basic idea of what sort of world the characters inhabit. Often those details are dictated by the story I want to tell; some particular details of government or culture or geography are required to make the story work. The other details often don't get fleshed out until they come up in the course of writing the story. This would happen anyhow--no writer can anticipate all the details she'll have to provide to make the world real to her readers. But it can be exciting--and sometimes a little scary--to discover, as your characters do, that some facet of the world around them is going to materially influence the plot.


The most recent example of that is in the recently-completed manuscript for my SF novel about the man who repossesses starships. The starships take off and land like jet aircraft. When they get high enough--in air too thin for the air-breathing jets to function any longer--they switch to onboard rocket fuel and the jet engines function like rockets to take them out of the atmosphere. (Such engines don't actually exist yet, but they've been contemplated and they're feasible.) Only then, in vacuum, can they fire up the FTL drives that take them from one system to another.

I decided all this the first time I wrote about my hero making off with a starship. It was just color--until later in the manuscript, when the fact that starships need long, long runways to land on when they de-orbit affected the plot. It sent my hero on a cross-continental journey he hadn't anticipated, and meant that many more obstacles to achieving his goals. I fleshed out a great many other details about the world in which he lives, some of which I will have to go back and add to earlier scenes as I work on the first revision of the novel.

Plotting and world-building are both very organic processes, at least for those of us who don't plot it all out ahead of time. And for me, at least, that's part of the fun. I'm never quite sure what I'm going to write, so it's often as much of an adventure fore me as it is for the characters. And, I hope, the readers.

Excerpt: Flying High (paranormal erotica, NC-17)

Welcome to Excerpt Monday! A number of authors are linking to and from the Excerpt Monday home page, and you can read excerpts from all of them. Follow the links and enjoy!
 
FLYING HIGH by Gail Roarke
 

A paranormal/urban fantasy erotic romance short, is available from Cobblestone Press.

It's another Excerpt Monday and that means--an excerpt! In this case, as if you couldn't tell from the image above, an excerpt from Flying High, the first of several erotic shorts in the very unofficial "Sex and the Single Superheroine" series.

BLURB:

Iron Maiden can fly through the air and bend steel in her bare hands. But finding a man to satisfy her may be the one feat she cannot manage. Not only is her first attempt rudely interrupted by bad guys, but mere mortals find her strength intimidating--and none of her fellow crime fighters is up to the challenge. She's beginning to think she's doomed to a life of celibacy--until she meets the enigmatic Black Knight and discovers that the sky's the limit!

EXCERPT:

Leah was trembling on the verge of an orgasm.

For the last half hour, a man she knew only as Steve had been giving her incredible oral sex. His mouth had worked wonders, reducing her to babbling incoherence as she writhed with pleasure. After he'd eaten and fingered her to one orgasm after another, he'd climbed up to loom over her with a smug grin as he slid his gloriously hard cock inside her.

Strangers shared the bed with Leah and Steve, another couple named Suzanne and Bill. Suzanne was on her elbows and knees facing the headboard, head resting on her crossed arms, Bill kneeling behind her. Suzanne's heavy breasts swayed with every thrust of Bill's hips. Leah occasionally met Bill's eyes as he watched her with Steve, sharing a knowing grin. It was daring enough that she was having sex with a man she'd only met an hour ago—to be doing so in public only added to the thrill.

Leah was very glad she'd worked up the nerve to contact their host, Ron, by instant message. She'd chatted with him for hours, asking questions, flirting and allowing herself to be cajoled into coming to this party. Actually showing up tonight had been scarier than facing any armed criminal or supervillain.

She'd been shaking when she knocked on the front door. A bearded man in his forties had opened the door. Leah had introduced herself with the pseudonym she'd given him online. He'd introduced himself as Ron and invited her in. There were a dozen people in his living room in various states of undress. Two large mattresses took up most of the floor space. Ron had introduced her to them all, but she'd been too nervous for the names to stick in her memory.

The next two hours were surreal. Leah watched with fascination as men and women made love right in front of her, mostly couples, but occasionally threesomes. Leah didn't participate. She was still too nervous—and frankly too caught up in watching at first. She'd seen porn videos before but had never witnessed other people having sex in front of her. It was startling and a little shocking.

