writing process – Page 2

this one’s for the writers

Since Not Your Mary Sue has been out for three weeks now (ahhhh!) there have been reviews being posted in various places that clearly mark it as a “debut novel” or “first book.” Which it totally is. All my other published books have been nonfiction, and this is where a bunch of people are encountering me for the first time. So this has nothing to do with the word choice of anyone kind enough to read my book and post about it – you’re factually correct. Not Your Mary Sue is my first published novel. But I want to offer a clarification for the writers out there.

It’s not actually my first novel.

I didn’t start off writing like this.

I started, the way many people do, with fanfiction. Some of that probably still even exists out there somewhere, under one of my old screennames, but I never had more than a handful of readers. Which was fine – I wrote because I had fun writing, not because of the praise. That was in junior high, which was … yeesh … over two decades ago.

Then, when I was 15, I wrote my first “novel,” which I talk about a bit in this post. I printed off a couple copies and one of them actually made the rounds of my classmates a couple years later – I let one person borrow it and it got passed around and people I barely knew mentioned it to me in the hall. Which was weird and kind of scary, but obviously didn’t scare me off writing completely.

In my post about failure I go into how many novels I haven’t finished – how many ideas I started but never quite figured out a full plot arc for. That’s where I get my 10:1 ratio of “started documents to completed novels.” And at 87 partial efforts, I’ve clearly written more than one novel.

Some people end up publishing the first novel they ever wrote.

It can be their first published novel or, as in the case of Stephen King, their novels can be published “out of order.” Carrie was his first published novel in 1974, but he wrote The Long Walk when he was only 18. (Granted, he wasn’t ancient or anything when Carrie came out, but still.) The point is that King had completed other novels, tried to find interested publishers, and then laid them aside as he wrote new ones and tried again.

And that’s the situation with me: Not Your Mary Sue isn’t the first novel I ever wrote. By a long shot. I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo – that challenge to draft a 50,000-word novel in a single month – since 2010, including the two extra “camp” months since 2011, and that’s added a lot of “novels” to my list. But I didn’t write Not Your Mary Sue until 2017, and it was around that time that NaNo reported I’d logged a million words on their site.

You have to write a million words before you find your voice as a writer.
Henry Miller

I doubt Miller meant a hard-and-fast million, and my NaNo stats are missing more than a decade of what I’d written prior to joining up my first November, but that’s where things stood for me: I’d written over a million words by the time I sat down to start Not Your Mary Sue (and I’ve written who knows how many since then). My current NaNo lifetime stats stand at 3,011,716 words.

It’s not about the word count – it’s about perseverence.

Writing a little bit each day adds up. Tossing an idea aside when it’s not working, but then picking up a different idea, adds up. Going back to one of those previous ideas (tossed aside but not into the garbage) adds up.

Not Your Mary Sue both is and isn’t my first novel. It’s only my first published novel because I kept going – I kept reading, kept revising, and kept writing. What you hold in your hands isn’t anywhere near a first draft, and it shows all the decades of experience behind it. All those words add up.

Do you have any tips for authors looking to push through that “first million”? How do you keep writing when it all feels like an uphill struggle?

Jay Michal Robinson, the Fresh Coast Killer

So far I’ve been trying to limit myself to teasers based on the back-of-the-book summary, but Not Your Mary Sue has been out for over a week now (ahhhhh!) so I think I can stretch a little further. Everything from today’s post has to do with Part I of the book, so if you really don’t want anything spoiled, bookmark this and wait to read it until you get to Part II.

We open on a private island with exactly two occupants: Marcy, our POV character, and Jay, who’s more of a mystery. Marcy knows a little bit about him:

I’ve been trying to figure out what I know about this guy, and all I’ve come up with is that he’s a high school choir director who spends his summers here, tending the cabin and the people who rent it.

… but, when you wake up after a drugged sleep with a chain locked around your ankle, that’s really not enough.

Let’s get to now Jay a bit better care of this portrait I commissioned from Shegry. Click on that link if you, too, would like to commission something. (Because seriously, how cool is this?)

I provided references for things like Jay himself and the very specific dagger in his hand, and Shegry took what I wrote about Jay and used it for the imagery.

the waves

The waves are Lake Superior. We first meet Jay on the island, and there’s a lot of similarity between the water and Jay himself – apparent calm, coldness, unknown depths. Marcy’s on an island, which at least means she’s currently safe from drowning, but it’s clear right off that Jay himself isn’t actually safe. He might say he wants to protect her, but … well. Jay’s idea of keeping someone “safe” doesn’t entirely match up with what the rest of us might thing.

Lake Superior is absolutely huge. I mean, all of the Great Lakes are, but there’s a little something extra to Superior. It’s dangerous, with at least 350 shipwrecks (one of which has been immortalized, of course, by Gordon Lightfoot) and no, you can’t see across it. It takes the Ranger hours to get to Isle Royale – which is bigger than Jay’s island, and much further out, but come on. If you’re out in Lake Superior, you’re really out there.

Being out on Superior means being isolated, out of communication with other people through everyday means, and you need specialized skills to survive. So … Jay’s Lake Superior.

the music

During the school year, Jay’s Mr. Robinson, high school choir director. (He’s only the Fresh Coast Killer during the summer. There’s no mixing business and pleasure.) But … why a choir director?

