Theres a Write Way and Then There’s My Way.

The clock is now ticking down to mere hours left until the submission deadline is reached for the August issue of Quibbler and I thought I’d give you an insight into my writing process as, believe it or not, I haven’t finished my article yet.

Yes that’s right I’m riding it down to the wire this time and in the end will have to scurry to meet the deadline because the simple fact is that if I am late, I will have no choice but to tell myself that my article was unfortunately not in on time and therefore will be held to the next issue. I’m being strict about this because I know in a week I’ll be doing the layout and won’t have time for late articles being held up by problems with the editing process.

But I’ll get to that in a minute

Each writer is different, but for me the process is relatively painless. I generally will mull over a concept for an article for a few days before actually putting fingers to keyboard. In those few days it is not uncommon for me to have a vacant look on my face and slightly glazed eyes as brain processing power is shunted away from animating my face and into putting together the article.

In the end however the article pretty much flows out of my fingers nearly finished, and I have a good idea how everything fits together from the set up to the punch line.

Lots of people have a problem working like this however, (mainly because they can’t get away with walking around with vacant expressions on their faces, I think) they have to sit down and plan their articles on paper first using mind maps and/ or multiple drafts. This process has its benefits as they can plan the structure of their articles in fine detail and perfect it over the drafting process.

Generally the format for the articles I write are the same so I don’t panic too much about it, and I work according to this formula: The first paragraph is a general summary of the article that aims to grab the reader’s attention. It also starts to set up the overarching joke in the article, but is careful to not give it all way just yet.

The subsequent paragraphs flesh out the summary and build the main joke, while trying to add as much humour and fun along the way as possible. If one was to put it in musical terms, my articles have a main theme with little riffs and sub themes along the way.

The last paragraph generally contains the punch line of my joke, although if I had to do a lot of work to get to the punch line it may be the second last paragraph and the last paragraph is then cleaning up loose ends and keeping everything newspaper like.

Once the article is done I will submit it to the quibbler as my own work, as opposed to submitting reader submitted articles that come into the [email protected] mail box which I usually will have a quick proof read before passing on to the editors as an article by someone else.

From there not one, but two editors will go through the articles, one looking at it from a content and formatting point of view ’ something they do for a living and are really good at ’ and the other from a spelling and grammar point of view. This is important as the second editor is British and can therefore help make sure that the articles are written as they would be if the writer was a local. I can hear the British asking if the representative of their country only speaks English or for example the Yorkshire dialect, to which I would reply “nobbut a mention”…

I can only assume that either all the people writing are of exceptional quality, or that we don’t hold people to as high a standard as the articles written for Scribbulus because our editing turnaround is considerably shorter. We do have standards however and do rather expect articles to be written in legible English.

Memo to me: Remember to have a word with Mundungus Fletcher about his handwriting and grammar.

I would strongly recommend you do head over to Scribbulus at one point or another and read the articles they post there; I purposefully staggered the release dates of Quibbler to the middle of the month so as not to compete with their awesomeness.

Well, I had best be writing that article, so I think although this particular blog entry may not be as humorous as previous ones, it should at least make up for that by being more informative…