If you’re getting sick of my complaining, you’re in luck — I’m finally going to talk about my actual process of writing. My routine is hardly defined and not in any way a rulebook, but I believe it capitalizes well on my sudden bursts of motivation but also works well with a lack of powerful motivation.
It always starts with a note. The birth of an idea, the concept of a concept, that I scramble to make real with text before it fades away.
I first conceived my fantasy series when I was in sixth grade.My memory of this time of my life is hazy, so for the purposes of this first step I’m going to use a slightly more recent example. In tenth grade, I did a project on World War I and spent a lot of time researching that era of history. I had also been reading a lot of young adult and teen fantasy, returning to recreational reading for the first time since middle school. Sitting in that overlap for multiple months, much of my imagination branched off from this mindspace, and one night I shot up from my bed in the pitch black, already reaching for my laptop.
I ended up with an incoherent, garbled mess of ideas listed in my Notes App — the early scraps of a duology set in a fictional world based on 1910s Slavic Europe. The main takeaway here is that inspiration will strike quite randomly, so if you aren’t able to force yourself to find it (just as you might not be able to force herself into “the zone”), do what you can to more naturally find a spark. Engage with the things that you are already interested in. Read books, watch movies, learn new topics and skills. While I was fostering an interest in history, I discovered a wellspring of images and narratives. You might encounter the same phenomenon doing something completely unrelated, like with a niche hobby or even while scrolling on your phone mindlessly. You’re never truly mindless, is what I mean.
After this initial conception, I reconfigure the mess into something more comprehensible: a vague summary, followed by a bulleted outline of story beats, and then a chapter-by-chapter outline. Essentially, break your book down, and then break it down some more. Each book in my current series is split into three parts (you obviously don’t have to do this), which helped me visualize the arc for each part and then sever those arcs into individual chapters. I determine what each arc needs to accomplish, so even if I end up shifting chapters around, I don’t lose focus.
For the story I’m currently working on, the third in the series, the main notes folder currently holds three pages: an outline, a bulleted list of various things to look out for during my rounds of edits, and random notes that include a hastily drawn map and outlines for very specific events in the book. For example — spoiler alert — a prison break.
There is also a sub-folder for “potential scenes” that I need to have prematurely written lest I go insane with all the circulating images in my head. Remember, your story may follow a certain chronology, but you don’t have to. Even in my drafting, if I don’t have the motivation for a certain scene or I want to skip a little ahead, I’ll type in something like “[more dialogue]” or “[walking along the road]” to signal to future me that a transitional or elaborating scene has to be entered here. If you have the motivation to write at all, don’t waste it — write what feels right.
Of course, the outlining structure depends on the book and what I think feels right for this particular style and/or genre. Below is the way I created sub-folders for the 1910s-inspired story I mentioned earlier. Here I have a section for characters, because of the multiple points of view, and world-building because of the more intricate details of the setting.
Don’t box yourself into my process, because I don’t even box myself into my process.
The rest of the method varies. I draft the entire story, rewrite scenes or even entire chapters, and cycle through rounds and rounds of editing until I feel confident in sending the manuscript to my editor. Sometimes, I find things like Google Calendar or Notion helpful to carve out time during the week to work on writing. Next chapter, I’ll talk about the process of finding professionals and self-publishing, but for a long time you as the author have sole authority over your draft. It sounds terrifying, and it is, but it is also liberating.
Your process is your process, ultimately, but I highly recommend taking the steps to make the actual writing and publishing part feel less daunting. It will take more than that to surpass the initial insecurities, but I promise you will benefit from breaking down your ideas into palatable, consumable pieces. Even if things change later on, even if you as a writer and person change later on, outlining and planning will keep the heart of your original idea alive — thus honoring who you were when you woke up in the middle of that fateful night, already opening up the Notes App.
By Oshmi Ghosh
Oshmi Ghosh is a rising junior at NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in English with minors in Creative Writing, History, and Entertainment Business. You can usually find her appreciating the simple things in life: tea with milk and sugar, a good book, and/or intensely competitive board games.
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