When I was young I wanted to be a writer. I also wanted to be a musician. I ended up becoming an engineer, but I kept writing and music as hobbies. I don’t think that I am a very good writer, but I do enjoy writing. My wife thinks that one of my books is good enough to publish, but she’s my wife so her opinion is bound to be a bit biased. I’m going to start shopping it around soon, so we’ll see.
When do you make time? Early mornings? Late at night when everyone’s asleep? Whenever you manage to grab a few spare minutes? When are you at your best?
I suffer from insomnia, and writing is one of the things I do when I can’t sleep. Most of my writing is done late at night, and unfortunately not when I’m at my best.
I’ve discovered that writing and engineering do opposite things to my brain. If I do a lot of difficult engineering, I find it difficult to write. If I do a lot of writing, I have a harder time concentrating on my work. I have tried to write at lunch time, but my mind can’t switch gears fast enough. Anything I write during my lunch break usually ends up being garbage.
Where do you write? Are you lucky enough to have a study of your own, or do you have to share the kitchen table with the leftovers from dinner and your kid’s latest art project?
I have my “man cave”, a room in our basement where I have all of my computers, music junk, books, soldering stuff, etc. Sometimes I will bring the laptop upstairs, but usually there are too many distractions if I’m in the living room and I can’t concentrate enough to write.
How do you write? Do you scribble away with a legal pad and a pencil, bang out your work on a typewriter or would you be lost without your MacBook? Do you take copious notes and work to an outline or do you just hurl yourself into the thick of it?
I write on a PC using microsoft word. I do a lot of backspacing, cutting out entire paragraphs, and rearranging stuff. I wouldn’t function well on an old fashioned typewriter, and my handwriting is almost illegible, even to me. I find a typewriter or writing things by hand to be cumbersome and painfully slow. I’m a lot faster typing on a computer. In fact, a former secretary once told me I typed amazingly fast considering how wrong I did it.
For fiction writing, I start with a rough idea of the story and I expand that into a rough outline. I don’t get too detailed with the outline, but I need it to be detailed enough that I won’t write myself into a corner. I try to fully develop characters before I do any serious writing about them. I found that when I was creating random people that the “random” characteristics I chose weren’t all that random, so I wrote a computer program that would create a truly random person. The program spits out a bunch of characteristics about a person, such as their height, weight, hair color, eye color, how well they see, how well they hear, how athletic they are, etc. I originally intended to use the program to spit out random minor characters so that those short lived characters that come in and out of the story wouldn’t be so flat and featureless. I’ve ended up using the program for most of my main characters as well, though. If I have an idea for what a character should be like physically, I just generate random characters until one matches the idea I had. This usually gives me a few extra random things I wouldn’t have thought about the character, and adds a little more detail.
From there, I flush out the main characters, from their birth all the way up until their appearance in the story. A lot of this detail won’t make it into the story, but it really helps to give the character depth. Once all of the characters are flushed out, then I start writing.