I have a lot of motivations for writing but the one that wins is: I have a lot of stories I want to tell. So whatever thoughts I have about how to actually get someone to read them, is anyone reading them, and so forth what I try to remember is: it all starts with writing them.
In that spirit, I stopped outlining book 2 (I didn’t outline book 1 at all) at chapter 30 and began to write last night. I wrote the prologue. That’s something else book 1 didn’t have. It had a very linear progression. This has a prologue, goes back in time, runs through the events of the prologue, and concludes.
Before I wrote the prologue I thought that I should skip writing it now and write it either at the point that it occurs or at the very end, because I’m bound to make changes to what I think will lead up to those events or occur during them, so there’s no point to writing it now.
Turns out, I was right. Instead of writing a good gripping prologue I tried to add some character development and make it to engaging with some humor. Gripping, not ‘oh I like these people’ was supposed to be the point.
So it’s there, on the page, followed by bullet-point notes of how to fix it. Which I will leave alone until the time I should write it.
But it feels great to be off to the races and crafting the story!
Wendy L. Young, Writer 