Wednesday, 26 October 2016
Social Paranoia by Dane Cobain
Release Date: 3rd August 2016
Genres: Computing / Non Fiction
I am thrilled to welcome Dane Cobain to the blog with a great guest post. Thank you Dane.
My Planning Routine
Hi, folks! My name’s Dane Cobain
and I’m a British indie author. I’m here today to talk about how I plan and
write a novel – I’m excited because I’ve never talked about this before!
For me, a book starts with a
single idea – a concept, or a little spark of inspiration that you hold onto
and develop over time. With No Rest for the Wicked, my debut novella, that
spark came from a nightmare I had about evil Angels going around and killing
people. I jotted a few notes down when I woke up, then developed them over the
coming months, fleshing out the idea and starting to develop the story line.
Sometimes I just write a couple
of bullet points to give me enough to go on, and sometimes I plan out whole
chapters and even work on a first draft by writing a couple of sentences to get
me going. With the book that I’m writing at the moment – a detective novel, and
the first book in a series – the process has been a little different, because
the planning has to be more intense to make sure that the plot makes sense and
that the clues are scattered throughout the story.
For the detective novel, I also
used character sheets for the first time, which reminded me of when I was a kid
and I used to play Dungeons & Dragons. Those sheets contained some key
information about each of their characters – such as their height, weight, age
and distinctive attributes – as well as a description of their personality. I
also used the galleries on acting agencies to find photographs of people who
look roughly like how the characters do.
The planning stage got even more
complicated for a project called Greebos, which so far is just a plan but which
I’m hoping to start working on soon. Greebos follows a class of schoolkids
during the summer after they finish school, as they’re all maturing and turning
into young adults. But because of that, each kid has their own story line, and
all of those story lines then need to be plotted against an overall timeline to
make sure that nobody is in two places at once.
It depends upon the type of
writer you are, and if you read enough books then you start to get a feel for
the writers that you’re reading. With George R. R. Martin, for example, you can
tell that he puts a hell of a lot of effort into the planning stage, because if
he didn’t then it wouldn’t work. Other authors prefer a stream of consciousness
approach, where they have an idea of what needs to happen and they just write
until they get it right.
Planning is important, of course,
and I couldn’t work without it. But with all that said, the level of planning
that you put in helps you to feel as though each book is a different creature,
each with its own personality. Some of them take barely any planning and others
take months or even years, but the planning process itself leaves its own stamp
on the work.
Look out for it next time you
read something. You’ll probably find out more about your favourite authors’
techniques than you expected.
Dane Cobain (High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, UK) is an independent
poet, musician and storyteller with a passion for language and learning.
When he’s not in front of a screen writing stories and poetry, he can
be found working on his book review blog or developing his website,
www.danecobain.com. His debut novella, No Rest for the Wicked, was
released by Booktrope in the Summer of 2015.
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