0.WRITING PROCESS: Conceive, Develop, Write

I like sharing my passion for writing with others and so over the next couple of weeks, I will be going over the various stages of my writing process. The philosophy behind it all is “Conceive, Develop, Write” and it has become my mantra.

First off, the entire idea behind the process stemmed from me needing to formulate a creative flow for myself so that I could focus my energy, become more organized, and increase my productivity. Working with the Concept Stage, Development Stage, and the Writing Stage, I saw that not only does one stage fuel the development of the next in a continuous cycle of creativity, but also, each stage affects and further enhances the other two individually.

Each of these three stages have a certain amount of steps to complete them, and as I complete the steps in one stage, it will influence the development of the next stage. Below is how I break down each stage.

I’ll go over each stage and their individual steps in detail over the next couple of weeks, but for now, here is a brief overview of how I use them.

CONCEIVE: The Concept Stage

The two steps that I use in this stage are Story Concept and Chapter summaries.

Story Concept

I hammer out the idea of my story in its simplest form. What it’s about, who it’s about, what are the conflicts and plot twists, and how they will be resolved in the story.

(this fuels the next step)

Chapter Summaries

By ironing out the story concept, I get ideas about certain events that must happen in the story, and other events that I would like to happen in the story, like a particular action sequence or character cameo appearance. I group these events into chronological chapters of how they should play out in the story. Then, I arrange the chapters into three sections: The Beginning, The Middle, and the End to get a “summary” of my story. Once the overall Story Concept and Chapter Summaries are complete, I am ready to go to the next stage.

DEVELOP: The Development Stage

There are six steps in this stage and they are influenced by what I created during the Concept Stage.

Characters

These are the beings that drive the story. It is through their conflicts and interactions that story is played out and the reason why the story even exists. Here, I focus on the major and minor characters. Most of "key" characters would have already been realized while working out the Story Concept and Chapter Summaries.

Organizations

In most stories there are organizations’ in one form or another. They can be enforcers of the law, a treacherous gang of bandits, or religious sects. They are all organizations and if they are in my story, I need to know what role they play, how they operate, and why they do what they do.

World

Through developing the Story Concept, Chapter Summaries, Characters, and Organizations, the world that the story takes place in has already begun to form on its own. In this step, the world is brought fully into focus. I think about what the world must be like to house the characters I’ve created and the organizations that fight for dominance. I ask myself what is the population like? Is it a dark and dismal world ruled by evil? Or, is it one of light, where guardians fight to keep the darkness at bay?

Locations

Where exactly are my characters? What city, town, or village are they in? What are the names of these places? What is the history behind them? If my characters are traveling, I need to know what forests, swamps, or deserts they are going through. What creatures inhabit those lands? Locations are the individual sets upon which my characters act out their stories and these locations are already influenced by the world I’ve created in the previous step.

Sciences

Here, I highlight and define the sciences that are featured in my story. Be it a unique form of magic, a religious belief system, social customs of fabricated a race, or a scientific theory that does not exist in the real world, I need to know how they work in order for my characters to use them and be affected by them. (This has been influenced by my characters and the world I’ve already created.)

Technologies

Is my world high tech, low tech, primitive, or a mixture of all three? Just like the previous step of defining the sciences in my story, I must list and define the technology as well. I only focus on unique technology, which is usual what I have created with my own imagination, and for the same reason as developing the sciences, I need to know how it works and affects my characters.

(With the Concept and Development Stages done, I move on to the next.)

WRITE: The Writing Stage

This is where I put fingers to keyboard and begin the actual journey of my characters. There are four steps in this stage.

Scene Summaries

Here, I break my Chapter Summaries down into individual scenes that guide my characters from one event to the next. Normally, I take it a chapter at a time instead of trying to write scene summaries for every single chapter back to back. I’ve tried it that way and didn’t like it because it took up so much time and kept me from actually writing the story. So, for instance, after I write the scene summaries for chapter one, I write out chapter one. Then, I write the scene summaries for chapter two and write out chapter two. For me, this helps identify and fix problems ahead to time before I get deep into the writing, and I wind up doing less back tracking and reorganizing.

Write the Story

Once I finish the scene summaries for a chapter, I write out that chapter. Here is where I focus on techniques like "Point of View", "Character Switching", "Show, Don’t Tell", "Descriptive Flow", and "Short Descriptions" in order to present the story to my readers.

Edit the Story

I edit my stories a chapter at a time, and the first edit is usually just a quick run through to catch and resolve any glaring errors before I give it to a critique partner to read through.

Revise the Story

Once I get feedback from my critique partner and go over their comments I make the necessary changes. This helps because maybe there is a part that I thought read really well but it actually doesn’t in someone else’s eyes, or say, there’s a part that I wanted to be suspenseful and it just doesn’t invoke the proper amount of emotion. After I make my changes, I read over the chapter one last time then move on to the next chapter and repeat the cycle.

For example,

Let’s say that during the Writing Stage an unplanned character comes to life and is now a permanent fixture in the story. This new development may change the Story Concept or the Chapter and Scene Summaries and they well need to be modified to reflect that change. In addition, I’d have to flesh out this new character in the Character Development Section and figure out how the other characters will react to this new cast member.

Or

Let’s say that one day a couple of ideas just hit me for a scene and I start out just writing a couple of pages based around some unknown character. From those pages, I would have to “reverse engineer” my story in a way. The pages that I wrote out would be used as a starting point to develop the Story Concept and everything else in the Development Stage.

Although the flow of my process is "Conceive, Develop, Write," it really can be started at any stage and go in any direction. The main thing is that, with having these stages and steps in place, what I create will automatically become organized. I will be able to easily see what I have already created and see what I need to deveop to complete the package.

Next week, I’ll go into detail about the first step in the Conceive Stage “Story Concept”.