I’ve written a bit about “casting” Jay in my head, relying on the Tumblr dichotomy of Tom Hiddleston for UNICEF vs. Avengers-era Loki killing 80 people in two days. Jay’s the reverse: his good-guy persona is the act, and the murderer is his real self, so I wanted to feed into that generic idea of what makes a man attractive. Looks, yes, but isn’t there a reason guys bring their guitars to college and play them out on the quad?

Jay himself was homeschooled before going to college, so his only public high school experience is as a teacher. I didn’t want him to be an English teacher, because then why would he need or want Marcy to write his biography? Choir’s an elective where students self-select participation, and Jay’s at a high school that, like mine, puts on a musical every year. So he’s heavily involved in those, and I couldn’t really pass up the chance to have him involved with Sweeney Todd.

There’s also a large element of performance to choir, much less musical theater, and a large element of performance in Jay’s life.

the morning glories and the dagger

Floriography is the secret language of flowers. (Fun fact: I’ve got a novel I wrote in high school where the characters use Victorian flower language like code, and I covered the paper folder with handwritten explanations of all the meanings.) Shegry picked morning glories because of their associations with mortality. (Flowers have all kinds of associations depending on type and color and era, so you can really get lost in there.)

But that dagger …

It’s probably the thing I’ve most wanted to talk about that isn’t entirely a spoiler but didn’t make it into any of the summaries of the book.

When Marcy takes herself on a tour of the island, she discovers that there’s a workshop attached to Jay’s living quarters, and she sees a sword forge inside. (My mother wants to know how Marcy even recognized it. Mythbusters fans have seen them in multiple situations, although usually having to do with curving gun barrels or cooking shrimp instead of forging swords.) It turns out that Jay isn’t just a choir director and the Fresh Coast Killer – he’s also a journeyman bladesmith.

Jay has made multiple examples of his favorite dagger, the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife: one for each of his victims. Then, after each murder, he can modify or recycle the weapon so it can’t be matched to the wounds. I didn’t just get my information from Forged in Fire. My husband’s an amateur bladesmith. I asked him to pick Jay’s favorite weapon, and he chose the Fairbairn-Sykes dagger.

This was fairly early on in my plotting, because Jay’s favorite weapon has a major influence on his serial killing. It’s a dagger – sharp on both edges – and a certain length, originally designed for a certain purpose. That means Jay likes to kill in a specific way. (And then head back to the forge, likely chuckling to himself, because he’s so carefully meshed his hobbies.)

Oh, and the plaid blanket? It’s because Jay’s a Yooper, and plaid isn’t just for Plaidurday. A Canadian tuxedo might be denim on denim, but when Yoopers put on their best it’s the jeans and plaid shirt without the holes.

Shegry drew Marcy for me, too. We’ll check her out next week.

Have you ever commissioned artwork of your original characters? How did that turn out?

going to the faucet

So we already know that I don’t actually write every day, as in putting pen to paper or my fingers on the keyboard 365 days a year, and I’ve written a bit about my writing schedule previously, but I wanted to add a sort of real-time musing update on this.

Yesterday the thought of writing made me groan. All of my emotions on the subject were “Nope.” Even though – or maybe even “because” – I’d written a bunch the day before that. I’m working on revising a project, which in this case basically means starting over from zero, and that’s not always something you want to do. Really it’s just one more reason to dig in your heels, pout, and say you’re not writing today.

But, since I’ve started actively working on this project, I figured I’d do it. Pout and all. I made some coffee and told myself I’d stare at the cursor for half an hour and then get breakfast.

I didn’t end up eating breakfast yesterday. I got working and didn’t look up for a couple hours.

So the moral to the story …

Here’s the thing: I’ve been writing for over two decades at this point, and I still can’t guess at which days hold the words and which days don’t. The wordful days are sometimes obvious (is that in the Newspeak dictionary?) but the unwordful days are frequently liars. Surprisingly frequently.

This sort of thing even pops up in my Facebook memories from time to time. “Yesterday I wrote a ton of words. Today I sat down thinking I just need a dozen, okay, please? And ended up writing two tons.”

It’s unpredictable.

So really, you do just have to turn the faucet on and see what comes out. I don’t particularly want to get all It in this post, but you don’t actually know what’s waiting (blood or water?) or what else might be down there in the sewers. Georgie Denbrough might tell you not to look, but we’re writers. We’re curious. And that second, oft-unspoken part of the famous cat phrase is “but satisfaction brought it back.”

And okay, we’re talking about the magical wordful faucet and not the thing on your bathroom sink. Some days the faucet is rusty and refuses to turn, or somehow it’s grown tall and is nearly out of reach. Maybe it feels like it’s hot enough to burn if we touch it, or it’s shrunk down to Borrowers size and we’re more likely to step on it and break it.

It’s one sneaky, changeable faucet, but we still need to turn that sucker on.

And the thing is, I don’t think I’m being entirely negative here. There are some days when the faucet is shiny and bright and I can’t even conceive of a spider hiding in the sink, but … those are rare. Off the top of my head, I can think of two (fiction) pieces that demanded to be written and wouldn’t let me go. I couldn’t turn the sucker off if I wanted to. Two, in two decades.

That’s a lot of forcing myself to the faucet.

