Welcome to the first stop on the
Twist of Fate blog tour! A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Shawna C. Smith on our podcast, and I thought our readers could benefit from learning more about her writing process.
My Writing Process
By Shawna C. Jones
I like to start a story by writing with paper and pen. When
I hold a pen and jot down words in a notebook, my creativity opens up. It’s a
freeing experience to be able to write something down, and eventually get into
a flow with it. At times it seems to be an altered experience. Words start
flowing, and sometimes after reading, I wonder if I actually wrote it, or if it
came from somewhere else.
At any time, if I’m not sure what I want to say, I just
start writing, and eventually the pen glides easily over the paper. At least
for me, this seems to help “prime the pump.” Then later, finding a different
way of saying something, or adding more to the picture, can give me an “aha”
moment. I was once told in a writing class to not cross anything out while
writing a first draft. They also advised us not to write longer than two hours,
because you need to process the information you’ve written and let it
percolate. Ideas for improvements could show up later that day, or in the
following days.
It took several tries for me to write Twist of Fate. It started out as a memoir, but that didn’t work.
Because I had so much travel in it, I felt like I was giving readers a tour.
And that’s not my story, although journeying to foreign countries was an
important part of it. So I decided to focus the story on the characters, and go
into less detail about the landscape. I realize this way of writing doesn’t appeal
to everyone. And that’s okay. It’s my story.
While reviewing my second try with the memoir style, an
editor told me that certain events had to happen before this and that. She said
it was a great story, but needed refining. By this time, I’d written over one
hundred pages (twice), and I decided to rethink the whole process, and approach
it from a different angle. I took out a lot of the travel, or used it as
backstory. I removed several characters that didn’t add to the story, and
weren’t really necessary. Who needs all those extras?
This new approach took another two tries by long hand before
I was happy with it. Then I went to the computer and started typing. Now as I
typed, other ways of making a sentence better would appear. Sometimes I would
continue typing it as it was, and other times I would stop and use long hand
again. Since this book is a memoir, I didn’t want to change a lot of it, but I
had two separate journeys going on at the same time. I didn’t know if I could
reconcile them without the story appearing disjointed. Somehow, I managed to
pull it off, but don’t ask me how I did it. I just went with my soul. In fact,
I would say my soul wrote a lot of this book. And sometimes in writing that’s
all that’s supposed to happen.
When we get too caught up in the words, we miss something.
Too much detail, for me, is distracting. I know some people prefer to have
every little detail, rather than using their imagination. I’m not one of those.
It will either bore me or put me to sleep.
So all in all, I wrote out my book at least four times. I
had it edited three times, and proofread twice, by some terrific people. It
took longer than I thought it would take: about ten months. All I know is
everyone’s writing is going to be different because we’re all different. We
come from various
backgrounds and experiences. And guess
what? It’s okay. My advice for aspiring writers is to not stop writing. Write
even when you don’t feel like it. Write even if the only thing you write is
about is the weather, or nonsense stuff. Deep inside you is a story dying to
get out. And millions of us want to read it.
Click here to listen to the podcast.
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