Editing as You Go??? Good or Bad?

This morning I was looking through the blogs I follow and found Sarah's Confessions of the Unpublished with a post about Wannabe Writers and of course this perked my interests. Along with this interest and in continuance of my comment, I decided to post some pictures here of my new way of getting my story from my head and onto paper without the horror and time wasting of editing what I just pushed out of my brain and onto the screen. 

When I start to write, I usually don't know where it's going. It's just something that is trapped in my brain that needs to hit the screen. So, thats what I do. I type out everything as I see it in my head. The characters are built by my fingers upon the keyboard along with every other aspect of their world. Then, when I reach 10 or 11 pages, I scroll back up and do the most awful thing I could ever do to bring my thoughts and novel to a complete HALT. My fingers give life to my novel as they also taketh away. I edit. I delete, move things around, change the characters... you name it, I do it. And then after I finish all the editing and drowning all of my creativity, my novel doesn't move forward any more. So, the day before yesterday I was chatting to a good friend of mine and she showed me some notebooks that she had purchased to work on her screen writing and novel. 

Then LIGHTBULB, I decided to borrow her idea, (Thanks Lisa), and started writing every idea (characters, traits, dialogue, scenes, plots, settings, etc.) into the notebook. I moved everything (post-its, both laptops, hightlighters, my notebook, pens, camera, box of index cards, magazines, etc.) into my idea room (my couch in the living room) and started writing. With in about 3 hours I had 3 pages written. Sure, there are a lot of scribbles, hightlighting, and lines, but I actually have a plot, setting, and quite a great crew of characters all written in black ink in my cute little pink journal. This is the most progress I've made in weeks. I'm so happy. 

I find that by using a notebook, I don't get sidetracked trying to research ways to write a novel on the internet. I have found some great books on Amazon about writing, creating characters, etc. and bought a few. I haven't received them yet. A few of them are:

Writing For Young Adults

Writing and Selling The Young Adult Novel

From First Draft to Finished Novel: A Writer's Guide to Cohesive Story Building

Those are just a few. 

Ideas… From Who, What, When, How, & Where?

Writers are known for their creativity, their wild imaginations, and the ability to put thoughts into well rounded words onto paper for those who lack that ability to read and enjoy… (and sometimes envy). But the question is, where does this special breed of human get their ideas from. What deep well do they dig those creative characters out of and what cave do they enter to find that wild imagination? Many writers get their ideas from the world around them. Article writers for Parenting magazines watch their own children or other people's children and the ideas of articles begin to flow. The same also applies for writers of sports, animals, and even car enthusiasts. The ideas for their stories and articles all thrived from somewhere within planet Earth.