Grimby’s Gratitude – How I Write
the E-Newsletter of Goldeen Ogawa • Issue 14, January 2019
Originally posted for Patrons on January 4 on Patreon
What have I done?
- Written: Driving Arcana 30/4.3: “White Noise”
- Art: Personal art!
- Published: Driving Arcana: Rotation Four (eBook)
What am I doing?
- Cleanup on Professor Odd #17: Eyes in the Deep, edits for Driving Arcana: Rotation Five, and final read-through revisions for Lucena in the House of Madgrin.
- Art: Interior illustrations for The Aubergine Spellbook and Lucena in the House of Madgrin
- Publishing: The Aubergine Spellbook (The Adventures of Bouragner Felpz, Volume III)
Where am I going?
- I’m tucking in for a winter of productivity, but I’m sneaking up to Seattle in March to help Kikidoodle sell Purrmaids at Emerald City ComicCon. And I’ll be in Seattle again in April for Norwescon!
How I Write
I’ve read a lot of posts with advice about how you should write. This will not be one like them. This is not how anyone should write (unless they’d like to try). It’s a description of how I write at this particular point in my life. I’ve been developing this process since I began seriously writing stories in 2000, and it will continue to develop, I suspect, until the moment I die. But if you like my stories (which I hope you do), it may interest you to learn how they are written.
Note that this describes how I write fiction. My process for creating comics is, while similar, also substantially different.
Stage 0: Sparks Coagulate
This is sort of the proto-story soup that is constantly sloshing around inside my head, made up of half-formed ideas, images, feelings and concepts. The earliest stage of a story begins here, when enough idea-bits bond together that they begin to snowball and take on a life of their own. I find that once a proto-story knows how it will end, it can move on to…
Stage 1: Raw Words
This is similar to what is commonly known as a rough draft. Now, what exactly that means will vary greatly between writers. For me it means the whole story, beginning to end, as close to perfect as I can get it on the first try. My lofty goal is to be able to actually get it perfect on the first try. Which I don’t know if any other writer has had the audacity to admit, but I bet we all wish we could. And I very nearly have done it when the story was short enough and the ideas clear enough. And I’ve gotten better at it the more I practice writing. But as of now my stories need a few stages of revisions before they’re ready for print.
Stage 2: Cleanups
This is not a second draft as most writers might recognize it. Maybe some could call it story edits. What I call it is applying the Diana Wynne Jones principle of “reading the whole thing over again as if you have never read it before” and fixing all the things that make me squirm inside and think “oh, I suppose that’ll do” (Diana says that is a sure sign that it won’t). Or, cleanups. I clean up the story. In the early years this could mean rewriting big chunks, but lately I find it’s mostly fine-tuning words and fixing all the typos I can find. And the occasional glaring continuity error.
Stage 3: Edits
Once a story is cleaned up it goes out to my Wonderful Mother for copy edits. In the beginning she would also do story edits, but these days I can do most of them myself in the cleanup stage. Then it comes back to me, and I enter or STET her edits (and do a little more cleaning), before sending it back to her one last time to check that all the edits are accounted for and that my “cleaning” did not introduce any new errors.
Stage 4: Final Read-through
This, after the raw words, is the hardest part of writing a story: I take the edited manuscript and read it out loud to myself to make sure it sounds good. This entails one last pass of cleaning and typo-catching, as nothing makes you really look at the words like having to say them aloud. It also takes a lot of energy, and I can’t do it in public places like cafés or waiting rooms so it can take even longer than writing the thing in the first place. But once it’s finally done the manuscript goes back to WoMo one last time for her to check my final changes (because I have caught glaring errors only in the read-through that necessitated rewriting hundreds of words) and then… then it’s time for Stage 5.
Stage 5: Publishing
At this stage the story is effectively finished. The only changes are extremely minor corrections (TYPOS), since publishing is a whole other process. One which deserves its own post.
And that’s how I write stories. You can probably guess, but it’s a lot easier said than done. So thanks for reading!
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What’s coming in January?
Patrons can look forward to:
- Saturday updates to the Sparks Gallery
- Sunday updates to “Travels in Valdelluna”
- AND exclusive sneak peeks at upcoming projects!
ProTip
Failure is relative. What looks like one specific failure might actually be a necessary stepping stone to eventual success. The great thing about art and writing is that no one needs to see your failures.
The bad thing about art and writing is, because we don’t show off our failures, we can create the illusion of easy success. Don’t fall for it. Dare to fail!
This post has been generously sponsored by my Fellow Traveler patrons.