Friday, June 3, 2011

What My First Draft Looks Like

Given that my debut young adult/paranormal novel: Darwin's Children has recently been released, I thought I might blog a little bit about my writing process and what my first draft looks like. For some reason, when I write I can't do it at the computer...and most of the time I need colorful sharpie markers...

Don't ask because I have no idea either.


This is my favorite journal and houses a few scenes in the third novel of Darwin's Children
This inside of the journal shown above and some horrid handwriting

A few of my journals The top green one is where I keep my character details such as physical descriptions and birth dates. Oh yes, and I love Batman. 

The journal I started the third book of Darwin's Children in. I love that color marker. 
See all the scribbles? This is from the second book in the series...the scribbles are code for "that just doesn't work."
Yes, I know. I put the "rough" in rough draft, but I've found when something works for you, go with it. I encourage you to do the same, no matter how ridiculous it is. Now I have this to show for it:

Available now in e-book at Amazon, Barnes and Nobel and Smash Words.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Ah, another fellow OCD writer. :) I was the same a few years back, everything in notebooks, now I go crazy to have to carry them around so I switched to folders. :)

Though I do agree that colors are a girl's best friend. I love my sticky notes and pens and markers.

Oh, and congrats on releasing a novel! That's great. :) Do you mind me asking how you did it? I mean, do you have an agent or.. and was it hard?

Anyway, thanks for sharing.

Btw, I'm @lympha13 on twitter. :)

Natasha Larry said...

I don't mind at all. I actually went with an independent, royalty paying e-publisher. They also publish trade paperback.

It was a hard and I got a few lit agents interested, but for personal reasons I went with a small publisher.

There was a lot of rejection involved, but I think it was worth it.

leah said...

this was super fun to see; i'd really like to see more! i really love anything that is behind the scenes, and writers are always so different. it was fantastic to get a glimpse of your process. thank you for sharing! now share more!

Natasha Larry said...

LoL, you are so awesome. Stay tuned, I plan on it!

Penumbra Publishing said...

The act of writing is a personal thing, a direct connection between the brain and the hand, transferred to the pencil. Handwriting as well is very personalized. So in creating this way, your output is very personal. However, once you start doing advanced editing that requires cutting and pasting pieces of paper together, it gets a little cumbersome. And having to retype everything to get it into digital format is also time-consuming. But the transition to writing and self-editing on the computer after doing it longhand can be a difficult transition. You have to learn how to rethink the whole process...

Natasha Larry said...

Righty