But I go. I go because – as Stephen King apparently is the only one to remember Alfred Bester ever saying – “The book is the boss.” (Seriously, a Google search for the quote plus Bester’s name gets you a whole page of King quoting Bester, and who clicks onto the second page?)

The book wants to be told, and it’s not like anyone else is going to tell it. If it’s going to be written – if I want to find out what happens – I need to write it myself.

Go to the dang faucet. Turn it on. See what comes out.

And keep going, day after day, until you get enough.

If you’re lucky, I think, you won’t ever get enough.

Is your writing like turning on Louis L’Amour’s faucet, or do you see it differently? Does your faucet work better than mine? Have you ever had something entirely unexpected come out?

Musings on unsolved crimes, inspired by the Writing Community Chat Show

I was on The Writing Community Chat Show last week – here’s a link to the episode – as part of a panel of authors. Panel talks are cool but also challenging: you want to talk, but you don’t want to go on and on and make it all about you, or cut in if someone else has something to say, or veer back if the topic’s already moved on. So, for instance, when a really cool question comes up … you don’t always get to answer it.

But this blog is all about me, so I’m answering it here.

When considering True Crime, how important is it to the guests that the crime is solved? Are there any unsolved crimes that intrigue and have inspired the panel?
Darren Pengelly

First, thank you, Darren, because I love this question. I could go on for hours about it. So it’s probably good other people jumped in and we moved on.

The thing about true crime is that, as a genre, it loves crimes that have been solved. When Ann Rule signed the contract to write about “the Ted Murders,” she knew she wouldn’t be getting it published until after there’d been a trial and sentencing. The Stranger Beside Me was first published in 1980, after Bundy had been found guilty of two murders, three counts of attempted first-degree murder, and two counts of burglary. It came out quickly enough that an update needed to be added when he received his third death sentence for the murder of Kimberly Leach, but it still wasn’t sent to print until Bundy had been found guilty.

True crime likes stories that get wrapped up neatly and tied with a bow. It’s all about the solved cases and the plucky law enforcement agents who went toe-to-toe with the cunning criminals and came out on top. True crime doesn’t like unsolved cases or systemic problems that can’t be pinned on a single person in a catchy mug shot.

Okay, there are some exceptions.

Says the woman who’s written two books on Jack the Ripper. But, in that case, the Ripper isn’t still out there, ready to murder anyone reading a book about him. (Imagine the Golden State Killer reading I’ll Be Gone in the Dark before he was finally caught. That’s the premise for Catherine Ryan Howard’s The Nothing Man. The Golden State Killer didn’t actually go on to murder because of the book, but in that case, it was a possibility. He hadn’t been caught. Not enough time had passed to be sure he was dead.) But the Ripper was in 1888, he only killed poor East End sex workers, and he’s dead by now – all layers of safety between the Ripper and the average true crime reader.

If someone writes about an ongoing crime that’s unfolding right now – say, a serial killer – then there’s not that barrier. Maybe, like the Green River killer, there’s a clear victim type and readers can assure themselves that they don’t fit it. If we don’t get into cars with strangers, and never go out after dark, and always take a buddy, and learn self-defense, and message our friends to tell them where we are, and check in with each other, then we won’t be the next victim.

That’s what true crime wants us to believe, and it’s so much harder when there’s an unsolved case out there. Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac Killer, and the Monster of Florence are the exceptions that prove the rule. Two of them aren’t even American, and we all know America likes to think it’s the world leader in serial killers, both having them and catching them.

Considering Ripper’s Victims and Media and the Murderer (and the whole Jack the Ripper tag on my blog) I probably don’t have to go on too much about any unsolved cases that particularly influence me, but I’d like to mull on a related topic for a moment:

What about unsolved crimes in fiction?

This is where it gets tricky. We like fiction because it doesn’t have to follow real-life examples. We can add a full narrative structure, including a proper beginning and an end, the way we do when telling stories about our own lives, but we don’t actually live in a narrative structure. (Narrative theory was one of my three comprehensive exam areas. Can you tell?) We try to make real life into stories, but we’re often restricted by details like evidence and proof. If we’re making the story up, though …

I do think there’s a difference between a character solving the case and the audience knowing the answer. It could be that the main characters have to give up, for whatever reason, before finding the solution. Or, like was mentioned during the chat, there could be a Hitchcockian suspense scenario where the audience knows the killer early on but can only watch as the main character tries to figure it out. That dual cat-and-mouse layer features in true crime: the police hunt the killer hunts the victims. It’s like one of those math problems where two trains are moving at different speeds toward a destination and you have to calculate how long it’ll be before one overtakes the other.

I’m thinking of things like the Lincoln Rhyme series where you can have a character like The Watchmaker who gets identified as the criminal … but not truly identified. He’s the Moriarty or the Big Bad, Rhyme’s intellectual equal and therefore more than capable of keeping out of the clutches of the police. Even the “real” name they come up with for him might not be right, and he’s been behind some of the single-book bad guys who don’t get to come back for a curtain call. The case isn’t solved in a legal sense, since he’s never put on trial and sentenced, but Rhyme knows. And the readers know.

It’s not like The Colorado Kid, which might be the only completely unsolved fictional mystery that I’ve read. Stephen King wrote a book about how frustrating it is for a crime to be a true unsolved mystery, with an unsolved mystery at its center. The main characters even say multiple times that it’s not a story, not exactly, because there’s not a single mysterious element and a single “must-have-been.” A man from Colorado ended up dead on an island off the coast of Maine with a Russian coin in his pocket and a bite of steak caught in his throat. And … that’s about it.

