Last time, I outed myself as a Quilter – a writer who focuses on distinct scenes, often in random order, and then brings it all together at the end by stitching them together into something that ideally resembles a story.

Oddly enough, I came across this post on Lit Hub by Lisa Ko, who compares her writing process to picking through a flea market.

I never start a novel knowing where I’m going. I don’t write linearly, and not in clear, numbered drafts, from a beginning to an end. I gather and cut and gather some more.

Like me, Ko wishes she could write more efficiently – beginning, middle, end – but she also embraces her path, which includes “hundreds of Scrivener files.”

In my non-writing life, I loathe clutter, my preferred mode minimalist everything, but my computer and notebooks, glutted with disorganized files, reveal the truth. My apartment may appear relatively sparse and tidy, but behind the closet doors are boxes crammed with paper. Whenever I get overwhelmed, I simply start a new Scrivener project and stick the old one into a folder so I don’t have to look at it anymore. There are no drafts, only a mess that expands until it’s time to wrangle it into shape.

She wrote multiple versions of her novel, Memory Piece.

I wrote a version of Memory Piece where one of the characters dies young, another version with four different narrators. I spent a summer writing 20,000 words’ worth of scenes that went directly into COMPOST. It’s through the process of trying and finding out what doesn’t work that you eventually discover what does.

I wouldn’t normally quote so liberally, but I could have written that.

Ko needed several years and several drafts before the novel clarified. That makes me feel better about the multiple drafts of my last novel. I’m still not sure where it’s going, but I’m experiencing the same journey. Thousands of words have ended up in my CUT folder. I’m also wondering if the novel needs multiple POV characters. And while I know what happens in the novel, I still haven’t decided what it’s about. Am I writing about tragedy or forgiveness? The importance of family or the need for independence? The desire for acceptance or the desire to live by one’s own rules? The answer is in there somewhere, and at some point, it will become clearer to me.

Funnily enough, I didn’t expect to find this connection when I opened Ko’s article. When I read her headline, I thought she’d focus on where she get ideas for her writing, rather than her process.

When it comes to premise, I’m a hardcore flea marketer. I have hundreds of articles, quotes, and images squirreled away in a Prompt folder. I scan it between projects to see if something catches my eye. If I stuck in a story, I’ll look for some weird tidbit that might add color or personality.

My current WIP – a short fantasy novel – originated in the prompt file. It actually combines a handful of prompts, including the stories of a few obscure historical persons, some weird nature facts about animals and insects, and a bizarre 18th century European secret society. I was never so pleased to be a hoarder.