Two Months from Concept to Final Draft

By Ron Hogan on January 17, 2008 7:49 AM

Jeff VanderMeer, one of the most literary fantasy writers or fantastic literary writers we’ve got working these days, take your pick, recently produced a Predator tie-in novel in just two months, and now that it’s done, he shares his secrets for writing super-fast. Among them:

“Make sure you support your efforts with sound process decisions. Most of the time, I wrote new scenes in the mornings, revised existing scenes in the afternoons, and spent my evenings on line-edits and rewrites of individual paragraphs here and there. By structuring my time this way, I made better progress than if I’d just focused on doing new scenes all day until the novel was done. Because by the time I’d finished writing the new scenes, most everything up to that point had already then been through a second or even third revision.”

On an even more practical note, he adds a bit later, “If using an exotic setting, make sure it’s one you can find a parallel to in your own immediate surroundings. I didn’t do much research on islands in the South China Sea. I just made sure the island had a semi-tropical climate like Florida and then I riffed off of the Florida landscape, with a few altered details.” (spotted on BoingBoing, where Cory Doctorow quite rightly points out, “Some of this advice adds up to ‘Write some other novels first so you can do your two-month novel in a measured and confident manner.’”)

Predator: South China Seas comes from Dark Horse Comics (even though it’s a prose novel) later this year; in an interview a few months back, he said it was a good opportunity “to learn some things about writing thrillers… It’s not so much turning off parts of my brain as utilizing parts that only come into limited play in the other books.”