My Writing Process - the Planning Stages
Using manual processes to write in this digital age might appear odd or anachronistic — perhaps even an affectation. But I don’t care. I use what I was taught to use when I was in school. It’s a method that works for me, and I’ll stick with it. In the initial stages of writing, I organize a story by plotting it out on my whiteboard, where it looks like an engineer’s left-brained process. I then use a portable manual typewriter (recently a Silver-Reed) and type a quick sketch of each episode on index cards. I choose to use colored index cards in order to break the narrative into the four-month timeframe of the story — a different color for each month. I tacked the index cards to my large corkboard, where the different colors pop out and demand attention. There’s also something aesthetically pleasing about the motley display. So far I haven’t used the computer for the planning stages of my current work of fiction. To an outsider, the whiteboard, index cards, corkboard, manual typew
