- Think of an idea.
- Laugh joyfully at the wonderfulness and originality of your idea, and a few great scenes you thought of.
- Start immediately to work out what your Hugo/Bram Stoker/Newberry/Pulitzer acceptance speech will be.
- Fire up Scrivener, start adding index cards. Opening, scenes you know you want, general arcs.
- Write your dedication page with confidence.
- Realize you don’t actually have a solid ending. Decide you’ll work toward it and let the story and characters move you along.
- Start writing.
- Realize three chapters in that you should have been writing in 3rd-person and not 1st. Go back and rewrite.
- Realize after two more chapters that no, 1st-person was better, but now you’ve added other POV scenes and you like them and also your plot seems to have changed a bit.
- Begin drinking.
- Rewrite from scratch with 1st-person, try to work in the new bits you liked anyway, get frustrated.
- Write three more chapters.
- Realize all of the characters sound like you and each other. Go back and decide which of your friends/family/favorite movie characters should be the inspiration for each character. Google for images to put in the Scrivener character sheets. Hit all the baby-name websites to choose better character names. Spend a disturbing amount of time on this.
- Think of another amazing scene, start writing toward it.
- Realize you’re now heading away from your original plans and some of your original great scenes are non-starters and now you have a whole unplanned book in front of you.
- Drink more.
- Skip ahead and write a future scene you want in the book, and think of some foreshadowing for it you can put in the early chapters. Rewrite the first few chapters again.
- Realize there’s a whole subtheme that would be perfect and start to make notes about it.
- As you’re falling asleep one night, think of a new angle on the subtheme that would not only tie things together, it would also add some observations on contemporary politics/gender issues/race that would make the whole work multilayered and important. This thought is so earthshattering and obvious that there’s no way you will forget it. Go to sleep happy.
- Completely and totally forget the observation.
- Put it away and wait for inspiration to strike, understanding that it may take months or years before you’re ready to write the story I want to write.
- The next day, pull it out again and read over the 4 or 5 complete versions you have by now, decide to rewrite an amalgamation of all of them.
- See other books already out or coming out with idea similar enough to yours to worry you that your idea will be seen as derivative. Write faster.
- Get three chapters into the rewrite, get sidetracked by another great idea for a different book/story/script. Get excited about that idea instead.
- Put this idea aside for now since you’re clearly not ready, throw yourself totally into new idea.
- Start immediately to work out what your Hugo/Bram Stoker/Newberry/Pulitzer acceptance speech will be for the new idea.
- Pull this one back out six months later, fall in love with original idea again. Decide it really should be a screenplay/play/musical. Start rewriting from scratch in new format.
- Rinse. Repeat.
At least that’s how I assume it goes.