Welcome back to another Open Book Blog Hop!

Today’s topic is: Describe your steps for moving from a story idea to a finished story.

And remember to visit my fellow writers to see what they have come up with. You can find their works here!

This is the final Open Book Blog Hop for 2023, so while we are here, thank you all for reading these posts this year!

I want to start off on this subject by saying that it’s completely different for every writer. And in some cases, it’s different from book to book. And in that vein, my answer is: it depends. When I’m working on short stories, I tend to just dive right on in. Often I have seen a snapshot of something – a character, action, location or dialogue – that hooks me in early doors. From there the ideas flow and I get down to writing.

This approach applied to Chasing Shadows as well. The story built outwards from the initial snippet that I saw in my minds eye. With As the Crow Flies, things were a little more considered, but only just. I had more of an idea of where the story was going. I had a few scribbled notes that helped me wrestle my ideas into something resembling order. But then I dove in and the plot coalesced around these bare bones.

The Twelve Days of Christmas is different again. I had an idea. An idea of a serial killer basing his murders in some way on the song of the same name. This story has probably had the most planning of all of my writing to date, though still not a lot more than my other works. This one took some research and planning to come up with how the twelve murders were going to work. But I’m very much a pantster rather than a plotter.

For me, writing is a rollercoaster ride that I’m riding. I have little control over what happens, I just see the scene and write it. I make use of the editing phase to really polish my work. After all, Terry Pratchett once said “the first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” And that is very much true. I find that first draft is just a brain dump. After that, the two or three rounds of edits are about tidying and polishing things to a point they make a finished story. I quite enjoy the editing process, it’s when an idea really starts to become a story.

I just wanted to take a moment to thank all my readers for reading and commenting on these posts, and to wish you all a very merry Christmas!