IntotheWayVerse
Hi Will, interested in hearing a bit about your writing process. Maybe this sort of thing is proprietary/confidential for authors, so apologies if overstepping.How do you go about structuring the actual writing of your books? Do you write linearly, one chapter at a time, or do you jump around, writing scenes from future places in the book before filling in the gaps? (or, none of the above).How often do you change what you've originally written? I'm sure there is a lot of editing that goes on, but do you often read back over sentences/paragraphs/chapters and change everything that's there? I guess I'm wondering what % of your writing you end up keeping after it's first put down on paper.
Will Wight
It changes. what they tell you a lot is they tell you to sit down and write a certain amount per day, write 2 hours a day, write 1500 words per day, write from 8 to 10 am and make sure you....whatever whatever whatever. I can't do that, I'm not very good a writing to a schedule, so instead of trying that, is I write in blocks of time, so I isolate myself for 3 or 5 days or a week, as much time as I can and I just write all day. So I write all day, I sprint rather than marathon basically. For me, that helps me to stay more productive, and helps me keep more focussed, because as I'm writing for those 3 days, I am completely in that world, I'm in Cradle, I'm not thinking of anything else, I don't take phone calls, I don't do anything else, I just write. So that's the way I actually write.
So what I normally do, is a write a brief idea of what the book is going to be about first. So I try to come up with enough minimum information that I can start working, so I try to start working as soon as possible in the process. When its a series it's a lot easier because I don't have to, for instance, outline who Lindon is and where he was up 'til this point, because I know who Lindon is and I know exactly where he's been up 'til this point because I've written six books about it. So that part gets easier as the series progresses. So I write that basic idea, I write down any ideas of what I think is going to be cool, what do I want to include in the book, and so on and so forth, but not a real detailed like chapter by chapter break down of what's going to happen. Then I try to start writing ASAP. I get to start writing and I usually write sequentially, so I start at the beginning and I continue. However, what I tried this last time, and I'm probably going to do something like this moving forward, was I knew there were certain key scenes, and in this case they were the rounds of the tournament, but there were key scenes that I was definitely going to be including, and I knew how they would go and I knew all that stuff. So I decided to write those first. I went through an wrote all Lindon's rounds, and I wrote those one at a time, I wrote the first round and then the second round but I skipped all the stuff in between the rounds. That allowed me to really nail down the bigger structure of the book so it doesn't change, because a lot of times as I'm writing the book I get halfway through and I'm like "oh man I have this cool idea, and it'd be so neat", and then I start changing what I'd originally planned, and that's what ends up taking a lot longer in the books. Then I afterwards went in and I was like "okay so I know now what needs to go between rounds".
So that's what I did this last time. I'm probably going to do that again. The reason I did that is so that I don't start changing my mind halfway through and end up taking too long.