If you write and you hang around published authors for long enough, they’ll spout advice to you that usually goes like this: “protect your process.”

They mean well. They really do. What they’re trying to tell you is this: write the book your own way. If your own way means hanging upside-down like a bat from three to five a.m. while writing longhand on a brand new legal pad with a purple Sharpie, by God, don’t let any other writers tell you that their process is better.

If you like to plot your book first, they say, then plot. If you like to fly by the seat of your pants and discover what happens as you’re writing the scene, thereby letting large chunks of the book be a surprise to you, then fly, little bird, fly.

And don’t worry that Nora Roberts or Brenda Jackson or (INSERT FAMOUS AUTHOR NAME HERE) does it some other way. The right way for you is the way that gets the book written. Period.

Isn’t this brilliant? Doesn’t it make perfect sense? Doesn’t it give you the freedom and permission you’ve been searching for so desperately all this time?

*SNORT*

What they never tell you, all these wise and wonderful authors, is that:

1. You may not be a pure plotter or pantser but rather some weird hybrid of both;
2. You may not discover what your process is during the actual writing of the book, but only months later, after long periods of introspection;
3. The process that helped you write THAT book may not help you write THIS book; and/or
4. Your process may up and change on you without prior warning, leaving you floundering and desperate as your deadline approaches.

Let’s examine these points in more detail using an author chosen at random.

Anyone? Anyone?

No? Well, then … why don’t I volunteer?

Here’s how I used to write a book:

1. Come up with an idea and a blurb.
2. Outline the whole book on enormous sheets of paper and/or storyboards using colored markers and Post-It Notes.
3. Make laborious notes on the characters’ archetypes so I’d know how they should behave.
4. Write a synopsis from all these notes.
5. Begin writing the book.
6. Start at the beginning and write until the end, editing the previous day’s work in the first half-hour or so of each writing session.
7. Write every day while the kids are at school AND after dinner AND on weekends.
8. Demand absolute silence while writing because I can’t stand noise and focus better in silence.
9. Print out the first draft and edit it.
10. Write a second draft (or, in the case of RISK and TROUBLE, umpteen drafts).
11. Print and edit subsequent drafts.
12. Send it in and pray.
13. Start working on the next book.

THAT was my process, and it worked just fine for my first five books (including my first, unpublish-able, book).

But then things changed. I’m not quite sure when they changed, how, or why. All I know is that they DID. Here’s what I do now:

1. Come up with an idea and a blurb.
2. Play with colored markers and paper.
3. Outline parts of the book on the computer (or not) using the highlight function with different colors as needed (or not) for different subplots.
4. Wonder what happens in the numerous blank spaces on the computer screen.
5. Begrudgingly work up a synopsis and hope neither my editor nor my agent notices that there are plot gaps big enough to drive a caravan of semis through.
6. Write the first fifty pages.
7. Send the proposal off and pray someone buys it.
8. Wait an excruciatingly long period of time while continuing to pray someone buys it.
9. Panic when someone buys it.
10. Think, what was this book about again?
11. Re-read the first fifty pages and synopsis and remember the characters and plot.
12. Begin at page fifty-one and go till the end.
13. Write every WEEK day while the kids are at school.
14. Write at my favorite coffee house because I waste too much time at home.
15. Listen to my iPod while at the local coffee house because I can’t write in silence and focus better with noise.
16. Think about writing every night after dinner but ultimately decide against it.
17. Think about writing every weekend but ultimately decide against it.
18. Wonder what should happen in a scene as I begin to write it.
19. Resist the urge to check my e-mail.
20. Decide what to do with the scene.
21. Resist the urge to check my e-mail.
22. Write the scene and do something totally different than what I’d decided to do with it.
23. Don’t print the manuscript.
24. Edit the first draft on the computer.
25. Edit the second draft on the computer.
26. Send it in and pray.

I have, as you can see, gone from a silence-loving, at-home-writing plotter to a music-loving, coffee-house-writing semi-pantser.

This, then, is my new process, which I expect to last for only about three days now that I’ve figured it out.

God only knows what my next process will look like, or when it will show up.

Would any other writers out there care to share their CURRENT process?