Writing Blog

20220104 How I Wrote A Story

January 4, 2022, 6:30pm

Trigger warning! Gun violence, death. (Apparently I am required to include this.)

I thought I’d go through the process for writing that I employ, using my latest piece of work. I don’t know if it will help anyone, but it does show how my mind works.

So, to the beginning. On January 1 I got the idea for a character while writing a long story, but it was a character that did not fit into said story. The character was more comedic – the son of Death. I made some notes, and then continued with the long story because I was on a roll.

The problem was, as the long story went on and that part of my brain mulling over this new character relaxed, I realised I was just stealing from Terry Pratchett, who had Death’s daughter as a character. But I had a story for my character! He was going to fall in love with some-one he had to kill! I even wrote a few scenes of them meeting and him being reluctant to do what he had to do.

January 2, I hit the long story and churned out a lot of words in a short period of time, then decided to relax. And it hit me – the boy was not the son of Death. He was a psychopomp, a guide of the dead. And his task was to help younger people over to the “other side”. This was not a comedy any longer. I took a school shooting scene from another work and used that as the backdrop and wrote a quick-fire 4500 words.

January 3 and I had a spurt on the long story, then wrote the ending of the short one to 5100 words. I read the short one through. The school shooting didn’t work. Not where it was. I re-wrote the girl’s death for the psychopomp, using a returning disease, and used it as the catalyst for a subtle allusion to a shooting at the end. That worked so much better. 4900 words and I was happy. I posted a precis of it on a Discord server and a publisher asked to see it. I said I needed to edit it. He gave me until 5pm today (his time; 4:30pm my time) because the submission window had closed on January 1 but he liked my idea.

So, anyway, I was in the local regional big town today because my car needed work, and with no Internet, I had no distractions and just edited and rewrote sections and made the story flow better from its more violent beginnings. I spent around 5 hours on it. When I got home, it sat at 5900 words, and it got sent off in time.

The editing, I think, needs talking about. It’s not just spelling and punctuation, especially in the limited time-frame, but making sure the story flowed. Also, in my case, it’s making sure that I didn’t fill it with gore for the sake of gore and, in the end, I removed all blood. This led to the deaths all happened off-screen (so to speak), which required me to write the responses to them by other characters. It went from a musing on death to more of character study. I had to make a character’s initial appearance occur earlier to make sure his actions made more sense. That is something I find I need to really look at in my writing – character motivation being more in-depth. And I made the language a little less formal and a lot less “big words” heavy, making it sound like a typical teenager speaking, even though it is in 3rd person PoV.

So, while I did do a semi-rewrite, I think if I had more time, I would have completely rewritten the opening, not just tweaked it, but we don’t always have that luxury.

Anyway, I hope this was of interest to some-one.