Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.
Usually I decide on what it is I'm writing next by the books I'm reading.
I've thought about writing, but it hasn't happened yet. It's like schoolwork - you start doing your revisions two nights before you're compelled to turn it in.
I see my writing as the process of looking at the usual, but from two steps to the side.
I sometimes start keeping a journal about the writing process itself. Particularly when I get the ideas, and I am trying to brood over the chaos phase. In writing a novel, you really have to brood over a lot of chaos of ideas and possibilities.
I read what I write over and over and make corrections and improvements, until I reach the conclusion that the material deserves to stand on its own.
I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.
There are times when I'll send a manuscript to an editor, and I'll think it is the most likely project I've ever sent them. And they might call me the next morning and say they couldn't tolerate it. That happens so frequently that I've given up any expectation of knowing what anybody's going to like.
I don't pick up my work at all. If it's something that's still in progress and I have the chance to make some edits on the material or think about the order, little things like that, I'll keep those stories at hand and go through them. But once it exists as the book, it's locked away in a vault, and I kind of put it behind me.
I've always kind of wrote when I wanted to. Once I get the idea in my head and get it outlined out, I usually just sit and write until it's done.