I’ve started to brainstorm my next book, but just barely: I’ve probably only had about thirty minutes to work on it so far.  I’m jotting down my ideas on a fancy notepad rather than typing notes on the computer.  The reason for this is simple.  If I type them into the computer and then change my mind about something, I won’t be able to resist deleting it.  With all the notes on paper, I can always go back and look at my original scribblings to see what I was thinking at the very beginning. 

The writing itself, I absolutely cannot do with any efficiency on paper.  Finished rough drafts of papers I wrote in high school used to be almost totally composed of scribblings from the margins and teeny tiny additions penned in above the crossed out first pass draft.  They were almost completely illegible.  I am not typically a first pass kind of writer.  I’m an edit, edit, and edit some more sort of writer.  Except with this latest book…the one I finished in less than a quarter of the time that it took me to write my first two.  With that one, I had copious notes and a collage (!) and I knew the characters.  (Nevermind that only bits and pieces of the collage make sense now…I still liked gazing at it during pauses in my writing).

[via]

The point I was trying to make when I started this post was that it struck me, after thirty minutes, that all I had written down were basic character sketches, with details that were beginning to flesh them out.  I had no plot elements at all.  But maybe that’s how I roll.  Maybe if I can pin down the characters, the plot will just flow freely from them.  That’s what happened last time, and what I’m hoping for that this time around too.

I’m also thinking I’m going to give Scrivener for the PC at shot.  From what I’ve seen, it seems like a really great writing tool.  We’ll see…

I totally think I could make the canoe method work…