Writing Life

Today, I’m discussing “Writing Life”.  What a great topic, especially since that’s my daily routine.

I recently read an article on this very subject where the author suggests all sorts of things to eliminate boredom.  Boredom???  Who the heck is bored?? 

Now perhaps I read that incorrectly, but quite honestly, if you’re bored, then it’s time to take a break from the novel you’re writing and move onto another.

Starting a new story is so much fun, isn’t it? Where do my story ideas come from?  Conversations, eavesdropping, funny things that happen to me, or my friends, or when I’m writing suspense, I’m using the newspaper for ideas. This is when the ‘what if’ game comes into the picture to formulate the ideas through various perspectives until I settle on an idea that excites me. 

Once that’s done, I begin my process by developing my characters and doing profiles.  I conduct interview sessions with lots of questions, after which, I match the profiles up against the personality types as based on the Meyers-Briggs Personality test, and then, I find the closest match of sun signs found in “Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs”.   

Now comes the fun part of collecting pictures of my characters from magazines, or an Internet search for models of all ages.  Soap Opera characters’ photos work really well too.  I’m always mindful about selecting images of characters I know nothing about simply because I don’t want to change protagonist’s personality type after I’ve gone through all the trouble to mold them into what I want them to be.  Sort of like playing God, don’t you think?

Next comes a brief outline, chapter by chapter, with as much information as I can come up with.  Sometimes it’s a little brief until I actually begin doing the research, but this is the time to develop the story no matter how long it takes.  This is called doing your homework.  It’s almost like being in school again, don’t you think?

What is your writing process like?