Sands Hetherington is the creator of the Night Buddies Adventures. The four books were born out of bedtime stories he made up with his son John. The unique banter and fun words were created in the nightly give-and-take.
Sands majored in history at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) and has an MFA in creative writing and an MA in English from UNC-Greensboro. He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. He likes visiting ancient Mediterranean sites in Turkey, Italy, and, most of all, Greece.
Today, we revisit a 2014 post where Sands shared his writing process for the Night Buddies books.
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The main thing for me is scheduling and dedication. I make a schedule and stick to it no matter what happens or how rotten I may feel that day. I don’t go for anything like eight hours. I doubt many writers do that. It’s just too exhausting. Three hours does it for me, but I try never to stint on my three hours.
I try to stop writing at a spot that will be easy to start from the next day. And to read everything I’ve got the next day before starting again.
I like to do about five hundred words a day and do it straight through. I get in trouble when I start trying to do a line at a time, that is, getting a line just so before going on to the next one. This hurts my flow (from the reader’s point of view) and wastes time. I try to do my five hundred words without looking back and then take fifteen or twenty minutes to clean it up.
If I get stuck, I take a little notepad or recorder and go for a walk.
I finish the whole business and then rewrite and rewrite. I need to stop this at some point, but I try to err on overdoing it.
So this is what works for me. You’re welcome to try it out.