My Writing Process

                                                                                                                

I spent last week finishing up on my current writing projects; The Isle House Ghost, a Red Wine novella, and Nine Again, another Red Wine story, but this time a short story. Nine Again is an extension of The Isle House Ghost, story, basically an afterthought, but an irresistible one. However, to have tacked it on to the main story would have destroy the symmetry of that story, and my ending, so it is its own separate thing. 

But that's not what I want to talk about here. I want to outline the steps I take to produce a story. And since I'm never at a loss for words, on a page anyway. let's begin.

Step One. Dream up a story. I usually spend three or more months just thinking about the story I want to write, getting to know it from beginning to end. Ideally. And often going over key scenes dozens of times, or more, in my head, so that when I sit down to write the story, I am telling a story that I know. Again, ideally.

Step Two. Write it. If I've done my job and know the story I want to tell from nose to tail, all I have to do is to put the scenes into words. Putting the story into words will add to and alter the original story somewhat as it goes along, but it will follow the outline of the story I dreamed up. I write it from beginning to the end. However there have been stories that I find, when I get to the middle of them, that I did a little too much handwaving over what happens in the middle, and have to stop and think about what I can come up with to fill in that gap. Sometimes I've had to put a story away for a while time, even a year, while I try to come up with stuff to fill that middle. Or in one case, just decide to make it into a novella. You don't need middles in novellas. I usually go back and start editing what I have written while I come up with things to fill out the middle of the story.

This first draft is the most important part of the story, since I do not make major changes to it in subsequent drafts, or edits, as some people call the process or revising the first draft. The first draft is the hardest part of the process because it sets the pattern, and so I need to be happy with it before going on, because I know I'll be only tinkering with it in subsequent drafts.

This step, writing the first draft, also takes about three or four months for a novel.

Step Three. Second draft. After finishing my first draft, I usually turn around and start my second draft. While experts often say that you should wait a while before starting to edit your work, I figure that the nose of my story is at least three months in the past, so that should be far enough in the past to view with an new eyes, and since revising is a lot easier than writing, the momentum of this draft will carry me all through this second draft. 

I don't make major changes. I will typically add 10% more words, as I fill out sketchy descriptions and dialogs. Most the changes involve straightening out my words; eliminating as many of my "and"s as I can, and taking all those phrases that I tacked on to the end of sentences and moving them forward to where they should be in the sentence. I seem to have heard somewhere that the German language adds a lot of phrases at the end, so this propensity to tack on phrases at the end of a sentence might be a heritage of my German ancestors. I also, of course correct all the typos I find along the way. But hardly all.

This second draft may take several weeks to complete.

Step Four. Third draft. I go over the story again, but hopefully I find less to tinker with. These days I do my third draft in Google Docs, as it has a better grammar checker, and the text looks different, which might make things I would miss going over the same text a third time, stand out more. I tried loading the document onto an ebook ereader, and then reading it, and then make changes when I found the clunkers when reading it as a book, but that proved to be too awkward. 

Ideally, after finishing my third draft, I should feel comfortable with the story as written. I know that anytime I read something of mine, I will find things I want to change, no matter how may times I've gone over it. So that at some point I have to say "Good enough." and go with it, or I would never get anything out.

Step Five. This is an optional step, but one I find I'm taking more and more; namely. a fourth draft. This happens when I don't feel completely comfortable after my third draft. The Isle House Ghost has gone through four drafts. It is an old fashioned mystery, and as I wrote it, I came to realize that I needed to change things that I had already written to be consistent, so this back and forth, even in the second and third draft left me uneasy. I did more drafts for The Girl on the Kerb, as I wasn't comfortable with my first "finished" version, and I had the time while I was querying it. 

Step Six. Online proofing. In the last several years I've introduced this step with great success. I upload my work, chapter by chapter to the free online version of Grammarly to find typos, wrong words correctly spelled, where to put commas, etc. Everything underlined with red. I don't use their premium grammar suggestions. This is just for proofreading. I then take these Grammarly-proofed pages and upload them to Scribbr's own online grammar checker, and correct all the mistakes that Grammarly missed. And decide who's comma suggestions I'll take and whose I wont. All of this is time consuming, and discouraging. They find so many mistakes. But well worth it.

Step Seven. I then print out a copy of the story and hand it to my wife to proofread and offer any comments or suggestions. Thanks to the online proofreading, her job is much easier than it used to be, with entire pages going by without needing me to fix anything.

Step Eight. When I've made all the corrections that my wife has found, I offer it to my beta readers. My beta readers mostly act as proofreaders - many of them became my beta readers by offering corrections in my published works that were far more prevalent in my early books. Some do offer suggestions as well, that I take into account.

Step Nine. Prepare epub versions. These days for Amazon, I use  their Kindle Create app on my computer to format the ebooks and audiobooks for Amazon. Otherwise, I use Draft2Digital to format my books for them and for Google.

Step Ten. I reformate my stories for paperback books using LibreOffice, the same program I write the stories in. It isn't too hard, and I'm not overly fussy. I grew up reading mass market paperbacks. I also have to paint or find painting for the cover of the books, both ebook and paper. And I do an interior page one illustration, and sometimes maps as well for the paper edition.

So that's my work flow. At present, I have turned over The Isle House Ghost and Nine Again to my wife for her proofreading. But with a release date in February 2026, there is no hurry for to get at it, as I will probably only sent it out to my beta readers after the holidays. I have a cover for The Isle House Ghost that would work for both the ebook, and the omnibus paper version of  Those two books and The Founders' Tribunal that I intend to release around the same time. But I have an idea for a separate cover for the ebook version of The Isle House Ghost that I would like to paint. We'll see.

So, with all of that, you are up to date with my writing.