You don’t even know for sure that it was a crime, or just a very weird accidental death. There’s enough to make you think that yes, you’re missing a lot of the pieces, but even the characters who have spent decades knowing the story haven’t been able to find them. It’s an incredibly frustrating story that isn’t really helped by the fact that the characters let you know from the start that it won’t be neatly tied up with a bow. You’re right there with Stephanie as she hears the story for the first time, asks questions, and keeps running up against the fact that there aren’t any answers.

And honestly, it’s probably something only a household name could get published on a grand scale, because that’s not what we want from our fiction, is it? It doesn’t matter if Stephanie and the two older reporters don’t know the full backstory for the Colorado Kid, but King doesn’t even relent and let Constant Reader in on it. We just get to the end and think “Wait did I just waste my time reading that or …?”

Have you read any fiction that deals with an unsolved crime that remains unsolved at the end of the book? Did it feel like a waste of time? Do you think all crime fiction needs to be solved in order to fit the genre? Share your thoughts!

current state of the (nonfiction) manuscript

I don’t often talk about my in-progress writing, except, whenever I do, it’s with other people who are also writing (or trying to write) and it’s a useful conversation for both of us. It’s also something I see less of when it comes to nonfiction/academic writing. I don’t think that’s just because I hang out with a bunch of creative writers, since it didn’t even really happen in grad school. We had to take that class and buy Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, but … that was kind of it.

I’m also going to be all superstitious and secret about the actual content of this project, for the record. Partly because hyping it all up and then still having to write it feels like knitting the second sock (I don’t knit socks because I have to do the exact same thing twice) and partly because … well of course my ideas are so good you’ll want to steal them. Right? [Insert sweat smile emoji here]

So this week I picked up a draft I’d started back in November. When it grows up, it’s going to be a book, maybe 80,000-90,000 words. I haven’t really touched this one since the end of last year. It was about 33,000 words when I opened it up again to see what, exactly, I’d been trying to say.

Since it’s nonfiction, I’ve got the whole outline established. (This is in direct opposition to my fiction drafting.) All of the chapters are there, and even major headings within the chapters. Perfect.

I’ve been out of my normal routine for a while, so I wanted to re-establish that and make some realistic goals. Now in the past I have drafted academic writing at 5,000 words a day, every day, with no breaks, until it was done. That’s how I wrote Surviving Stephen King, for example, but a side note there: that was in April 2020, when I could pour all my emotions into my writing and let it distract me, and I’d just quit my job to write full time anyway, and I didn’t have any freelance work just yet. I’d also been researching King academically since 2014 and reading him longer than that. So. 5k/day was not a realistic goal for this past week.

I settled on a couple guidelines:

1,000-2,000 words a day for all 5 weekdays
sit down to write by 10am

It looks so innocuous and simple, doesn’t it? But let me also explain why these were my goals.

First, like I said, I know I can produce 5k words a day. It’s physically, mentally, and emotionally possible. I’ve done it before. But that was then, and this is now. It’s a different book, a different topic, and I’m in a different place in my life.

Plus I’m coming back from a pretty long break. So. I wanted it to be realistic and achievable, but with a push. A push with breaks – weekends are still weekends. No need to go into burnout and frustrate myself trying to expand this draft.

As far as the “sit down by 10am,” I’ve got a couple things going on there. If I say “write from 10am until noon,” I might not get my word count goal. If I get up early, then I don’t really want to force myself to sit around until 10am to start. My sleep is something I try to put into my schedule, but it doesn’t always happen when I want it to, so some flexibility is good. Start by 10, check. Can do.

I’ve also clearly got that time free to schedule as I want – some of my freelance work is at specific times – and I know what time of day I’m most likely to be productive. So the point is to set myself up for success as much as possible, but also to show up and get my butt in the desk chair even when I don’t feel like writing.

I’m still at the point in the draft where I can easily skip around and fill in different parts depending on what catches my attention the most. I like this part. Monday I worked on Chapter 7, Tuesday Chapter 6, Wednesday Chapter 3 … I’ll have to go back through and make sure things flow properly, sure, but I know where the blank spots are.

Here’s a tip:

One of the first things I did was skim through what I’d already written and add [more] at the places that still need something: a transition, a whole section, whatever. The highlight helps me scroll through the document and see where I still need to do some work, and I chose the brackets because I don’t use brackets within the text. This makes it easy to search and see exactly how many places I still have left to work on.

Some of them are small (a transition) and others are pretty big (the conclusion chapter), but that part doesn’t matter for me right now. The important thing is that I can easily tell where more work needs to be done, and I can fill in all of the 0ther [more]s before tackling the conclusion. That’ll save me from printing it out for what I think is a final proofread and realizing I’ve left out an entire section.

Now when I sit down at or before 10am to write at least a thousand words, I can search for the missing piece that grabs me the most and start there.

I also like the Pomodoro technique.

Some days it takes longer than others to write a thousand words, so that can seriously be an extended time when I’m trying to force myself to focus … and nothing else. So most days, and especially days when I feel sluggish and like there’s no way in heck I’m getting 10 words, much less a thousand, I’ll start the timer. 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off. Or I’ll use my Pomodoro – Focus Timer app (I paid the one-time fee and it’s totally been worth it for me) and set it to 15 minutes on and 5 minutes off.

