A little while ago I asked on Twitter what people would love for me to blog about. The lovely JL Peridot gave the idea to write about my creative process and how I deal with the aftermath of intense scenes (you can find the tweet here).
I’ll answer the second question first, since that answer’s a lot shorter and easier.
When the writing gets intense
There hasn’t been anything I’ve written that was so intense for me that I needed to deal with the aftermath. I think this is due to me on the one side being used to talk about and delve deeper into harder topics and sharing experiences due to therapy.
On the other hand though, I think that when scenes do get intense enough that it starts to impact me that way, I somehow change the scene. As I think about this I think it’s something I need to work on, because it means I’m pulling punches, which I don’t want to. I want to really reach people’s hearts and to do that I need to open up mine. So, I guess that’ll be a challenge for this upcoming year!
My creative process
For the past 2-3 years I’ve been getting better acquainted with my own creative process. I’d been researching others a lot, thinking there was a right and a wrong way to go about writing books, but it turned out it wasn’t that black and white at all. I got to know better what my process looks like, and honestly, I think I’m still learning and developing. Find new ways that work for me, and figure out I’d maybe not been going about it as well as I thought.
Sometimes you need to do things the wrong way to learn that things aren’t working. I’m curious by nature and have a penchant for researching things. It soothes me. It makes me happy to gain more understanding on a subject, and that includes writing. All the research I put in did help shape my creative process, forming a sort of foundation, if you will (sorry, been watching Mindhunter xD).
This won’t fit in one post
Because this got way longer than expected I’m splitting this up in a series of posts, breaking down my creative process from inspiration to final manuscript. The links for the future posts will be included in here but I’ll only publish the posts once a week.
Here’s the list:
- From inspiration to concept: harassed by the muses!
- From concept to outline: organising for the chaotic mind
- From outline to early draft: I have no idea what I’m doing
- From early draft to revised draft: panic at the laptop
- From draft to manuscript: everything makes me cry
Thank you, JL Peridot for giving me such a nice subject to write about and for the interest to get to know me a bit better through this 🙂 For those who don’t know this awesome erotic romance writer yet, JL Peridot, here’s some links: