I’ve heard authors all my life say write what you know, but I’m a fiction writer. I don’t want to bore my readers with life lessons learned and I don’t have any life wisdoms to give anyone besides not letting your kids wipe poop on the walls while they are still in a crib (yep, I’ve had some great kid stories over the years, but you DO NOT want to learn about most of them). If that is something of interest to you, then follow my personal Twitter page @thorntoncrazy8s and I can regale you with all my family nonsense.

So to give you an idea of methodical writing from my perspective you have to climb into my head. Let me paint you a picture, there is a library of blank books in my  mind. Wall to wall spines with no titles. You could browse them one by one to no avail because their stories haven’t been told yet. Now with no warning a person climbs out from between the spines of two books. You have no idea who they are, but then they start screaming facts and information at you, but wait then amongst the chaos another climbs out and starts screaming over the first. I have to find a way to calm them, but it gets very crazy when four or five people are screaming at once. I have to silence them, but they are having none of it. So the only way to begin to tame them is to pick one and focus. Deep focus to drown out the remaining voices still screaming. One by one, as their stories are told the voices quiet. Allowing them to calmly and peacefully converse with one another on a basic level.

So the object is to tell their stories before the noise gets overwhelming. So it is imperative for me to tell their stories quickly before someone else has a chance to chime in. Now this gets tricky when not just characters from the same book are yelling. My mind is never off so that means if I get a book idea and I write it down before I begin to write, sometimes the characters get antsy and want me to start their stories before I’m ready. So like right now, I’m fighting two sets of voices in my head to tell two stories at once.

So when I say I have voices in my head, I hope you now have a basic understanding and a very vivid picture as to what I mean. If you suffer from the same disorder as I do, let me encourage you to just write them down. Even if you do it a little at a time, but this will help I promise.

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