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?
Well to tell you the truth I have absolutely no plot, no idea I just write and the words seem to flow onto the paper from my subconscious mind it is quite interesting actually and that is also why I write in a notebook first then analyze and edit on the computer. It is surprising that despite my disorganisation the manuscript is usually up to date.
My writing is somewhere in the middle of yours and the answers so far. I generally know where the story is to start and end, and some idea of how it's supposed to get there. I create notes and background information in Evernote. My latest stuff is sci-fi and needs some fairly meticulous date-keeping so I need to plan out what is happening when reasonably accurately. My primary characters are filled out using a role-playing games rule-set set so that I maintain consistency of what they can do within and between books.
However, the actual text is another matter. I start writing and it gets put down on the page (or in the file) as is. I like it to be as correct as I can make it as it goes down, but the important thing is to get it on the page. I rarely make extensive edits. On the two or three occasions where I find myself not liking how things are going, I've generally had to start from scratch rather than trying to edit my way to a good manuscript. Plus, while the basic ending is usually the way I thought it would be, exactly how I get there can change as I work. Sometimes the ending has changed during writing because I realised that the characters would not do things the way I first thought as things progressed.
This all seems kind of haphazard, but I wrote an 11 book series with continuity and foreshadowing running from book 1 to book 11. I think it's not so much about organisation for me, more about vision.
I have the beginning, middle and end of my novel before I start to write. I list my working chapter titles and note the key landmark event in each individual chapter. I lie down and visualise each scene. I play each subsequent scene through my mind a few times and then I write it down. Frame-by-frame continuity is the key to keeping my plot and storyline as straight as I can make them.
I hope that helps.
Good luck.