Day one of us writing, very important to Lin is to have the outline buttoned down. And so we talk through the possibilities. And if a story is good, the ideas come like, like a volcano. If the idea is not good, you are stumped and then we throw it out. I mean literally just crumple it and throw it in the garbage.
We get an outline, we read every day what the outline is, where we’re going to do go that day in that chapter or in that section. What I have found most surprising thing, is you can have the most detail in an outline and the book will take you where it wants to go.
And I am, I never know when it’s going to happen, just we’re off to the left of the story.
So you get a phrase like let’s put a pin in that one for a minute, have you ever heard me say that? Or just let’s just hold off on that one and explore some other ideas. You know there are ideas, one thing you can do is go down the path of the bad idea and you see where it takes you which is usually nowhere or somewhere you don’t want to go.
Or if you can feel it coming you don’t have to say that is the worst idea I’ve ever heard and what were you thinking? You just say hold that for a minute and let’s explore some other ideas, I think we do that a lot with each other.
We do that a lot. And an individual word sometimes, snorting instead of sniffling, instead of whimpering. To find the word that actually cradles the emotion that alien is having at the moment is extraordinary. I mean you know it, as soon as you hear it, it clicks into place like a puzzle.
One thing we do also is we start every writing session by going back to what we wrote the day before.
And I’m just going to jump in, Lin reads out loud the first, the last half chapter that we have written to get into the flow, what’s happening, where it’s going. I love it. You never outgrow the need to be read to, let me just say that.
And you hear it out loud, you hear it out loud so, and that’s when you can do the fine tuning where you, where you know in that first draft when you’re kind of, if I can use the word barfing, can I use the word barfing?
If you want to.
Barfing, you’re kind of barfing up the story. And so you’re not really worried so much about individual word choice. Once you have the scene down and you know where the action is and where the emotions are then the next day you can go back and polish up the word choice a little bit.
Everything happens through my ear. My whole life, I learn through my ears, I am affected through my ear more than my eye. I can’t always visualize things but I can, I hear it and it, it couples up with whatever is happening at the moment so nicely. Just you hear that, it’s attached.