A new approach to writing.

I have been writing, in fact, I have been writing a lot. I have been in the groove so to speak. It all started last weekend, the Jubilee weekend, I was totally on my own for most of it as my children had gone off to various places so I decided to get to grips with Trafficking. I have been walking round and round it without actually really getting down to the writing. Really engaging with it. It was time to change this. I had my denouement. I knew what my characters looked like. I had a change of setting and I had two chapters.

I made a weekend of it and I took Martin Scorsese's advice - he suggests you need to know the past in order to create the new. (Check out this blog post from back in 2010)  I watched a couple of films and read some books in order to remind me of what I liked and what I wanted to achieve. And then I started. I was really lucky the words just flowed. All the images in my head just fell onto the page and  in four days I managed to write just over 16,000 words and 11 chapters with all the rest clearly forming in my head as I wrote. This is the first time it has been such a complete process. In part I think it is down to the amount of pre-writing thinking I have done which has helped form the story so totally.

There was another difference this time though. I am a tinkerer or I was. As I wrote I would go back and change things. Fiddle with them slightly until they were right but this always stopped the creative process. It was like a hiatus, so this time I decided to keep writing regardless. If I thought of something I put it in my notebook under a list of things to check and/or change. For example I wrote a chapter last night which I know is too long (it has been so hard not to go back to it) but I am going to wait until the end and I have the whole picture to see how I want to change it. I also know I need to add more sense of place and more character detail. As I have said to you before I write cold, getting the story down, and then go back and fill in the colour. It is actually quite liberating to just get the story down and not stop. I am now over 22,000 words and the ideas are still flowing easily. I do wonder if this is because I have changed my method of writing. Whether it is or it isn't I am relieved and delighted. When it flows like this it is a wonderful place to be. Long may it last

This was the theme tune to my writing, Paul Buchanan's album Mid Air