BookGoodies, a well-known site for promoting books, was nice enough to do an interview with me this week. For your general edification, you can find it here.
Here’s one of the questions they asked — how I write. (If you’re not up on the lingo, a “pantser” is someone who creates the plot as he goes. Nobody is 100% pantser or 100% outliner — I create detailed outlines that are usually overtaken by events.
If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts, I name some of the most interesting software I’ve found.
Tell us about your writing process.
I’d like to be an outliner but I generally wind up being a pantser, because the process of writing sparks off many of the ideas that wind up in the finished work.
My main tool for information-gathering is Evernote. I tuck factoids about places, people, and things in it, organize them by book and character, then turn the notes into my rather detailed sketches. I keep those in Scrivener.
When I’m ready to write, I use an outliner (usually Tree, a neat horizontal outliner for Mac) or Scapple, the mind-map app from Scrivener. From there I start the writing process.
The first draft is longhand, but thereafter the manuscript lives in Scrivener. I edited on double-spaced printouts.
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