Writing Methodology

The first draft is now complete.

We began with a very rough outline of the story. In fact, even though they have since changed, we began with the chapter titles. That seemed like the easiest way to organize the major plot points.

Although relatively unimportant at this stage, we then proceeded to add some basic formatting. This will likely change also, but it was somehow emotionally important.

We then started to add sentence fragments to each chapter. Most of the fragments later evolved into paragraphs, however a few were later merged with others.

Around this time, again more for emotional importance, we began thinking about cover art. The idea was to design something that might help readers visualize one of the most important moments in the story.

We then went through and ensured that every chapter had at least a few basic paragraphs. This resulted in additional detail.

We then went through, yet again, filling in timeline gaps with additional paragraphs. That brings us to the point we are at now, with a complete first draft.

However, the first draft only tells the basic story. It reads as if someone tells you his or her life story matter-of-factly, devoid of emotion. Therefore, the next iteration will focus on adding descriptive text. As previously stated, we want our readers to experience all of the sights, sounds, and feelings that we hope to convey.

After that, we will share the new draft with our inner circle. We will not yet be concerned with proofreading, but rather with the readers' experience. We see no point in having a grammatically correct bad story, but a good story can be checked before submission for publication.

We leave all that for another blog post.

TGIF

Out of curiosity, do any other part-time writers limit their writing to weekends? We find that at the end of any given work day our creative juices are just about dried up. Is it more common to try to push through a little bit each day or to just set aside larger blocks of time on days off?

Joe Latte, Assistant Writer

Meet our new assistant writer, affectionately named Joe Latte. He came highly recommended.

That was a bad idea.

Our current challenge, which probably befalls most part-time writers, is finding the time to actually write. Yes, our entire story is already outlined. However, converting surreal imagery into sufficiently descriptive text is rather challenging. We need you, the reader, to be able to visualize what happened. And we need you to not just visualize, for that matter, because the inspirational nightmare for our book also drew upon the senses of sound and touch. We need you to see what was seen, hear what was heard, and feel what was felt.

That said, we set a goal of writing a little bit each evening before going to bed. If you have never tried it before, we can tell you that writing a horror story before going to sleep is a bad idea.

Cover Art

The book is developing nicely, so we spent a little time thinking about a design for the front cover. And since there is one part of the story that is clearly the most startling, we chose to visualize that as closely as we can. So between the front cover and the book's title, we hope to establish a true horror theme even before you read the first page.

Rated PG-13

At first, we were simply going to write a horror story based on the nightmare that inspired it. In movie terms, this would have deserved an R rating. Although the dream was not explicit in sexuality, violence, or profanity, there were two moments that are definitely too mature, suggestively, for younger audiences.

However, there has been an expression of interest in this project by teenagers and pre-teens. Therefore, we have determined that we can tone down those two elements without weakening the integrity of the base story. As we considered writing two versions of the book, one edited and one not, we determined that re-adding those two elements really wouldn't contribute appreciably to the story anyway.