Marie Force - Guest Blog!

Marie Force, author of The Line of Scrimmage is doing a guest blog here today! I'm so happy that she's graced my little blog with her writing as I loved LOS and can't wait to read her next book! I'm also a wee bit romance-happy because the football season has started and my boyfriend will be decidedly unromantic until it's over.

Let's get to Marie's post, shall we? She's even being generous and giving away a signed copy of LOS to a commenter who responds to her question at the end!

How does she do that? by Marie Force

One of the questions I’m often asked is, “How do you write a book?” Stephen King says, “One page at a time.” The writers out there will attest that it’s as simple as Stephan suggests—and much more complicated. Most of the time, I’m convinced I could never teach my process because it’s so bizarre. However, as I’ve connected with more and more writers, I’ve decided we’re all a little bizarre, but that makes us better writers.

So how do I do it? I’ll try to explain my process using my debut novel “Line of Scrimmage” and my spring release “Same Time Sunday” as examples. The seeds of “Line of Scrimmage” began with a vision: boots dropping in a fancy foyer. From that came a series of questions and answers: Are those boots welcome? No. Work boots or cowboy? Cowboy. Definitely cowboy. What if the house is his but he doesn’t live there anymore? And what if the mistress of the house is entertaining her fiancé and his parents when her soon-to-be ex-husband shows up? And what if that ex-husband happens to be an NFL superstar who just won his third Super Bowl championship? And what if he blackmails his wife into spending their last ten days as Mr. and Mrs. together or he’ll stop the divorce? Since she’s due to married in a month, that’s going to be a problem.

That’s exactly how it unfolds in my mind. Then come the decisions about where they’re from, what brought them together, and what broke them up in the first place. Often I don’t have those answers before I start a book. I tend to discover these things as my story unfolds, which I’m told makes me a “linear pantser” in writing vernacular. I write the story in chronological order, I edit as I go, and nothing gets in unless it propels Character X or Character Y’s story forward. Because I go back, re-read, and edit often during the writing process, I end up with a pretty clean first draft. In fact, I recently stumbled upon the hand-written opening scene of “Line of Scrimmage” and discovered that other than a renamed character, not much had changed.

For my second book, “Same Time Sunday,” I began with a conversation I overheard in an airport. Two twenty-somethings, on their way to visit their significant others for the weekend, discover they are on the same flight home and agree to meet up again to compare notes on how their weekends went. That part actually happened in the overheard (note I don’t say eavesdropped”) conversation. From there I wondered, what if both their weekends were a disaster? What if they strike up a friendship that leads to love? What if their exes don’t go quietly? What if he’s a prosecutor on the eve of the biggest murder trial of his career and she gets sucked into it in ways that endanger them both? From there, it was off to the races!

Since I don’t plot, I spend a lot of time staring off into space when a book has me by the throat. During these phases, my kids often ask, “ARE YOU LISTENING TO US?” at the top of their considerable lungs. I have to confess that Mom just took a brief trip to Pluto, but I’m back now and you have my full attention. I do my best zoning/plotting when I’m driving (watch out for a green Honda Odyssey), doing dishes, showering, drying my hair, and vacuuming. I’ve solved a lot of plot issues while sucking up a few days’ worth of dog hair. I’ve run dripping from the shower to the computer to get something down before I forget it. Bizarre? You bet. My friend Chris likes to say that my mind is a strange, scary place. Of course I take that as a compliment!

To the writers out there, are you a plotter, a seat-of-the-pantser, a linear plotter, a linear pantser, an organic or what? To the readers, are you more convinced than ever after reading this that all writers are a little bit nuts? I’ll give away a signed copy of “Line of Scrimmage” to one lucky commenter, so let’s hear from you!