I always start out with the best of intentions and often with an actual outline. I start writing, convinced that I will start at the beginning and work straight through to the end. It never happens. I end up thinking about this perfect bit of dialogue that I don't want to forget so I jot it down, then another scene pops into my head and then I get hung up trying to write a transition and decide to just say screw it and write the part of the scene that's important and come back and do transitions later and pretty soon the first 200 or more pages are written, but they're an unholy mess of random occurrences.
I just hit that point on my latest romantic suspense novel, The Bones Will Tell. I then wasted an entire week of precious writing time, arranging and rearranging and rearranging again the first one hundred pages of the book. I was near tears on Wednesday thinking I would never be able to get it to work and would have to do a major rewrite. Then everything clicked into place.
Boom.
Now I'm sailing. Everything's falling into place. A huge amount of the most important scenes are written. A lot of what's left to do is transitions and reaction scenes. I know this is my process, but quite honestly, I hate it.
Do you love your process? Do you love structure?
