Learning to write is an extended process. At one point, early in the process, you recognize that you can put symbols (letters) on paper that reflect what you are thinking or saying. What seems to be very simple now, was difficult at the beginning.

And that’s just the start. When we get past the, “See Jane run” lines, we get into much more complex things. At some point the beauty of the words working together creates an image that you can finally say, “That’s pretty good!” I remember an old Peanuts cartoon when Snoopy has a dictionary, and he says, “Now I have all the words. I just have to put them together.”

Elizabeth George is an excellent writer of fiction, and like many excellent writers she tries to pass her knowledge of the craft along to others. That’s what she did in Write Away. By the time I found this book I had already self-published a novel, Recalculating Truth. I thought it was pretty good, but I knew I had more to learn.

Like all writers, George has a specific process that works for her. (She has written 21 Inspector Lynley novels now.) Her stories are set in England but she lives in Seattle, Washington. She spends a great deal of time surveying the sites of each book, and she describes and illustrates that process in Write Away. In fact, she moves through the entire process of book creation from the Overview, through the Basics, the Technique, the Process, and finally examples.

The primary idea that I extracted from this is right from the title of her first chapter: Story is Character. That’s the kind of book I want to write. People have characters and those characters interact to make the story. In Chapter 19 she includes a Character Prompt Sheet that I have pulled into the writing software I use, Scrivener, which helps me to define the characters in the story. This includes their age, height, weight, build, but also enemies, best friend, ambition in life, political leaning, and hobbies. It also includes a pathological maneuver - what would the character do under stress? When the character is at the moment of stress they perform some sort of personal ritual like tucking hair behind an ear, straightening out their glasses, twisting their body away.

I found this book very helpful in fundamental ways of helping me to develop my own process. George includes excerpts from her “Journal of a Novel” that reflects her nervousness and fear in the process. I found this book more useful than her second book on writing, Mastering the Process, which seemed padded with her book excerpts and more personally related information.

I would definitely recommend Write Away, however, as a great starting point.