It was also arousing. She found herself squirming in her seat, feeling flushed with excitement. Her nipples were erect, and she could feel the moisture between her legs. By the time another man named Steve had arrived, her arousal had trumped her nervousness.

Steve had wasted no time before inviting her to play with him. She'd agreed but wasn't ready to do so quite so publicly. He had smiled, taken her hand and led her upstairs to one of the bedrooms, where he'd taken her in his arms and kissed her, beginning the slow seduction that had led to this moment.

And then, of course, it all went wrong....

www.cobblestone-press.com

How I Write: Ideas--Where Do You Get Them?

Welcome to the inaugural post in the How I Write series. This series of posts is the brainchild of Ansha Kotyk, who--along with the other participants, including Yours Truly--haunts the forums (registration required) of the Romance Divas website. We'll each be posting on the same topic each Wednesday for the next two or three months--longer, if it goes well and we're having fun with it.

So, today's topic is ideas. Specifically, where do I get them.Or more broadly, where does any writer get them. SF writer Harlan Ellison once famously replied, "Poughkeepsie." But he's infamous for not suffering fools gladly, and many a writer tires of being asked just that question.

The answer is that ideas are everywhere. They're thick on the ground, a glut on the market. It's not getting an idea that's difficult, it's turning an idea into a completed story. Most professional writers will tell you that they have more ideas for stories than they'll ever have the time and energy to write--something many non-writers don't seem to understand. More than one famous writer has been offered an idea in return for his doing the work of turning it into a story, after which the idea man and the writer will share in the bounty sure to flow from this partnership. That's rather like handing a sculptor a block of wood or marble and saying, "You make a sculpture of a dolphin, and we'll share the profits when it sells." Not a very enticing offer.

I have files full of ideas on my computer, and partial stories. I have notebooks scattered around the house with notes, story synopses, and short character bios, all of which could be turned into stories eventually. Some I've had in my mind for years but have never found the right way to spin into fiction. Others come to me and get turned into stories almost immediately.

But the question is: where do I get them.

I get them by looking at the world around me and asking questions. You can look at your family, your friends, your co-workers, strangers; you can look at the neighborhood, your home town, your nation, or the world. You can look at the news, or other works of fiction. You ask, "What if?" And then you consider the possibilities. What if things were different, in small ways or large? What if people behaved different, individually or collectively? What if two very different people were attracted to one another?--leads to any number of romance stories. What if you received an invitation to a magic school?--J. K. Rowling created Harry Potter. What if some new technology made it impossible to conceal your thoughts from those you loved? What happens then?

Another good question is, "Why?" When you notice someone doing something eye-catching, unusual or odd, ask yourself why. Why did that happen? What would motivate someone to do what you observed? What was his purpose? What was his goal? Discard the mundane answers, the easy, off-the-top-of-your-head answers. Dig deeeper. Look for something more intriguing.

What if? Why?


I'm partial to speculative fiction (i.e., science fiction, fantasy, comics and superhero stories). What if a young woman with superhuman strength wanted to try bondage? Who could bind her? How? Bound by Convention was the story I wrote to answer that question for myself. What if someone defaults on the payments for his multi-million dollar starship? Well, someone would have to repossess that starship for the bank, wouldn't they? I just finished the first draft of a novel about that someone. A dozen other writers could tackle the same idea and produce a dozen other stories--better or worse or just different.

The idea is just the starting point. What you do with it is what matters.

Next Week: Character/World-Building

Below is the current list of contributing writers to the HOW I WRITE blog series.
Click a link and find out HOW I WRITE!  (in alphabetical order, check us all out!)
Kendall Ashby Corbit- http://www.twokendals.blogspot.com/ Rated R
Kristine Asselin – http://krisasselin.blogspot.com/ Rated PG
Tatiana Caldwell – http://tatianacaldwell.com/blog Rated R
Jennifer Carson - http://jennifercarson.wordpress.com/ Rated PG
Isabelle Flynn - http://www.isabelleflynn.com/ Rated PG
Ansha Kotyk – http://www.anshakotyk.com/blog Rated PG
Laura Pauling – http://laurapauling.com/ Rated PG
Alexia Reed – http://alexiareed.blogspot.com Rated R
P.M. Rousseau – http://pmrousseau.com/ Rated R