Brenda Cooper: Readers, and Doing a First Draft

by Brenda Cooper

Welcome to the second installment of Adventures in Writing. This week I’m back from the Rainforest Writers Village and now balancing writing, the day job, family, and a head cold all at once.

The highlight of the week so far has been a trip to a book group at a local (Portland) independent bookstore where I heard good things from a whole circle of people who had read The Silver Ship and the Sea. Writing is a weird profession: a river of rejection, waves of the word no, and sometimes, floating on the waves, a yes.

But the main reason to write is for readers to read. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking we’re writing for editors or publishers or money, but the real key is writing for readers. So talking to people who read my book felt good. Even better, they liked it.

In the meantime, I’m revising a story I finished at the workshop set in the same world as my books, still reading my own book two in the current series, Reading the Wind, to get ready for the copyedits on the next book, Wings of Creation. And I’m planning a story for the positive future anthology Shine. I think every science fiction writer out there should write a story for Shine. The guidelines call for a near-future story with a positive spin. We could use that right now. Science Fiction has become pretty steadily apocalyptic, even though in reality, the human race is basically doing better than ever before. So if we all write a story for Shine, then they’ll buy and publish a bunch of good ones, and there will be a lot more positive science fiction looking for homes and getting published elsewhere.

I have to admit that if my cold would go away, I’d feel shinier.

So in my last blog I talked about idea generation, which is freeform and largely can i buy gabapentin in spain subconscious. I then pick an idea using my more analytical parts, although I have to admit my emotional attachment to the story is usually how I finally choose. Now I have a few paragraphs to a page summarizing the story, including a beginning, a middle, and an end (right now, I have ten of these for my Shine story). It’s gut check time – do I need to develop it more? Do I need to research anything? If the answer to either of those is yes, or if I just don’t feel ready to start, I’ll play with my idea some more, most likely with a pen and paper journal.

When I sit down at the computer and create a lovely blank page to start filling in, I go fast. I just need to get the whole story spit out. I typically write five hundred to a thousand words an hour and work until I’m done. That might be one sitting or across a few days, and a few trips to coffee houses on the way to or from work. If it stretches, I do reread what I’ve written so far, and maybe tinker a bit, every time I sit down. But I don’t do major editing. The more I stay out of my editorial brain the more unexpected and lovely things drip out of my fingers and onto the page. Much junk comes out too, but that can be dealt with later. At this stage I’m not worried about specifics like pacing, so some scenes might be well developed while others are sketches. That’s all okay since there’s more work to come. What matters is to stay out of my brain and use my heart as much as I can. Yes, even in science fiction.

So now I feel compelled to mention that there is no one right process. So what’s your process?