I go through and often realize I can cut things or combine two scenes, or that chapter 1 was written with an idea that morphed by the time I got to the end, so fix all that. Once I have all the words down I sort of treat that like the scaffolding of a draft. Part of editing then becomes figuring out if Hamid, Tamid and Farroukh are three different characters or three names for the same one. I draft so quickly in fact that if I name a minor character and then forget what I have named them, instead of scrolling a page up to look for the name I will just put in a different name at random. Then when I’m drafting I just spill out words in as coherent an order as I can, focusing more on speed and getting it down than form. There’s nothing harder for me than trying to write without knowing where I’m going or what I’m working towards. Usually that starts with various ideas for scenes I think would be fun or dramatic (like the boy rushing into the store) and then slowly pulling them together into a plot and figuring out how they all link up.
I mean, before I even get to putting fingers to keyboard I spend a lot of time putting the story together in my head.
I draft quickly and sloppily and then edit slowly. Both the Wild West of the US and the arid Arabian planes share this environment, and it was making this connection, at midnight, that kicked off the whole idea that became Rebel of the Sands. A tough environment that makes tougher people still.Īnd then finally when I decided to cross the Wild West with the Arabian Nights the desert was a starting point for that. Those kinds of stories of gunslingers and bandits always play out across a landscape marked by sand and scrubby desert plants. Then there was a separate idea to write about a sharpshooter girl, who clearly belonged in a Wild West type story to start with.
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