To all you writers...

Well, in all honesty, I usually write my stories without thinking. I just kinda go with the flow and let it all out. However, I prefer slowly planning out chapters if I have the time.

 

I'm still kinda "getting back" to the idea of fiction writing after high school and college, but I'm finding a process that works for me. It is really focusing on letting ideas percolate naturally, but then tackling them more methodically once they get to a certain point.

It starts as an idea, and as I glom more things onto the idea, I start thinking about tone, themes, and messaging. From there I decide basically what the story is, enough to start outlining, if something solid that I like has developed. This is where things get methodical, starting with the outline. From that outline I build a "quick draft". This is something where I can hammer out a "chapter" in say an hour, but won't be nearly as long as the real thing. Quick enough that I can more rapidly find issues with the outline, fix plot holes as I write later "chapters" and so on. Once I have a quick draft of the work I'm happy with, I move onto the real draft.

I'm finding that having at least some sort of pipeline helps reduce the amount of reworking that goes on. If an idea just isn't becoming solid, I've avoided the pain of trying to make it work when it simply isn't. And the quick draft thing is actually new for me, but I'm liking that it gives me a way to solidify things enough to get a feel for the flow and pacing, but it isn't nearly as expensive to re-work as a real draft would be.