Welcome to Work in Progress!

Have you ever wondered how a writer writes a book? What the process is, exactly, to get from “I’m going to write a book!” to “I’m holding the book in my hand – and look at that! It’s got my name on it!”

That’s what this blog is about. While I write my book, I’m going to write about writing my book. Every week I’ll tell you exactly what I’m doing – what I’m researching, what I’m writing, who I’m talking to and how I’m progressing. You’ll see what I’m worrying about, what’s working and what’s failed. I’ll even post some actual “work in progress” and invite you to speak your mind about these early drafts.

It’s a kind of behind-the-scenes tour of how book writing actually happens. If you’re a writer, I hope you’ll find some ideas that will work for your writing project. If you’re a book reader, I hope to demystify the writing process for you.

Sound good? So here’s some background to bring you up to speed on my book. Its working title is “Muskoka’s Main Street: The Muskoka Colonization Road,” and it’s a historical adventure story to be published in Spring 2012 by Muskoka Books.

All you non-historians, read on! Even if you are reading or writing fiction, you will still find meaty stuff on the blog as I write this non-fiction book. Good writing is good writing, and much of the process of writing – planning, research, structuring, drafting and redrafting – is the same for any genre.

With one big caveat. Fiction, by nature, requires creating something out of thin air, while non-fiction, by nature, requires something soundly based in research.

So what I won’t be talking about on this blog is how you go about making up characters, putting them into conflict in a compelling setting and resolving their issues through storytelling. What I will be talking about on this blog is how you go about finding the data you need about real people and describing the conflicts they actually lived in a compelling setting, using a storytelling style.

I’ll show you how I’m doing these things as I’m doing them. I hope you’ll learn from my stumbles and copy my successes. Most of all, I look forward to hearing from you!