How I Do It: One Author's Approach

Guest post by Brandy Purdy, author of The Confession of Piers Gaveston and The Boleyn Wife, due out from Kensington in early 2010. For more information, see www.brandypurdy.com.

s an author, I am often asked, “how do you do it?” a question, I have heard, most frequently asked of magicians also. The explanation is not quite so simple as how a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat or saws a lady in half. Even I don’t fully understand how I do it. I have never taken a writing class or read a how-to book. The knowledge just seems to be a part of me, perhaps something I imbibed or absorbed through years of voracious reading without even realizing it.

When I settle on a subject to write about I do research, I take notes. I always keep notebooks close to me so I can write down ideas, whether they come to me in bed after I have turned out the light to try to sleep or when I’m in the bath. Perhaps because I have been a fan of classic films since I was a little girl, my books, and the ideas that later make up the scenes, chapters, and dialogue, come to me like snippets of film playing on a movie projector inside my mind. The quality and length of these clips vary. Sometimes it is like watching a film without my glasses on, I hear the sound, but the images are all a blur, then it is my job as a novelist to bring them into focus and sharp clarity, Other times the picture is clear but the sound is garbled or scanty. And sometimes the whole thing is a bloody confounded mess like an old silent film on decayed nitrate film-stock desperately in need of restoration. And it is my job to make sense of it all, to put all the clips, which come to me entirely out of sequence and in random order, in the proper chronology, to bring the picture into focus and as sharp as possible clarity, and to make sure all the dialogue is audible and at as perfect as possible pitch. When these scenes pop into my head, the projector is running, and I have to grab a pen and strive to write down as much as possible of what I am hearing or seeing.

To give an example, imagine being shown a snippet of Gone With The Wind then being asked to write down every little thing you remember, what was said, how it was said, what emotions the characters conveyed, the costumes, hairstyles, the setting. As a novelist, it is my job to put the pictures I see in my head into words, to make a novel out of the movie in my mind. When the book is written and I can read it through and watch the whole movie as I read then I know I have it.

Every writer is different, but that is the best explanation I can give of how I do it.