On writing.  My process?  I guess?  This kind of blogging is new to me, so please bear with me.  Hopefully, this ‘On Writing’ series will help a couple of you who might be authors yourselves.  Or at least make you laugh helplessly at how backward my supposed life as an aspiring writer is.

My first book was based on a recurring nightmare.  The nightmare wouldn’t go away until I finished the book.  The further along the book was, the less sleep I got and the more I started to feel like I was likely going insane.  I wrote the last chapter in a crazed frenzy in the wee hours of the morning after not having been able to sleep for over twenty-four hours.  I call this the Lovecraft process.

My second book series started as a backstory for a beloved Dungeons and Dragons character.  The more she got into my head, the more I had to continue chronicling her adventures.  The darker the story became the more necessary it was to make sure her tale would be told.  I’m still writing that series nine years later.  When things get especially difficult, I resort to whisky.  I believe this is generally referred to as the Hemmingway method.

I don’t really know what made me start writing my third series.  I just had this weird idea and it kept bugging me, so I kept picking at the scab until the story started to bleed out of my brain.  After seven years I’m also still writing this series.  The books are short little bits of cotton candy fluff, kind of like literary junk food.  Totally not serious, absolutely not based in any kind of factual reality, but every time I start reading them to refresh myself with the narrative I end up reading the entire series over again.  This series has been written entirely without inspiration and totally stream of consciousness; I just put the characters in situations and then imagine how they’d react.  I guess there are some happy monsters that live in my brain and damn if I don’t enjoy torturing them.

I truly can’t count the number of stories I’ve begun and quit.  Sometimes after a sentence or a paragraph, but sometimes after ten or twenty pages.  When the idea just refuses to take root, I know better than to try and make it grow.

I have no idea why I decided to write this, but I am going to try and post more content more often and hopefully to give something to the writing community in the process.  If this is at all useful let me know what you want to read about next.

Peace, love and may your characters write themselves.

-Benraven