Weekly Ask Me Anything Series: Writing Insights After 18 Publications

I’ve decided to start a new post series. It’s going to be a weekly post with a single Ask Me Anything question. I’ll start in the beginning with questions found on a website to ask authors, but leave comments with your own questions and I’ll get to them.

How did publishing your first book change your process of writing?

It didn’t. My writing process didn’t change until about my 18^th published book.

That’s when I started to trust myself. That’s when I stopped overthinking every word. Second guessing every word choice. Wondering if what I meant would be understood.

I noticed, not for the first time, that when I did a revision, even the first revision, my word counts were not changing dramatically. I might add or subtract a thousand words over the entire manuscript, and when that MS is 50-70k words, that’s just not much. I was wasting time worrying about should there be a comma here, or a period there.

Don’t’ get me wrong. I’m decent at grammar. But that wasn’t why I write. I write because the people in my head insist their story get told.

So on the next book I started writing. And not revising. Not reviewing things a hundred times before I sent it to my editor.

And when it came back, I looked at the changes. I looked at what was missing, I looked at her comments and fixed the plot holes. And I didn’t, and still don’t, sweat the little stuff. The commas, the did I capitalize this word or that one. I just approved her changes.

And I felt so much freer. And I tell so many more stories now!

Have you published? or do you intend to?