September Experiment: The Writing Process (Patreon)

A Jenga Tower Made of Jello and Broken Dreams: Writing, Process, and the Kind of Chaos Theory That Results in Inevitable Dinosaur Carnage

Hullo, Mad Fictioneers! October is upon us here in Maine, though I have been on the road for most of September, being an author and a minister and other things that end in r. That means I left full summer and came back to everything crisping at the edges like burnt pastry. Soon it will be time for pumpkins, oh yes, and scaring children in the dark. As an occasional scary witch in the big house down the lane, it’s my favorite time of year.

I asked you what you wanted to hear about this month, because I am a scary witch, but also a considerate one. The grand consensus seemed to be that you, my beloved mad story scientists, want to hear about my process. The dreaded word. The Writing Workshop 101 word. The earnest, super cereal, deeply concerned with art and the state of the human soul word.

Please to picture me laughing uproariously, then slowly, softly, ungracefully transitioning into uncontrollable sobbing. 

I laugh because, inasmuch as I have a process, it is a goddamned mess. When speaking to young school children I put on a brave facade of being an organized and put-together person, a locked and loaded kind of girl who knows where her towel and/or word processor is, but I’d never fake it for you, dearhearts. I’m a mess. I’ve always been a mess. My 3rd grade desk was a small hurricane of paper and books and old pens and whirlwinding crap, and my brain looks like that now. Also my desk is still that. I am not a person to emulate as far as process. Nothing here should be taken as something you need to do. Or should do. Or anyone should do. It only barely works for me. I’ve got a couple of tricks but generally speaking, I am the HMS ADD and I am always holding on by my fingernails to any kind of sequence of events that might generously be called a “process.” Now, I do tell kids that I have ADD, so they can see that a creative life is possible, even saddled with a brain like a stoat hopped up on pixie sticks and true love and just hardcore cocaine, but the secret truth is most of what I do logistically as a writer are coping mechanisms built up around not knowing I had ADD until I was 32, and just barrelling through life mashing all the buttons like everything in the world is a game of Streetfighter II, hoping and praying that some combo lights up my legs like Chun Li and unlocks a power move. My process is that shrugging emoji dude. He is my Patronus.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Let’s start with the basics. I use Scrivener. If you don’t, I highly suggest you start. If I had had Scrivener while writing The Orphan’s Tales…oh god, it is to weep. (Some of you may know that I didn’t keep a single note while writing OT. I’m not saying that to brag that I’m some sort of super genius, I’m saying it to illustrate that I had no idea what I was doing and no organizational skills whatsoever. It seemed easier to write the whole novel than to outline one because that is the kind of freak show that is my head at all times. It’s wicked gross up in here and there’s old popcorn and grandpa’s whiskey and plush toys all over everything.) I’m not going to go into full infomercial mode here, but it’s simply the best writing tool available, and ridiculously reasonably priced as well. I would be lost without it. Scrivener provides a lot of the tools most writers use to sort their shit out in one program. Just do it, you can thank me later.

I also have an office separate from my house, which is a lot harder to come by, and if you have heard me speak even once you have heard about how I caretake a tiny museum for nine months a year in order to afford this essential tool. This is not super replicable, but the fact is I can’t be trusted with internet access or any distraction at all, and the museum is a wifi-proof bunker with nothing on the walls in the off-season. I used to be able to work anywhere, Starbucks, buses, the surface of the sun, but as I get older and crankier and more and more like a scary witch in the house down the lane, I find I need to shut myself off from more or less everything. 

Now that’s out of the way, let’s get into the little things. I usually have the seed idea for a novel quite some time before I start working—up to a couple of years before. I sit with it for a long time while I work on other things, planning, scribbling things in the note file on my phone, asking dumbass questions like if my book was a tree what kind of tree would it be? When the book is sold and the deadline set (did I mention I am useless without a deadline? I mean, I won’t neccesarily meet that deadline, but without it I’ll definitely never come close. My entire life is an endless cascade of barely managed deadlines plummeting off the edge of a cliff in a beautiful waterfall that whispers Cat wtf are you doing in a constant low scream) then I do my favorite part.

I get a big giant watercolor paper pad. I love the thickness of the paper. It’s SERIOUS PAPER FOR SERIOUS GIRLS. GOOD THOUGHTS GO ON GOOD PAPER. YES, PRECIOUS. And I get whatever pens I’m digging on at the time in lots of colors. Anything with a thick, rich line, soft and wide, that makes a big mark. Just this side of a marker is my pen. And then I spend a few days writing all over the giant paper in lots of colors, writing down, in no particular order and with no real thought as to what any of it will mean, All The Things I Want To Cram In This Book. It’s the dreaming part, when I haven’t fucked the book up yet by actually writing it, when it’s still this perfect cloud of delight and ponies and grace and skill and magic and wishing wells and deep artistic significance and still more ponies in my head. A lot of things in that watercolor pad might not even make it into the book, but I can always have it nearby throughout the rest of the process to remind me of that Pony Book that couldn’t stay. 

