Creative Process: Preparation is part one of a five part series on the creative process.
Preparation is the first step to writing your book. The great thing about this step is that you can do it before you even have an idea for your story. You’re probably already doing this! This post focuses on big picture preparation, and project specific preparation.
Big Picture Preparation
Have you read a book on writing (or any book)? Listened to a podcast about characterization? Watched a youtube video on dialogue? Then you’re in the preparation stage!
As a writer, there’s always something to learn. There’s always a way to make your stories better. I think we should live in this big picture preparation stage where we are constantly learning about our craft. We’ll need to move on to other stages, of course, but I think it’s possible to keep one foot here. We’ll talk more about transitioning to different stages later.
Project Specific Preparation
You launch into this stage once you’ve got a kernel of an idea you want to turn into a story. This is where you research things like “pictures of beaches in the northeast in the 1950s” and “viking dragon myths.”
You might also search for things like “three act structure template,” or “how to outline a story.” These are all things that take your idea and start crafting it into a story.
Once you get to this point, you start to transition to the next step, incubation, which we’ll talk about next week.
Jump. Build, Fly.
F.C. Shultz