Apologies for being a bit late with my post this month- school holidays are really disruptive routine-wise. This is possibly why I’ve been giving some thought to my creative process over the past few weeks.
I’ve got an amazing ability to take on too much and at the moment that means two active works in progress. (What were you thinking you fool? do I hear you cry? Or is that just my inner self?)
I’m serializing one work for subscribers to my monthly newsletter and ko-fi and chipping away steadily at a second ‘proper’ work. They are both set in my Lost in Time universe, but are a hundred and forty years apart and in different parts of the world.
This should make it easy to keep the two stories separate, yes?
Or… not so much.
I have come to the conclusion over the last week or so that this is because of the way I write. I ‘discovery write’, generally speaking. Which is a posh way of saying I’m the ultimate pantser. I see scenes in my head, I sit down and write them out in Scrivener, which gives you a handy cork-board sort of setting that lets you drag scenes about. And after a bit – usually about twenty or thirty thousand words – I suddenly realise what’s going on with the storyline, what order everything should be in and where the narrative is leading.
I’m never going to be Proust, but sue me, it seems to work.
Except recently, my two stories have bits that overlap. A notebook from one turns up in the other. Someone mentions something in passing that is a hat-tip to the other story. Initially I wasn’t doing it deliberately, but now, I’m taking pleasure in hiding the occasional little easter egg for readers to find. It shouldn’t make any difference which order the books are read in or even if they are both read, but it’s brought back my joy in the creative process when I was losing it slightly.
What’s your creative process like?