Once I start the typing portion of the proceedings, I write fast. On a deadline, I’ll write anywhere from 2-6000 words a day. That’s not good or bad or indifferent and if you write slow, that’s great, too. (Okay, it’s a little bad. Carpal tunnel is not a Chinese hoax.) It’s just how I am built, and also how I need to function because I have cripplingly low self-esteem and if I don’t get that book out before I decide I hate myself and it and neither of us are worth a capybara’s lonely, tuneful fart, I will never finish anything. I know it’s easy to look at a published writer who has awards and things and think she’s got her head on straight but oh my god I am constantly outracing my essential conviction that I’m worthless. LOOK, MA, HONESTY! I can keep up the idea that I’m good at writing for about a month, two tops, and then it’s a giant clown-slide into the land of I’m The Worst. So I keep up the speed I do because, well, because Mario. When Mario runs super fast, he can skate right over all the gaps in the landscape no problem. If he slows down, he falls, sad 8-bit noise. Also I never learned not to do my papers the night before so I blame my teachers. If I’d ever gotten less than an A on that I’d have figured out something other than this maelstrom of nonsense, but I didn’t, so I didn’t, well done all of us, take a bow.

At age 38, this works a lot less well than it did at age 28, I’ll tell you what. But I literally don’t know any other way to be and it makes books, so bottoms up.

That’s the thing, by the way. Whatever you’re doing or not doing, if it results in a finished book or story in the end, that was the right process. There’s no wrong way, except for the way that doesn’t result in a finished project. What you do is fine. What I do is sort of kind of fine. Cooperate and graduate—all that matters is the finish line. 

Some scattershot observations: I don’t jump around when I write. Being the grand ship ADD that I am, it just no work. If I skipped a scene because I thought I’d fill it in later, I’d just…never ever fill it in later. So I move through the book as a reader would, first word to last. But I revise as I go along. I feel a broken chapter like a broken bone and I can’t go on until it’s fixed. I read my work aloud to my partner, and my partner reads it aloud too because I am ridiculously lucky to have an amazing actor who loves my work for a boyfriend. Reading aloud is incredibly good and important—you find rhythm that way, you feel what’s working and what’s not, especially when it comes to dialogue. When I get to that last word, it’s like a third draft. I send it to my editor and do another editing pass, which may (Radiance, The Glass Town Game) or may not (Palimpsest, Fairyland) involve extensive rewrites. I usually sneak a few last changes in with the copyediting pass. 

Sometimes I mean to write a short story, and I know from the first line it’s going to be a novel, really, and the short that I owe this editor is just a placeholder for the eventual book. Sometimes I think it’s going to be a novella and it just laughs in my face. Stories get as big as they want to get. You can’t really tell them to stop.  

I tend to write the first several chapters organically, just playing around and having fun, and then somewhere around the end of the first act, I stop and make an outline of the rest. But it has to be an outline looser than a windsock on a still day, because if I already know everything that’s going to happen, I get bored immediately and wander off. I give myself just enough of a path that I don’t fall and break my neck, but not enough that I don’t have to look where I’m going and watch out for assassins. I always start by naming everyone. Names are absurdly important to me and I don’t even really know why, but if I don’t have all the people and places named I can’t start. Names are destiny—they reveal culture and story and world and family lore, economic status and political affiliation and childhood trauma and deep history. A kid starts with a name and so do my books. 

I used to have a cigarette after I finished a novel, because when I was a kid I saw/read Misery and thought that was so unassailably cool. But my ex-husband gave me so much shit about it and how much he hated the smell and that I finished too many books in a year to make that a good habit that I stopped and now I usually have some champagne and a lingering feeling of loss and grief and resentment that angels didn’t descend from the heavens playing kazoos or something the minute I put the last punctuation on.

But all of this is just the detritus of one girl’s blundering through a literary career. If there’s anything I haven’t covered, feel free to ask in the comments. This is what I’ve accumulated over a decade and change of doing this. It was never a plan. And all of this is just what I look like on my best day. Mostly it’s actually scrambling and procrastinating (and procrastinating is important! What I do when I’m procrastinating ALWAYS ends up in the book. Procrastination is part of my process!) and hellacious stress and questioning my very sentience every day until it’s done if indeed it’s ever actually done.

 “Process” is just office management. I know when you’re starting out you want there to be this one cool tip that’s going to get your head together and point you in the right direction and produce a book presto-chango-Jeannie-blink but it just isn’t so. If you ask a hundred writers, they’ll have a hundred different processes and a hundred ways of saying there must be an easier and less stressful way to do what I do. Your process won’t even be the same from book to book. Some come so easily, some hate you and want you to suffer. I wrote Fairyland in two months of working on it two days a week, posting the chapters live, with no thought of publication or even much thought of quality, following none of my other “process” rules, and it’s the most successful thing I’ve ever done. Radiance was every ounce of blood sweat and tears for years and it’ll always be a cult hit at best. IT’S MADNESS AND IT ALWAYS WILL BE. This is a job for people who are not quite right and can handle the world not making any kind of sense and nothing ever holding still from one minute to the next and having no real control over your destiny other than whether to put a fairy or a robot in and also holding a hundred other complete human psyches in their head. I wish I had magic rituals to share with you, I WANT to have those things, so I can give unassailably cool interviews and be mysterious and awesome but I always found they got in the way of actually writing. Me and coffee and a computer and sitting there typing for hours upon hours upon hours—that’s process, and that’s the only process that is common to every writer of every kind. The advice I can give you, the only advice, is to think of what happened on your best day of writing, when everything was perfect, when it all flowed just so, when you were filled with the fire of the story and time stopped existing and it wasn’t work at all, it was just happening, without pain, without worry—and try to repeat those conditions as often as you can.

That, and download Scrivener.