Germination

Sometimes all you can do for writing a book is to write down ideas and plant seeds; then let them sit until you can water and care for those seeds.

Today, I began to reap the benefits of story seeds I'd planted many months ago.  I had written out a bunch of chapter ideas for my Knitting in India book after going through my trip journals.  Not all of these ideas will make it to the final book.  In fact, some of them seemed to get less interesting the more I wrote about them.  But some are germinating.  After months in a dormant state, it's time to see if these seeds planted long ago can grow into a book.

Never question your writing process, if it is working for you.  If you need to work in jumps and starts but end up with a story, so be it.  If you need to write from the last page to the first, so be it.  And if you need to start five stories but end up with one, so be it.  Each writer is different in how they craft a story.  Follow your own instinct on this and allow yourself times of frustratingly little progress and times of "aha" moments and times when you think this all might actually work.

The important thing is to keep going forward.