02/11/2017 - Pre Production

I'm in pre-production of my next book, it's very exciting.

When I wrote my first book, I didn't even know I was writing a book. It just happened. I started off writing a short story that got really out of control. More or less the same thing happened with my second and third books (the third book is sitting on a hard drive waiting patiently. I haven't decided what to do with it yet.)

Since then I've become ever more enamoured by planning. The more I planned my work out in advance, the better the end result was and the less re-writing I needed to do. I've still needed to re-write an awful lot. The book I've just finished a draft of had to be completely torn down and restarted from the beginning. I made some characterisation mistakes which made it a lot less good than it could have been.

For the book I'm currently in the process of planning, pre-production is being amazing. I'm working on character journies, plot and world building. I'm doing this in Scrivener - a writing tool I've fallen in love with. I still need to make a few maps (something I thought would be a waste of time but turned out to be invaluable in the last book) and write a chapter by chapter breakdown.

What's surprising is how fun pre-production is. When I first started writing I avoided planning because I thought it would be boring. I couldn't have been more wrong. Endlessly re-writing things because you made mistakes in the early stages and can't work out how to fix them? That's boring.