Chris Norris

Here’s a view from the Big Yellow Chair when I’m writing. Yes, I pixellated the screen. One has to maintain at least a little mystery, I think :).

People sometimes ask about process. For me, it starts with an idea. Not always a plot – most often it’s just an image, or a scene, or a character sketch. I jot it down and move on. Over time, I’ve accumulated a lot of these. I come back to them fairly regularly, and eventually – like bait dropped in a stream – some of those nuggets will start to hook other thoughts or ideas. Those are the ones that I prioritize for development. At any one time there may be five or six of them, bobbing about.

I do most of my early story development when I’m out walking. I enjoy hiking the trails around our town, and I try to do at least 20 miles a week, weather permitting. I don’t listen to music or podcasts when I walk (I like to stay alert to what’s going on around me) so this is a good time to run story ideas through my head. I also like to let my imagination roam around when I’m trying to get to sleep. The 20 minutes that it usually takes me to drop off is surprisingly productive.

Once I feel like I’ve done that for long enough, I start writing. I don’t start at the beginning and work through to the end, and I often don’t know exactly how the story will end when I begin. I write scenes in the order that they take shape in my head. I place them in roughly the order I expect them to follow in the finished story.

Over time, the narrative emerges as a rough, Frankenstein’s-monster-approximation of the final form. I can begin to see where there are gaps, or overlaps; where a limb isn’t working because it hasn’t been connected properly. I perform the surgery necessary to knit the muscle, skin, and bone of the manuscript together. By this point, I’ve also decided whether there’s enough here to support an actual novel-length piece, or whether it’s more suited to a short story.

Like more than a few writers, I suspect, I’m pathologically averse to sharing my writing with others. A paradox, I know – if you don’t like sharing, why publish? That can be a topic for another post. But finally, after I’ve spent what feels like an eternity trimming and polishing the piece, I send it to my daughter. She’s also a writer, and a trained one too, so her comments are always on-point and helpful. She’s also become my editor, a critical role since the first novel had way too many typos.

And that’s really all there is to what I do. To some people it probably seems unpardonably messy and unstructured, but that’s how my brain works (God help me).