The Writing Process

Still beavering away at the new book. I thought I'd make a few comments on my writing process in case there are any authors out there who want to compare notes in the comments.

 

I'm finished my first pass, and I am very happy with the overall concept and the flow of the book. It's in novel form and has a nice story arc to it. It builds slowly, introducing us to the characters. I try to make sure there is at least a bit of titillating stuff in every chapter. In later chapters I pull out more of the stops. I basically try to take the reader on a journey through the character's awakening to domestic discipline.

I foreshadow things to come. For example, in the early chapters quite often Julie is asking David to stop the car at a rest stop so she can go pee. This foreshadows the diapering she will experience in a later chapter. Or David and my Dad exchange a subtle innuendo, which foreshadows the point in the book where David spanks me in front of Daddy for the first time. Or Nancy start off as an eighteen year-old brat and we comment that she needs a spanking, which foreshadows my parents taking up spanking again for her.

It's all written down in my word processor, but I find I can't proof-read it there. That's where I write. I can't read it there. I render it down to pdf in approximately the format it will be in Kindle. I email that to myself and load it onto a pdf reader on my iPad. Then I curl up with it and read it all the way straight through from start to end. Of course, I catch typos as I go, and I have a highlighter feature on my pdf reader so I can quickly mark the problem area and read on without much interrupting the reading flow. I then go back to the word processor on the computer and laboriously make my way through all the marked areas and correct them. It's amazing to me that I can read it straight through like this, several times, and still find obvious typos that were there from the start.

I do a pass through looking for consistency in the form and the verb tenses. When I blurt I tend to mix up my past and present tenses freely, so I have to go back and put it all into a coherent grammatical structure. This involves deciding on your point of view when telling the story. I decided to tell it from a point 4 years after the events. Only the final short chapter brings us up into the present to wrap up the events of the book.

At this point I can begin reading it with a more critical eye to the reader's engagement and enjoyment. If I'm boring myself, even after the 10th read, It's not right yet. I found some of the earlier chapters to be too slow moving, and so am cutting those down to size. I also wrote in too much over-the-top stuff that when I read it back I can no longer suspend disbelief, so I have to go back and tone that stuff down also. Also as I go through it a nice phrase comes to mind that I think would add something, so I add that in judiciously.

I find in places that some of my own writing is plain annoying me. It feels heavy and pedantic in places, so I have to go back and do something about that.

There's a surprising lot of thought and effort that goes into producing a really readable and enjoyable book. I knew this from my first book, and so knew what to expect on this one.

That's my little update, now back to work, woman! Mush! Mush!