People often ask me about my process for writing books. It\u2019s really pretty simple. I start at the beginning and write to the end, finding out what\u2019s going to happen as I go along. I do NOT outline. I met outlining in Mrs. Watkins\u2019s sixth grade geography class. I hated outlining then, and nothing that has happened to me in the intervening decades has changed my mind about that. Oh, there\u2019s one more thing. Since I write murder mysteries, I usually start with someone dead and spend the rest of the book trying to figure out who did it and how come. Easy peasy, right? Well, not exactly.<\/p>\n
I kicked Joanna #22 off in my usual manner\u2014with someone finding a dead body. Since there\u2019s a bullet in the back of his skull, clearly the he\u2019s the victim of a homicide, but he doesn\u2019t have a name yet though because the victim has yet to be identified. That\u2019s what I meant when I mentioned out learning things as I go along, see above paragraph. To begin with, I was pretty sure the dead guy was also a bad guy. Now that I\u2019m 10,299 words (I count the words every day) into this as yet unnamed book, I\u2019ve changed my mind about that. At this point I\u2019m pretty sure the dead guy was actually a good guy. I\u2019m also reasonably sure about who\u2019s responsible for his death although I can\u2019t say that definitively, either, because I\u2019ve yet to meet that particular individual.<\/p>\n
You can chalk my being able to make changes like that along the way to my taking a page out of the Evie Busk Handbook of Sage Advice which reads as follows: A wise man changes his mind. A fool never does. Changing my mind about a character is something I\u2019ve had to do on any number of occasions over the course of forty-plus years of writing close to seventy books. Ditto for discovering along the way that the person I originally thought was the killer didn\u2019t do it. In one instance, I didn\u2019t come to that surprise realization until two chapters from the end of the story. Believe me, it\u2019s a whole lot easier to do that EARLY in a book than it is at the last minute.<\/p>\n
Years ago I saw a production of August Wilson\u2019s play, Two Trains Running<\/em>. The central idea of the play is there are two trains running, one going south and one going north. If you don\u2019t happen to like what\u2019s going on at your end of the track, then get on board a train headed in the opposite direction.<\/p>\n Early on in writing this book I realized that the storyline was feeling like pretty thin gruel. Then, overnight one night, I realized there was a second storyline unfolding in Joanna Brady\u2019s life at the same time, one that\u2019s running parallel to the other one. Now though, with both stories chugging along in the right direction, I\u2019m happy to be along for the ride.<\/p>\n As for why the book is still unnamed? So far suitable title hasn\u2019t presented itself. I trust that will happen. After all, it\u2019s always done so before.<\/p>\n Joanna #22 is currently at the 10% mark. As for the other 90%? Again, as Evie would say, if it is to be it is up to me, so stay tuned. In the meantime, I should probably stop working on the blog and go back do working on the book. The first thing I need to do on that score is to bone up on my Southern California geography. So no, I\u2019m not off to see the Wizard. Instead I\u2019m going spend some time communing with Apple Maps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" People often ask me about my process for writing books. It\u2019s really pretty simple. I start at the beginning and write to the end, finding out what\u2019s going to happen as I go along. I do NOT outline. I met outlining in Mrs. Watkins\u2019s sixth grade geography class. I hated outlining then, and nothing that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Unnamed Joanna Brady #22 Progress Report","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33,147,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-joanna-brady","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-Tw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3442"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3443,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3442\/revisions\/3443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}