How I Write, Part Zillion, and Secret Project

What surprised me when I started doing this shit professionally was how often people genuinely asked me where I got my ideas from. Except I decided, unlike, apparently, every other writer on the face of the planet, that it was not in fact an unreasonable question and deserved more than an eye-roll. Obviously there's some kind of underlying psychological process, and how that process works for, say, someone who gets paid to write books or stories is to some extent different from how it works for most people sitting down to make stuff up for quite possibly the first time. 

The bad news is that it's all down to practise and persistence. That's it, no great secret. I also don't believe in writer's block. The real Jack Torrance wouldn't have sat there all day writing nothing but ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY. Noooo, he'd have carefully constructed a step-by-step description of precisely how he was going to slaughter his entire family in intricate detail about the same length as, say, a novel about a crazy person locked up in a hotel with his family who he's going to try and slaughter. 

Don't believe any one would actually be crazy enough to do exactly that? Here's an example from real life. 

When it comes to ideas, I just start writing whatever daft shit wanders into my head. I essentially talk to myself on the page, which has the advantage of not making people shy away from you in public or look up Wikipedia articles on how to get someone sectioned. Like this:

3 February
I like the idea that electronics - high-end stuff - doesn’t function well or at all on the island due to “interference”. This has three advantages: 1 - it means in many ways they’re pretty isolated. 2 - their cars have to be relatively low-tech without much in the way of fancy electronics. 3 - it explains how people don’t have much luck sending teams into the island because they find it hard to remain in contact.
Disadvantage: if there’s an international audience for this stuff, how do they get to watch it live? Maybe specially adapted low-tech cameras that can nonetheless upload? How?
Okay, I _like_ the idea of electronics not working well there. But people being able to watch the action is where I trip up. Could you build devices like, say, semi-autonomous camera drones that don’t require that same kind of electronics?
Perhaps it’s a distance thing. The cameras don’t work except on the coast, at a certain distance from the ‘rift’. Any closer, they fail. Okay, so it’s a gradation - that works!

What is this? Random unedited text from the "work diary" for an outline I'm putting together. I couldn't figure out how to get something in the plot to work, so instead of staring at the screen, as some people imagine writers do, I wrote that shit out. Once you get it down on the page and out of your head things can start to become a lot more clearer.

As I say, that above text is completely unedited - it's not actually intended to be seen, ever, by anyone but me. The last half dozen books I've written each have tens upon tens of thousands of words of notes like this where I try and work out, sentence by sentence, how something works, why somebody is doing something, how it'll affect the overarching plot, and so on and on.

So the lesson for today is: write it down. It doesn't matter if it's utter gibberish, because typing it up, spelling mistakes, dodgy grammar and all, will fire up the logic-driven part of your wet squishy brain until it wants to make sense of it.

As for where these notes come from, that's the SECRET PROJECT I'm working on. I've had SECRET PROJECT in my head for a good long time now, in one form or another, and I'm finally putting together a tentative synopsis. What's it about? Well...you'll have to wait. All I can tell you is that it just might be simultaneously the greatest and the stupidest idea for a book I've ever had.