I am curious to know how other people actually get it down, as in write.
For me it’s a strange process and maybe bad I don’t know, as it’s the only way I can. The thoughts spill out of my head and I have to type them down at top speed. I pay no attention to spelling, grammar or punctuation. Just concentrate on getting the idea out of my head – it’s almost if I am talking to myself in a steady flow and I can hardly keep up.
Then after about a thousand words or so, I go back and read over what I have created. It’s an unintelligible scrawl of thoughts and ideas interspersed with dialogue. The next part I really like, slowly sorting out the mass of jumbled words arranging them in order, adding the details, the descriptions the slow polish, like moulding a lump of clay into a recognisable shape.
I have tried to start off slowly and carefully and I simply can’t work that way.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you write?
I plan the story in my head, then write in 15-20 minute bursts stop for 1hr thinking then another little session this goes on most of a good day. Then I re read edit and proceed as before. But wakeful patches are now productive thinking time. This is a modification of my previous write full tilt for hours forgetting to eat style. Me imposes more thinking time and I also read what I've written aloud.
A strange mixture of all the replies left to this question so far. However, I recently saw a video of Stephen King talking to a group of students, and one asked about writing down ideas as they come to us. He said he used to do that but then you end up with post-it notes full of bad ideas. That may be the case for him, but I guess everyone is unique.
The writing process for me begins with what I observe in my surroundings. Having worked in such environments from building sites to offices (and just about everything in between) I have discovered that some of the best lines of dialogue, anecdotes, situations, etc come from the 'real world'. It is up to the artist or writer to shape these events into their own story, if at all possible or feasible.
I started writing a book in September 2011 (around 25,000 words so far) and already characters, events and places have appeared that I did not expect. J.R.R Tolkien once wrote that some of the shocks in plot came as a surprise to him as he was writing the LOTR. I can truly understand that now; after writing many short stories for some of the modules in my degree in English (I graduated with 2:1, mature student) it is perfectly clear now what Roland Barthes was on about in his essay 'Death of the Author': once a story is put down, the author is no longer there.
I also use a notebook, I scribble in pencil then type up what I have.
I generally work to a chapter list with notes, but I also fill the front of the notebooks with all manner of notes... Maps, family trees, pictures, etc...