For the record, when I use the app, I set my phone on a stand where I can see it count down. It helps me to know how much longer I have to force myself to focus, or how much longer I can be on Twitter, and I like how I can set it to automatically run. Once it starts, it’ll tell me when the focus session is over and I can take a break, or when the break is over and I can get back to work. There’s no messing with individual timers to switch back and forth between 5 and however long I’m focusing. I really only use it in the moment and don’t even look at my stats, but you can try the official 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off for free. It’s setting up your own timing that’s part of the paid app.

Otherwise, it’s really just one word at a time.

If I hit my minimum goal, that’s 5,000 new words this week. If I max out, that’s 10,000 new words. They’re not necessarily all keepers, no, but once again, you can’t edit a blank page. Right now I’m still in full rough draft mode: nobody ever has to see this. I’m just shoveling sand in the sandbox and telling myself the story. Once I get all of those [more]s filled in, I’ll have to switch gears and get into revision mode, but that’ll be a while yet.

Current state of the manuscript: rough draft, over half of the way there

the one about failure

All right, as promised (because I knew I could make myself write about this, but only if I’d actually put it out there): the failure stories. Okay. Honestly. Here we go.

*deep breath*

I actually feel pulled two ways about this. Some of my abandoned WIPs have gems buried in them: awesome phrases, sparkling dialogue, or a nugget of an idea that’s still worth pursuing. Others totally faltered for good reasons (mostly the reason being “I have no idea where I’m going with this”). But I think I’ve managed to hang on to at least 90% of them, so I can give you some actual numbers. (Even though I’m not sure I really want to look at the numbers myself.)

I wrote my first original “novel” in 2000, so in the past couple of decades …

I have 87 abandoned projects on record

Okay. I’m not sure if it hurts more or less to have the actual number written down like that. It works out to just under 4 abandoned projects a year, but in the cases where I’ve got the original dates, they totally group up. Some months I try and try and try and try and … nope.

Some of them are only a paragraph or two. Others are already tens of thousands of words (and I really want to know how they end, but … I still don’t). Many are variations on a theme, where I kept trying to find the proper path into the dark forest. For some of them, I eventually made it … after a dozen attempts. Others are just abandoned.

I’m not entirely sure why I saved them all, even if I’m grateful I did. Some were saved on a CD. Others were printed off and put into a three-ring binder. The more recent reside in the “nuggets” and “established beginnings” folders on my computer (with a sort of arbitrary line for when something’s long enough to become the second instead of the first).

And, if we compare my numbers with the titles in my “completed” folder, we’ve got 10:1 odds here.

For every plot arc I’ve completed, I’ve made 10 attempts

That’s just overall. Sometimes – the magic times – I complete a plot arc on the first attempt. Others take four or six or twelve false starts.

I think if I wanted to do more math I’d find that the ratio started out much higher and has come down over the years. I also don’t think it’ll ever be 1:1, but 3:1? Maybe. And I also think that’s only happening because I do keep trying.

I mean, aside from the obvious “You’ll never finish anything if you quit starting,” I like to think that bringing the ratio down is all part of the process. Maybe I’m finding myself more easily, or maybe I’m more wiling to circle the dark forest longer before trying to make my way in. And for me, finishing is the ultimate goal: getting a draft with a complete plot arc so I don’t flip the page years later and groan because it’s blank and I have no idea what happens next.

But I’m also really proud of Teenage Me for the fact that, despite the 20:1 or so ratio, I kept writing. Like I seriously want to go back and give myself a hug for it. I made repeated attempts and even kept the record of those attempts, even though it’s basically a record of failure. And that momentum has made it easier, or maybe even necessary, to keep saving everything like that. To keep on dropping breadcrumbs on my way.

So I’ve kept them, and every so often I’ll pull them out and go through them. I’ve even made lists of the lines that still strike me as good and the ideas that still intrigue me, just in case.

If I’m feeling very brave, I might even share some of those someday. (Right at this moment I’m not feeling very brave …)

When’s the last time you looked at your WIPs? How does your stack compare to mine?

To outline or not to outline: that is the question

I know I’ve already shared how I, personally, outline books – or, at least, how I outlined Ripper’s Victims specifically – but since I’ve also pointed out that each new project can feel like learning to write all over again (and since that first post is pretty darn old by now) I thought I’d come back to this question with a broader scope.

Yes, I outlined Ripper’s Victims using sticky notes before I ever started writing it. Yes, I’ve still got that poster board. And there are a lot of times I use sticky notes and poster boards to organize my ideas in the early phases, especially of nonfiction projects, but of course that’s not the only way.

I have friends who:

jump right into a project without any notes or outline or anything. She just sits down, goes “Hmmm,” and writes the first page. And it works. She’s written entire novels this way.
come to the first page with a pretty detailed world and the first couple scenes in mind, then see where that takes them.
outline everything very meticulously. And I mean very. To the point where it’s less of an outline and more … nearly-completed scenes. But she doesn’t like revising, and she can manage to keep up the energy not only of these outlines, but also then writing the book.

