E.N. Gussler

As unique as a fingerprint or as common as the air we breathe?

Every writer must find their own unique voice as well as develop their own style.

Writing, for me, is forever evolving. What works for one project, or part of a project, will not necessarily work for another. Writing is a creative process that, like my own experiences, changes with time and circumstance.

The process I have found most effective, is rooted in the way my imagination can paint a picture that is truly vivid and tangible. It can be a place, or a character, an event or sometimes just a feeling which manifests itself as a visual entity or picture. It’s on this image that a story starts to build.  I often don’t know exactly what a story is going to be once it has clawed its way out of my mind. At the end of it all, I just sit back and find that it’s complete.

I’m a free writer, more of a “pantser” rather than a “plotter”, I suppose. I have a beginning, major conflict, and ending planned, but I tend to avoid detailed, rigid outlines. For me, they can feel limiting. I simply don’t decide what’s happening at every twist or turn at the onset of writing.

I also prefer writing in chronological order. This helps me to remember what knowledge and experience characters have at any given time within the story. Typically, I learn details of characters, the same way they become known to a reader, popping over to a separate document to add elements to their character sheet. I visualize everything, like a movie playing in my mind, where every one of the senses are involved. In a way I become the characters, experiencing the story as it happens. That isn’t to say, the characters I write are me, I just sit in their spot for a minute. It sounds so weird to put it that way, but, that’s how it happens.

So there you have it, my process of writing.

An idea strikes, a scene starts to paint itself in my mind’s eye and I sit down and write, start to finish. It isn’t always a well fleshed out story. Sometimes it’s strictly the bare bones of something that could be great…or it could be complete crap. But isn’t that why we call it a “rough draft”?

All in all, you find your voice and process, and you write.

However that looks for you, is the right way.