My Writing Process

I'm not sure if anybody is interested in this sort of thing, but here we go. I've been working on Repercussions since the beginning of September of 2011, about a week or two before season 2 began. Since then, I've been trying to develop writing methods for the novel. Currently, I'm operating under a four-phase plan.

Phase One: First draft. What it says on the tin. At first, I actually took zero notes on anything, I just had a vague idea of what I wanted to do, and I started writing. I divided the novel up into "acts" in my brain, with each of the five "acts" being a significant event in the story. My original outline for act 1 was something along the lines of "introduce Greyhoof, have him do something heroic to gain the trust of the main characters and the reader." That's it. I'd write a chapter, and below it, I'd make a short list of instructions contained in double parentheses, akin to an RPer saying something OOC (no, I never RP'd). I abandoned this method with acts 2 and 3, and just wrote stuff down as it came.

I finally began writing physical notes, outlining in bullet point what I wanted to happen within each chapter. I never wrote a full plot outline for the novel. The closest I came was creating the basic infrastructure for act 5. Currently, we are in act 4, and will be until chapter 19. Similar to a Shakespearean play, act 5 is the "resolution" act, tying up all the loose ends of the story and resolving all major conflicts. For Repercussions, I have not been doing any true first drafting since January, when I completed the epologue for the story on the 31st. Some parts of the story are completely new, such as the Cadence/Shining Armour scenes, of course, but on the whole, first drafting doesn't really happen much anymore.

Phase Two: Second draft. Especially in the case of the first 15 chapters -- which have now been condensed into 11 -- my writing was quite abysmal, which meant total rewrites in most cases. Very rarely did I manage to salvage anything from the first draft in that section. Nowadays, I've more or less combined this phase of my writing with the first phase, because I've gotten good enough to not have to do such large-scale changes. However, this may not hold true once I start my second novel, whatever it may be. I just haven't needed to do entire first plus second drafts for the new sections of Repercussions, nor did I have to do this with A Twinkle in His Eye, or any of my University work. Perhaps because it's so much easier to write something not completely awful when you're only writing down less than four thousand words.

Anyway, for Repercussions, I keep both the first draft and current documents open side by side. I copy the good stuff, otherwise I rephrase or rewrite parts. I've gone through parts of it where I ignore entire pages of the first draft, taking only a few fragments from it, and the equivalent part of the second draft is written from scratch. I write notes down for almost all of the second draft stuff, specifically on issues I know I need to address, things to add, or things to delete, or other such general reminders.

Phase Three: Here is when I show my friends things. I get as much feedback from people as possible, and I have a wide circle of helpful prereaders. Best of all, their tastes, backgrounds, and writing skill levels are quite diverse, which gives me a broad scope of opinions. I also have one specific friend who goes through my second draft of Repercussions on a separate google doc and leaves comments on things he likes or has issues with. Taking all that feedback into account, I make major or minor revisions where appropriate a while after I've written it. I feel this is very important for everybody to do.

Phase Four: The final part. This is where I physically print out the piece of writing, usually go sit somewhere that isn't my computer desk, and revise it with a green pen. This is where I get super picky. I look for redundancies, incorrect grammar, poor sentance structure, etc. I go over this as thoroughly as I can, and in some cases, I break out the thesaurus, particularly in situations where I find the same word occurring twice and I can't come up with a good alternative. For example, in A Twinkle in His Eye, I replaced some subpar word or other with "broth." Could I have thought of that word on my own? Was it in my vocabulary to begin with? Absolutely, but I simply speeded the process with thesaurus.com. When it comes to Repercussions, after I've done my own green pen work, Horse Voice comes over to my house and goes over it with his blue pen, and we discuss things before the chapter is considered finished.

That's basically the process I go through. Everything I've posted on here has been worked on that much. This is why you don't see terrible mechanical problems when you read my stories, and this is why it's taking a week or more for me to post a Repercussions chapter. Will I be able to maintain the pace of a chapter a week? I hope so, but I cannot guarantee it.

I hope you enjoyed this insight, assuming people actually read my blog posts.

Comments

[v-invidia]

Oh pony, if only more writers here approached working on their fics in such an ambitious way! But, you forgot to mention the clop session between every phase! :3