Last Updated on February 19, 2024 by ADMIN-TOM
There’s a lot of hoo-hah going on in the writing community at the moment concerning outlining in writing. Let me be straight about this piece. I’m not advocating this is how you should write a story or book. This is simply me telling you, dear reader, how I write my books in the Twilight Zone.
And all Kudos to Rod Serling for his exemplary work, but my Twilight Zone is not his Twilight Zone.
So, here’s what happens to me when a book idea hits me between the eyes.
There I am, minding my own business, and I could be anywhere, doing anything, and suddenly I get a title to a book land in my cerebral grey matter. Once I have the book title, I soon get an idea of what the cover to the book should be like. And bear in mind, dear reader, that this also applies to stories and blog pieces like this one. Once I have a title and a book cover, or the featured image for a blog piece, then I start to get ideas about chapters. In the case of a blog, this rarely comes to me. But with a book, chapters come tumbling down from who knows where. And hereby lies the tale. Where do I get these ideas for books from?
In my case, I have a theory. I think an outside force drops them into my noggin from on high, that is, from a higher dimension. I believe what I call an inter-dimensional handler invokes a book idea into an unsuspecting human, i.e., me.
There I am, minding my own business, and bam!
Once I have around forty chapter titles, then it’s down to writing the book. I write a couple of sentences for each paragraph and from there it’s just down to filling in the rest, which usually flows fairly freely, but slowly.
And that’s when I get stuck. Things seem a little jumbled and they don’t seem to fit together. I have to sit back and wait. At that point, little ideas come to me to make a change here, change a bit there and twist a little here and delete a sentence there. Until finally, it’s done.
All I have to do at that point is pad it out a little, polish it a lot, proof it, edit it and then shove it through ProWritingAid.
Then I have my ARC and I can send it out for a few opinions.
Job done, thank you inter-dimensional alien beings for another winner.
Of course, I could be completely wrong and maybe I’m just a good storyteller. What do you think, dear reader?
Copyright © Tom Kane 2024
