Anatomy of a Writing Session

My sessions vary from 90 minutes to multiple hours long, like on weekends where I have very little to do other than crank out entire chapters in a day.

If I’m writing at the bar, I skip the music and art because I write off my iPad and my headphones don’t currently function with my iPad. There, I order a drink and a snack, and skip to number 3. (While writing this, I just realized I could use my phone. Learn from my mistakes.)

1. Open up my playlists and play the appropriate playlist. For Like A Flame, I have 4 playlists. One for each of my main three characters and one for the setting at large.
   
   For Like A Flame, I usually start with the “gooey” part of Basil’s playlist and then realize I’m writing a revolutionary scene or vice versa. (There are distinct sections of “revolution,” “please hydrate Tom Waits for the love of god,” versus “gooey” for Basil’s playlist.)
   
2. Open up Scrivener, open up art inspiration side by side with the current chapter I’m working on. This is a major reason why I had two monitors initially, so I could both write and look at my playlists or my art inspiration.
   
   I highly recommend getting some art commissioned or looking up celebrities to fan-cast your work in progress! I have both, but I started with art rather than the other way around. You don’t need to have a Pintrest board, but I recommend having something you can use that works for you where you can throw pictures or screenshots of stuff that inspires you!
   
3. I have Scrivener set up so each chapter is a file and I have copied the outline for that chapter already, so I don’t need to refer to different files.

4. Write what’s in the outline first. This is my version of “eat your veggies first.” For chapter one, this meant a flashback to Moonwort Calabar’s dingy Faerie Deals office, setting up how deals worked, and then flashing to meeting Aspen and building the world up from there. I had a very vivid scene in my head of Aspen sleeping on the street and then heading to work, so I started there.

5. From there, make dynamic and interesting characters for your lead to interact with to build the in-between the outline and what needs to go on the page. In chapter one, I realized I only had the foreman for Aspen to talk to and needed someone to move the plot along, so I made up Oskar Moshe, his Jewish mentor at the shipyard. Fast forward to now where I have an appendix of character names.

6. A lot of my sessions are writing stream of consciousness until I realize I’m 2.5k words deep because dialogue writes easily for me. I try not to edit as I go, but sometimes it gets the better of me. Like A Flame has very distinctive scenes in my head, but that’s because I did the outlining ahead of time. If pants-ing is more your speed, try writing the scenes that you have the most imagery first and then glue your pieces together. That’s what I used to do and it worked very well!

Now, however, I’m such an organizer and planner that it doesn’t work for me anymore – in a former life I was a librarian.