In Today’s Journal
* Quotes of the Day
* The Bradbury Challenge Report
* How Other Pro Writers Write
* The Numbers
Quotes of the Day
“You can’t leave [a situation] too unexplained. Readers want your version. They don’t want a prompt. They want you to do the work and tell them the story.” Lee Child in his “How I Write” interview
“If you give the characters free will, the characters go places you don’t anticipate. The characters start having their own thoughts that surprise you. What I learned over the years is ‘trust the character’.” Dean Koontz in his “How I Write” interview
The Bradbury Challenge Report
Participating in any challenge is a great way to have fun and grow as a writer.
The requirement is to write at least one short story per week, then let me know the title, word count, and genre per the format below. During the past week, the following writers wrote these new stories:
- Erin Donoho “An Alternative,” 3700 psychological
- Vanessa V. Kilmer “Red, Red, Rosie” 3015 Dystopian Syfy
- Christopher Ridge “Night of the Living Nuggets” 3015 horror/ comedy
- KC Riggs “A Flick of the Wrist” 2616 Historical
- Dave Taylor “Unintended Consequences” 2087 Science Fiction
Congratulations to all of these writers.
How Other Pro Writers Write
Last Thursday was a day of learning for me, highlighted by an hour-long video interview with Lee Child followed by a two-hour long video interview with Dean Koontz.
Both writers follow a version of writing into the dark. If they had not—if their writing process was limited to the conscious-mind construction and control of the characters and their stories—I wouldn’t have watched and listened to the interviews.
Why? Because I’m serious about what I do. I’m not interested in constructing stories. It isn’t about me or my ego. It’s about the characters.
I’m interested in creating stories, and to me that means conveying the characters’ authentic stories by immersing myself in my creative subconscious.
Then I race through the stories with the characters, trying to keep up as I record on the page what happens and the characters’ reactions in dialogue and action to what happens.
I’m also interested in constantly improving my craft in that regard. Hence, my search for advice from masterful writers.
In his interview, Lee Child never mentions why it takes him several months to write a novel. He’s retired now, but when he was writing the Reacher novels he reportedly always began a new novel on September 1 and wrapped it the following May, June, or July.
My personal guess? I suspect his publisher allowed him only one novel per year.
Still, he says he can’t outline the story first:
“Even if I did a two-page outline with two lines per proposed chapter, then I’ve told myself the story and I’m bored with it. I want the next story.”
(As an aside, I suspect that’s why Patterson only outlines his novels now and then hands the outline off to someone else to write the actual bones. I’d also bet those novels are better than the ones he wrote himself.)
As I wrote above, by their own admission both Child and Koontz follow a version of writing into the dark. Still, their process varies a bit from my own:
- Lee Child says he writes the Reacher stories “instinctively” although he does admit to paying careful attention to the rhythm of sentences.
- Dean Koontz also writes instinctively, but he admits to reading over each page as many times as necessary to ensure it’s as perfect (for him) as he can get it.
Koontz’ process reminds me a bit of Ernest Hemingway’s process. According to Hemingway himself, before he began writing each day, he read the whole manuscript over again from the beginning, allowing himself to touch it and make any changes or improvements as he went.
As for my own process, it hasn’t varied since I started writing fiction. As you know if you’ve been following me for any time at all, I tend to write for about an hour (or a little longer)—so anywhere from 900 to 1300 words—then take a break of a few to several minutes.
When I come back I cycle over what I wrote in the previous session to make any corrections, add necessary description, etc. By the time I’m back to the white space I’m ‘in’ the character and the story again and I write another session.
(For anyone who doesn’t know, the difference between “cycling” and “revising” or “editing” is that cycling is accomplished while in the creative subconscious mindset, whereas the others are done with the conscious, critical mind, ‘looking for’ things to fix.)
So both the Child and Koontz interviews supported and shored up my own views on writing, but I also learned a great deal.
I was going to call this post an introduction.
Then I was going to begin posting another series, one about great writers who actually create stories vs. constructing them. I was going to include a long list of quotes I took from the vids, along with my own comments if I had any.
But there are 110 videos in David Perell’s “How I Write” series. I already know some of those writers will push outlining and editing and other conscious-mind endeavors, and I have no interest in those.
Also, some of the videos actually have titles like “Real Writing is Thinking.”
You all know what I think about allowing the conscious mind to be involved in the creative process (a horrible idea). But if I was posting an ongoing series on this, I’d still have to watch at least a few minutes of those videos to see whether the titles portend what actually in the vid.
So instead, I decided to give you three URLs. All three will lead you to videos on David Perell’s “How I Write” podcast. You can watch, listen, and judge for yourself what will help or harm your writing:
- The Lee Child interview (a little over 1 hour)
- The Dean Koontz interview (not quite 2 hours)
- The Overall “How I Write” podcast (all 110 videos)
I do recommend you keep a notepad handy to jot down advice as you’re listening. I personally pulled several quotes from the Child and Koontz interviews.
As an aside, I’ve read most of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books. As I was watching the first video above, it struck me how similar the Reacher books are to my own Blackwell Ops series.
The only real difference is that Child follows one POV character through the whole series. I follow several POV characters with TJ Blackwell most often in the background as the main character of the overall series.
This isn’t of any real consequence, but it’s interesting for me to think about personally from a structure point of view.
Anyway, talk with you again soon.
The Numbers
The Journal………………….. 1130
Mentorship Words…………….. 0
Total Nonfiction…………………. 1130
Writing of
Day 1…… XXXX words. To date………… XXXXX
Fiction for March……………………….…. XXXX
Fiction for 2026…………………………… XXXX
Nonfiction for March.………………….…. 2320
Nonfiction for 2026………………..……… 45620
2026 consumable words………………… 45620
2026 Novels to Date……………………… 0
2026 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2026 Short Stories to Date……………… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 123
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29