Someone asked me how I wrote Stigma. They were interested not in the way I came up with the idea, more about how I went about turning the idea into a chapter or story.
So, be it right or wrong this is how I did it.
The Story
The idea came to be about what would happen if people got letters about their heads that indicated that they had committed a crime or were just generally a naughty person.
Having got the stage on which the story could be told, I then thought about what stories, threads, I wanted to tell on that stage.
This involved:
- Coming up with the character plots
- Deciding on the journey/arcs the character needed to go through
- Finally giving then names, jobs, characteristics.
The plot
High level plot
Once I had the characters I needed to know what they were going to do. I did this by writing a couple of words for each major plot point.
So for a character that I dropped from the story, it was
- Introduced
- Leaves Dubai
- Gets Watch
- In Birmingham
Plot paragraph
Once I had all the plot points, and I’d made sure that they made sense, that included any interactions with other characters I wrote out a paragraph to explain the plot point.
- Introduction - Karl is introduced. He is waiting for an old friend who is going to supply him with a new form of explosive
- Leaves Dubai - The journey to the airport, knowing that he has an experimental explosive in the bag beside him.
- Gets Watch - He needs to go into the London financial district to meet a contact that can provide a trigger for the explosives
- In Birmingham - Meets a cousin of his client, that he want’s to be part of the attack. Explains the plan. Not happy.
Freeform drafts
When all plot points have a paragraph (or two) explain what I think should happen I then open Scrivener, create a new file and just write whatever comes to mind.
I don’t care about spelling, or grammar, I’m just writing the story. I know it won’t be perfect, and things might change, but I try and get it down in a freeform mind dump.
I do all the plot points start to finished. This way when I read it back I can see if thing don’t look write.
Converting the drafts
Once all the plot points have been drafted, I start at the beginning and work my way through each draft. At this stage I’m trying to tidy the drafts into something that looks like a well written story.
Once all the drafts have been done. I read the story. At this point I might change things around. Improve how things have been written.
ProWritingAid
When I’m happy that I’ve got the story to a stage that is the final draft, I open the project in ProWritingAid, and sort out any spelling or grammar issues. I might look at some of its suggestions for rewriting sentences, though I am wary that the tone won’t match mine, so I don’t use that heavily.
Speechify
The final stage is to listen to the chapters one at a time using Speechify. I find this an excellent way of spotting errors, out of place beats, and other mistakes.
Bring in the professionals
I know that my English and grammar aren’t brilliant, so at this stage I brought in an Editor to read the story and point out problems.
