I’ve been quiet on here recently because…I’ve made a breakthrough on my third, and final, book in my trilogy! So, I have been busy writing for the past few weeks and days to bring that to fruition.
I had thought I had finished the book, I’d written The End and put it to one side as I usually do to get rid of the energy of it I guess before starting the editing process. I have people who go through the manuscript for me with a fine tooth comb for the typo’s and someone who goes through it on the development side. But I will probably go through the manuscript myself numerous times before it is published. I just feel as though I want to get this out there quickly. To conclude the story. I don’t know why, and I don’t even know why I am writing this blog. I do know that none of the prompts are inspiring me at the moment, hence not writing anything on them.
I have had some feedback on the first two books in the trilogy, it’s been glowing and it has certainly given me the impetus of finishing this series. But it’s funny, how I knew I wasn’t in the flow of writing book 3 for such a long time and my intuition telling me that it wasn’t finished as I thought it was. That there was something missing in it. I just didn’t know what it was. But that thought kept on niggling away at me, how it wasn’t complete and didn’t ‘hang’ with the other books. As usual for me, the inspiration came in the middle of the night and I had to grasp around for my glasses so I could write a note for myself on my phone. I always think that I am going to remember any ideas, I never do and this time I had the sense to make the note. Since then, the idea has gained momentum and is starting to flow.
I often talk through scenes as though I am the characters. Usually, this happens in the car – I will be driving along having an imaginary conversation between two characters and I am sure I look quite mad as I do so. But it’s important to my ability to hang the story together that I do this, and I realised as I was driving along doing it the other day that I hadn’t had this process so far in book 3. I’d kind of written it by rote. So, I’m also going through it quite ruthlessly, re-writing where I need to and scoring out swathes of the story that don’t settle with me anymore. It’s taking a very different shape now, and I am liking it a lot more. I don’t think the ending will change, just the way I write it because I instinctively know I don’t like how I originally wrote it.
This is my writing process I guess. I can agonise for days over a word, a paragraph, a chapter. Sometimes I will finish a chapter and think…where do I go next? What’s happening next? I don’t plan my chapters down to the nth degree, I don’t plan the whole book chapter-by-chapter. I have an overarching plan, and idea of what I am doing and where I am going and start…then the characters take over and tell me what the detail is. I meet new people in my books I wasn’t aware I was going to introduce, characters who become significant players in the storyline. What happens to them guides what happens to the main characters, and it just flows.
I’m not sure I even knew what the ending would be for my trilogy until I started writing book 3. As with a lot of things, the ending came to me in a dream and while at first I was resistant, I now realise it is the best way for the whole trilogy to conclude. The only way, really.
Anyway, I’m not sure why I felt the need to write this jus that I did. Maybe it will help someone who is writing their own work to remember that it is a process, it is an artform and we can get inspired right up to the very last minute, even if that means changing the direction you thought you were going in. Just let it happen, just let it flow.
And on that note, I am going back to book 3 and the new chapters…
Louisa Simpson 