They’ve also all written more than one project, so these methods are the ones they’ve figured out to help them keep moving forward. It’s like Stephen King‘s “Write every day” advice (I wrote my own thoughts on that here): it works for him because he knows what doesn’t work for him. My outlining friend does so much work before “officially” writing because she’s seen what happens if she doesn’t. The friend who writes by the seat of her pants hasn’t had to change her method because it works for her.

And along with the “each project is new” aspect of it, I’ve also realize that – shock, I know – there are major differences between my nonfiction and my fiction approach.

I don’t outline my fiction with sticky notes.

Sorry. I should’ve warned you. That one’s probably a big shocker.

For Not Your Mary Sue, I don’t think I have any written notes … at all … before starting it for NaNoWriMo (at 12:01am November 1, because I’ll force myself to wait for November, but no longer). Even though the idea had been in my head since February that year.

I’d been thinking about Marcy, and her family, and her background, and how she’d react to waking up on that island, but I don’t have any character sheets written down. No timelines drawn out. I “cast” Jay in my head but I had even less on his background than Marcy’s.

Since it’s from Marcy’s POV, she was the one I needed to know better. I also knew Jay’s main goal would be talking and telling her all about himself, so … I figured that I’d be able to learn along with her. (Hey, it’s a first draft. Nobody ever has to see your first draft. If it crashed and burned, nobody ever had to know.)

And the thing is, the story I thought I’d be writing ended up being only about half of what actually came out. I saw where it could go, to a specific point, and assumed I’d then write a little tag scene to sort of wrap things up, but … the story didn’t want to be wrapped up there. I knew who Marcy was by then, had spent so much time with her, and realized her story wasn’t done yet.

So I had even less of an idea of how the second half of the book would go, but I followed her anyway and let her do her things and live her life, and followed her like Joe Goldberg and wrote it all down. (Maybe someday I’ll share how I thought Marcy’s story “should” have ended, before she told me how wrong I was.) But I was like my first friend and had no idea at all what was going to happen next until I typed it, and … it still worked. The story came out. It made a complete arc.

Okay but that’s a success story.

I get it – there are plenty of ways to outline a story or not, and they all work for different people, and look at how well they worked for me! Whee! But what about when something doesn’t work? What about all the failures and the discards and …?

Next post, I promise. We’ll talk about about the failures next. I’m going to need a lot of space for those.

so you want to talk about flesh prisons (aka characters’ physical descriptions)

The other night at dinner, my husband was talking about Ready Player One. He read the book (in English) first shortly after it came out, then saw the movie, and now he’s reading the book in Italian. (Which he’s taught himself, because this is the guy I married.) He commented on how, since he’s seen the movie, he kept picturing the character Art3mis as her on-screen version and not the book version.

Which got me going about describing characters and using the phrase “flesh prisons” (yes, while we were eating) and he asked a) if I’d write it up, and b) if I’d use the phrase “flesh prisons” in my post.

So. Here we are.

I’m even going to throw in the asterisk that I gave him before going on my rant: this doesn’t work for all genres. If you’re writing romance, for example, you’re going to go right ahead and slow down while focusing on the love interest. There are times, be it in genres or just scenes, when more description matters. Just bear in mind that longer descriptions do slow down the action, so they’re more suited to certain places in your book than others.

Okay. Asterisk out of the way. When boiled down, my own personal decision on how much to describe my characters is this:

What do we decide to do with our meat prisons?

Bearing in mind that my characters are contemporary figures who get put into “basically today, usually Michigan” for their thriller settings, they’re humans. And human beings can be interesting, but part of what I’ve come to realize about myself is that physical appearance is most interesting to me when it ties into characterization.

Maybe also that I’m just not good at in-depth character descriptions. Anyway.

Let’s take Jay for a minute. I know, I know, only a handful of people have read Not Your Mary Sue so far since it’s not out until June, but you can meet him in the opening pages here. And most of the description comes when you first meet a character, right? So we can see some elements of Jay’s appearance: reddish hair (currently messy instead of purposefully tousled); blue eyes; tall; has a smile that lights up his entire face. I’ve even dropped in a clue about whether he’s right- or left-handed, but that’s not really a physical descriptor.

The thing is, in the first draft of the novel (from NaNoWriMo 2017) I did something that made me cringe a little when I went back over it: I described him based on which actor would play him in the movie version. It made sense within the book itself – Jay wants his story to be told and become a bestseller, so it’s not a stretch to imagine it then getting turned into a movie, the way both Mark Harmon and Zac Efron have played Ted Bundy – but I ended up cutting it.

Naming a well-known actor basically locks us all in to the same Jay, forever and ever, amen, the way my husband’s been picturing the Art3mis from the movie while reading the book. If I describe someone as “Avengers-era Chris Evans” (not my Jay model, in case you were trying to make it work), then we’re all stuck with Avengers-era Chris Evans in our head. We might not complain, but … we’re still all picturing the exact same thing.

I want to give you some leeway.

Pick whatever kind of nose you want for Jay. Imagine his eyebrows. Fill in the rest of his face.

You’ll learn later about why his smile maybe isn’t such a welcome thing, and Marcy has her own reasons to focus on his physique in the early pages of the book, but there’s enough to play with so that your Jay doesn’t have to be my Jay. And I’ve gone for sort of the low-hanging fruit: hair color, eye color, and height. Basically sketched in a roughly humanoid figure.

