As part of my job I often spend a fair chunk of time talking to different types of people face to face (I dispense prescriptions for glasses and contact lenses if you’re desperate to know). It often means I get to hear a lot about what these people do for a living. I workmate was mid dispense with somebody yesterday and called me over as the fellow was a writer too.
He wrote war stories. I asked him if this took a lot of research to which he said it did but military history was part of his previous job.
He then told me that he tries to keep away from a computer as much as possible during the writing process. He always keeps a card file with his characters in and refers to that as he goes along typing. Apparently this helps him because he’s not searching through files on a hard drive when he’s wondering what each character would do.
Thinking about it that’s really good advice. This might be worth considering for book two if I get around to it.
We wished each other luck with our individual projects and I got back to work.
