I’m not usually one to plan before writing anything. Even in school, I usually think up an idea, write down the “hook”, and get rolling for the next forty five minutes. But then I try to write novels.

Novels are incredibly intricate when it comes to plot, theme, characters, settings, even the title is a huge part of the whole process for some books. And I’ve always wondered how they do it.

JK Rowling, for instance, took years to sketch up Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. That seems to be the norm among modern writers: create your first hit novel and keep rolling with that. But how do they keep all of their thoughts in one linear path?

Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, must have had one of the hardest times of any author I’ve read recently. Her book bounces around both place and time, with dates and time stamps and all. It amazes me that people have the ability to do this. How do you know where the story will go? How can you ever agree where to take the story?

I’m sure that no book is ever finished, because that’s always true in coding (a rather strange type of storytelling). So cherish the books that push that to the limits. That question the author’s ability to plan anything and everything all at once and not at all.

This has been an LPSA.