Canister X – A.P. Fuchs

For some reason I’ve recently been giving a lot of thought to my writing process and I came to the conclusion I don’t really have one. At least, not in the conventional sense when someone thinks about how an author writes a book. Usually it involves notions of slaving away over the words, crafting each sentence to perfection, doing rewrite after rewrite, line editing, copy editing, proofing and so forth.

None of that applies to me. Not in that sort of depth, anyway.

My first book, A Stranger Dead, and from what I recall, involved a lot of that: slaving away over each word. Being a first book and first effort, that’s how I thought book writing was done. And, hey, if that’s how you write your books, by all means, whatever works, right?

But for me, I’ve been following the same writing process for at least a decade. It’s bare-bones simple, and doesn’t require a lot of brain power other than the first draft, and even then, I’m not exhausting my mental energy to the point of being brain dead after a writing session.

Though there are exceptions, this is typically how I write a book:

– A title or basic premise comes to me

– I let it stew in the back of my head so my subconscious can work things out without me consciously thinking about them

– The first line of the story comes to mind

– I get to work on the first draft

On the first draft:

I’ve only outlined a book once, and that book is still in process as of this writing. I will also be outlining another book to finish it off because it involves time travel and I got myself into a possible paradoxical mess with the thing so I need to iron out the details so it’s paradox-free (something that’s very important when writing time travel stories). Other than that, I simply write a book as it comes to me, scene by scene, sentence by sentence, word by word. I don’t think about what I’m writing. I just write it as I see it in my head and that’s it. I’ve written enough books over the years to know the golden rule that every word needs to serve the story, so I don’t have to worry about scenes being cut later because they’re just fluff.

And that’s it. I write the story start to finish and do not edit as I go along.

Sometimes I know how it’s going to end, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes when I do know how it’s going to end—and since I let the story tell itself—that ending either doesn’t happen or doesn’t happen how I originally envisioned it. But whatever. I let the story do the talking, not me.

After the first draft is done, I run a spellcheck and print it out.

I leave the book alone for a while, sometimes a week, sometimes a month, then get to work on the second draft.

On the second draft:

By leaving the book alone, I had a chance to mentally distance myself from it before going at it with fresh eyes.

You see, you write and read at different speeds, so while taking my pen to my first draft, I re