Normally, when I throw some words down on a page, I leave them to the side for a week or two. Not so having just published them on my blog!
So, what's next? A lot of writers think about what they're going to write before they put pen to paper. For me the ideas, in whatever form, simply arrive in my head. I never sit down to write because it's what I do next - that doesn't work for me. Yesterday morning, I was sitting on the train when the thoughts below arrived in my head. I wrote them down and typed them straight into my blog when I got to a computer - unedited as you can tell!
When you write like this, what you get is a lot of ideas in a rough outline that need a considerable amount of work. Some of it can be brilliant straight off and needs very little editing to help it into shape - unlike yesterday's which needs a lot of something!
Actually, yesterday's paras surprised me somewhat. The characters, Sarah and Brodie, are no strangers to me. Sarah is my main character in a set of short stories -she arrived in one story and has kind of hung around. What surprised me about this appearance is that she's never been a stand up comedian before. Brodie and Sarah are probably a good combination. Brodie is a relatively new creation for me and I'm still figuring her out.
The questions I generally ask myself now are
- what is the main story line in this new writing?
- does it fit with anything else I'm writing?
- do the characters work together?
- what is each of the segments about?
- what is the message?
- how does it get delivered?
- what's its main function?
- how does the action move through this piece?
- how do each of the characters move the story along?
- is there anything that doesn't add to the story telling?
- how do I want the readers to feel at this point?
- what's the most important thing the reader needs to know?
- are there things here the reader doesn't need to know?
- what happened before?
- what happens next?
- does it tell a story I want to tell?
You know what I'm doing for the next 24 hours!