The rest of what you learn about Jay has to do with his character: who he is as a person. When Marcy describes his physique, it’s in comparison to what she associates with his favorite hobby. (Spoilers there, so that’s vague. No, it’s not serial killing.) His hair matters because it is messy instead of deliberately tousled, each of which says something different about a person.

What I like to describe about my characters’ physical selves are the things that tell us something about them as people.

It’s usually not something they had no control over – whatever genes blessed or didn’t bless them from birth – but the things they do: hair style. Tattoos or piercings. Hair dye. Clothing. Hobbies and learned skills that show themselves physically, like a guitar player’s calluses. Sometimes things they didn’t necessarily have control over, but tell us about their lives, like scars.

In the Ready Player One example, Art3mis is encountered first – and for the vast majority of the book – as an avatar. Cline spends a lot of time having his main character describe that avatar, in part for those romance novel reasons (Wade knows who Art3mis is before encountering her “in person” so he already knows she’s interesting) but also because the avatar was entirely created. Art3mis chose not only her screenname, but every element of her avatar. Everything about her appearance is therefore a deliberate choice that tells Wade something about her before he ever meets her.

And to be fair, I have wondered if character descriptions are one of my weakest points. (If you’re going to tell me I’m right, please be kind while you do so.) Maybe it’s something to do with being ace and just not looking at people the “usual” way. Or maybe I just think motivations and internal aspects of character are more interesting than flesh prisons.

How do you approach describing characters’ physical appearances? Do you have any favorite authors who seem to be really good at it?

Learning to write all over again

Writing can feel really isolating: just you and your computer as you stare at the blinking cursor and wonder when the document is going to have the desired word count. How you get from 0 to that word count is pretty much up to you. If you’ve got a deadline, you just have to be faster and figuring it out.

It’s also one of those things where you don’t always realize what you know or how valuable your own struggles – uh, experiences – might be until you’re talking to another writer and someone says “OMG, me too!” in clear tones of relief.

In grad school, we didn’t really talk about the writing process. It was like everyone assumed we already knew how to write and just had to be told the assignment parameters. When I submitted for my first conference, I felt like I was winging it. Same for my first chapter. We didn’t talk about writing, and it didn’t seem acceptable to ask anyone about writing. It was just this weird taboo.

So it was hard to tell if my own experience actually related to anyone else’s, or if mine was somehow … subpar. Like I’d missed a bunch of key information that everyone else somehow magically knew.

Part of my intent with this blog is to share the things that get me the “OMG, me too!” responses so I don’t play into the secret-keeping aspects. I’m (somehow) at a point in my career where people look up to me and think I’m a real writer (imposter syndrome what?) and there are so many things I wish I’d heard from someone when those positions were reversed, so …

Starting a new project can feel like learning how to write again from scratch.

There. It’s out.

You’d think, or maybe hope, that after you write one book, you’ve got it down. You’ve managed to go from 0 to 80k or so, get it passed editors and proofreaders and through the printing process, and you’ve learned a bunch of lessons along the way. All of which can be applied to Book #2. Right?

Uh. Well.

To be fair, at first I thought maybe I was just making things harder for myself by not approaching a new book project the same way I’d gone about the first. Like I was just reinventing the wheel to keep my stress level high for the fun of it. Except each book project is different, so why should the process look exactly the same?

For me, Book #1 was about Jack the Ripper. Book #2 was about H. H. Holmes. Two nineteenth century serial killers, right? Well, yes. But …

Ripper’s Victims came out in 2018, but I’d started reading about the Ripper in 2007. I’d already racked up a respectable number of books by the time I signed the contract, and bought even more in the process of researching it. But it wasn’t like I’d only looked into the Ripper from the moment of signing the contract. I’d already had a better part of a decade not only reading about the Ripper, but writing a paper on the women for a graduate independent study course and then presenting that paper for my first conference. I had this whole history with the Ripper, and there was such a huge bibliography to make my way through.

Take a look at this:

I know you can’t read it, but the framed poster board at the bottom with all the neon sticky notes is my outline for Ripper’s Victims. I went through and wrote down the titles of books about the Ripper and organized them chronologically. Which worked quite well until the 1990s, which spilled over, and then for the 2000s I ended up parsing out different themes because yowza. The Ripper was popular and still gaining.

Holmes isn’t that popular. I’ve had people hear I do true crime and name Holmes as their sort of “gotcha” killer, because apparently we’re gatekeeping true crime now. (Also apparently Erik Larson’s book, despite selling so many copies, hasn’t made Holmes mainstream. Who knew? Maybe everybody reads it for the architecture.)

But already straight off you can see I couldn’t start the same way with Holmes as I had with the Ripper. I’d read I think three books about Holmes when my editor asked if I’d be interested in writing my own, and three compared to my Ripper history seemed kind of pitiful. Except … there aren’t over 100 books about Holmes. My bibliography didn’t stay at three, but it certainly didn’t explode like my Ripper posterboard.

That’s just one major difference. Another is the subjects themselves: the Ripper was never named, but Holmes was. He’d been identified, put on trial, and even wrote both an autobiography and a confession before his execution. You can’t approach them the same way. It makes no sense to try.

And still I thought maybe I was just trying to make life difficult for myself.

Is this a case of form following function? (That’s for you architecture fans out there.) Granted, the final form – a book – looks very much like any other book. There’s a different cover, but … sentences and chapters and pages.

