Cidney Swanson: Sure! I write six days a week, in the mornings when my inner editor is groggy. That way the creative stuff is flowing pretty well. When I approach a new project, I will generally create a loose outline with a very definite “this is what happens at the end” in mind. I find that I need to know which direction I am driving, as it were.
I write out my first drafts at a pace of right around 2,000 words/day. Sometimes I’ll hit a 4,000- to 5,000-word day, and those are great, but many days I struggle to get those 2,000 out. I write anyway. Even when it feels like pulling teeth. I’ve found the muse only shows up if I do.
After I’ve completed a first draft, I set it aside for one to two weeks. Then I clean it up a bit and let my editor have a look. My editor does a “big picture” pass over it, suggesting where I need to pick up the pace or describe things more clearly. This is more of the “story development editing” that you may have heard of.
Afterwards, I go into a revisions phase where I am still focused on the big picture: what scenes need to go buh-byes, what additional scenes I need to write. Then I set it aside for another two weeks or so and look it over again, cleaning up obvious errors. If I am still feeling uncertain about the overall story arc, I may ask that same editor to look it over again.
Once I have a storyline that feels nice and solid, I get to do my two favorite passes through the manuscript! I do one pass looking at each page as a separate unit in completely random order. When I read the single page, I am looking for one bright sparkling bit of something: a moving description or something humorous or a really lovely metaphor or a sentence that I could just dive into and live off for the next six months. Well, those are my goals, anyway. If the page doesn’t have any of the above, I work it and tweak it, asking myself where it needs something really yummy, where that bright bit might fit in. Ah. There. I feel happier just talking about that process.
Lastly, I do a line edit searching for word repetition, misspellings, weak verbs, any adverbs I can get rid of, and so on. That is also deeply fun, for me. After this, it goes to a line editor, and after I fix the line edits, it goes to a copy editor.
You’ll notice I have several weeks of “down-time” when a manuscript is either out of my hands or when I choose not to look at it so that I can come back to it with fresher eyes. During these periods, I work on another manuscript.