I think the biggest takeaway here is flexibility.

When you’ve written a book, you’ve learned one way to write a book, but it’s not the only way for anyone to write a book … and it’s not even the only way for you to write a book. The tips and tricks you’ve amassed are certainly there in your toolbox to be used as often as you need them, but they’re not the only tips and tricks in the world. And they might not always work on a new project. (I’d try for another architecture metaphor, but I personally read Devil in the White City for the serial killer.)

I’ll revert to Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey: he says that the hero has to find his own path into the woods. If the journey’s easy, then you’re on a path someone else has made, and you’re not going to be a hero.

Writers have to find their own path into the woods … for each book. Maybe you can make some headway on a path you’ve made before, but not always. Sometimes you have to reassess your approach and start hacking away in a different direction, because this book isn’t the same as the last one. You’re not looking to end up in exactly the same place, and you’re probably not starting from the same place, either.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep … and enormous. Starting a new book can feel like learning to write all over again, and that’s not a bad thing. It can be frustrating, but it can also be thrilling and rewarding.

What do you think? Do you find yourself still learning how to write, no matter how much you’ve written before?

“Do you ever get into a writing funk where you just can’t summon the energy to write?”

If you google “write every day,” you get over a million results. I mean, it’s Google, so there are usually tons of responses, but … it’s common advice. I don’t know if it’s the most common, exactly, but it’s out there enough that people who don’t write everyday are worried, or even convinced, that they’re doing it wrong. To the point where someone I know, who is in no way a slacker, asked me this question: do you ever get into a writing funk where you just can’t summon the energy to write? Because maybe she assumed that, being a “real” writer, my answer would be “no.”

How accepted is this idea? I wrote back “YES” and she responded “THANK GOD.” (We proceeded without shouting after that.)

The thing is, we get people like Stephen King telling us to write every day. And you’d think he knows what he’s talking about, right? World-famous bestselling author, and he says:

Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop, and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind … I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace.
Stephen King

So … write every day. Right?

Not according to Cal Newport. Or Kristen Simental. Or Luke Eldredge.

I’d like to pick apart King’s quote, because even though it often gets repeated as the simple “Write every day,” he actually tells us more than that. In fact, he reveals a bit about his own writing pitfalls. Once he starts a project (so presumably not 365 days a year), he feels that he, personally, has to write everyday because otherwise he sees issues in characters, plotting, and pacing.

Remember how not all writing advice is universal? How there are so many books about writing out there, and they all have different advice? We call come from different backgrounds and have our own potential pitfalls. Not all advice is for every writer, and not all advice is shared in a way that’s actually helpful.

That’s why we need the full quote: to see what, exactly, “write every day” means to King, and why he stands by it. He’s noticed, in his own many decades of experience, that he, personally, has to write every day once he starts a project, or else these issues arise. He’s not “writing every day” because it’s been repeated so often, but because he knows what’s likely to happen if he doesn’t. For King, writing every day is the solution.

I’d say I more or less align with King here: once I get started on a project, I’m likely to write something in it every day until I hit my goal. Sometimes the goal is a completed draft; other times it’s a completed section of a draft. If I’m at the very beginning and I’m excited, then “every day” means 7 days a week. Other times it means 5 days a week, because even people with “real” jobs get weekends. (Mine aren’t always Saturday and Sunday, or two days in a row, but they’re still days when I don’t expect myself to write.)

The biggest argument I hear for “writing every day” is that writing is a job. If you’re serious about it, then of course you’ll do it every day.

Think for a moment about what you do every single day of your life. Breathe, eat, sleep. Take care of other humans or pets in our household. But even exercise plans have rest days built in. Work limits your hours if only because they don’t want to pay you overtime. We recognize the need for rest, recovery, and making space for other things when it’s not writing, so …

If writing every day burns you out, then it’s bad advice for you. Like all other writing advice, it’s something you need to consider for both practicality and personal adaptation. If you’ve never tried it, maybe it’s time to pick a project and adhere to the advice for a set amount of time – say, a month. Give yourself long enough to figure out if it’s working, and maybe long enough to become a habit. Maybe you’re a big don’t break the chain kind of person. But even then, remember that the true test of your chain is missing a day … and getting right back into it on the next.

You might mess around with expectations. Are you trying to write a specific number of words each day, or carve out a specific amount of time for writing? When you say “writing,” do you mean “putting words on the page” or will you count research, plotting, daydreaming, and so on? Are you willing to switch up your goals and your schedule to better match your actual daily output? Is this a 24/7/365 sort of goal, or a project-based goal?

So no, I don’t put words on the page every day. I don’t sit in front of my laptop for a set amount of time every day, either. When I’m working toward a deadline, it’s far more likely – but even then I remember that weekends are a thing. And, like King, I’ve been doing this for a while, so I have a pretty good idea of what works for me and how to avoid my worst pitfalls. But that doesn’t mean you have to do exactly what I do.

Sometimes I get into a funk and can’t summon the energy to write. It happens. I’ve barely worked on my book projects all month because so many other things have come up. Stress is real, and burnout is real. If writing every day adds to either of those, then it’s probably not your best solution right now. Because that’s what writing advice should be: a solution, not stress or shame.

How was your January? Were you more productive, word-wise, then I was?