The Art of Finding A Writing Process

Every writer has a process, but don’t worry if you don’t know what yours is, yet. It doesn’t always come to you during your first book, and you don’t have to do things exactly the same each time. There are more ways to write books than there are writers, which is part of the fun of being a writer. Many of us will be able to tell you pars of our process, and there will still be subconscious steps of writing a book that will go unrealized for many books to come.

Back in midsummer 2019, I decided to plan a novel before NaNoWriMo that fall. My previous book had been a year and a half of re-editing what I’d written, not knowing where the story was going, and discovering that writing scenes out of order and then shuffling them around on note cards didn’t help me. I found out I’m not a Pantser (or discovery writer, or someone who writes a first draft without a plan to go off). If you are a Pantser, I commend you. I know plenty and you’re all valid. But it takes me a long time to write a book that way.

I heard great things from a few friends who liked outlining about Save the Cat, both the screenplay version and the novel version. I went down to my local library with a loose collection of scenes and vibes and some sort of order, and an ending, and some characters and settings. I grabbed the book off the shelf and set myself up a nice little table, facing the big glass windows to the park. I had a water bottle that I could fill up, the library had air conditioning (it was the hot part of summer in North Carolina).

And then I had a bit of a breakdown about my plot. It didn’t fit the mold. Any mold! I couldn’t even pick the right genre for it to go in! There would be some romance, but it was fantasy! No, wait, contemporary, too! And… well, it’s not a hero’s journey plot, but—maybe I should throw it all away! (If you’ve been to this point in writing anything, you know what I’m talking about. It sucks.)

In a fit of desperate googling, I must have asked the great Google something like, “how do you outline a novel but not hard” and an oddly cut series of YouTube videos with peculiar intro and outro music showed up, called "Dan Wells on Story Structure." Here's the first of the five-part series. That night at home, I sat with my laptop on one side of the couch, and me, a notebook, and a cup of coffee on the other, and took notes just as if I was in the lecture Dan was giving. He’s a fun speaker to watch, and goes fairly quickly, but pausing for a few minutes to get stuff down worked great for me.

A few weeks before NaNoWriMo, the imposed date to start drafting, I was absolutely terrified to stop tinkering with the outline and start. But, I knew if I waited until November, I wouldn't finish the whole manuscript. Worse, if I waited until November, I might find something else in my plot to fret about, and double guess and question. So I decided it was time to get something done early. Part of my process: starting when I need to start.

This year, I’m using parts of what I’ve learned about myself in the past (plotting, hand writing for the overview and synopsis first, letting things stew), and also adding things from my revisions phase that helped while I plot my new book. This book did have most of a plot, I wrote 21k words in November, but then scrapped them and reconstituted most of the plot to lean into the speculative element more. When I wanted an overview of a speculative element before, I remembered TVTropes. If you've never heard of this site, it's really easy to get sucked down a long, long rabbit hole. Like Wikipedia but it's all pop culture. You've been warned.

Scrolling through, reading examples of a trope or the description of it often gave me little ideas. These could be quirks for characters, or elements of the world itself; one character’s car now runs an hour fast because she doesn’t change it for daylight savings time (this is a combination of reading the Implausible Synchrony TVTropes article and something that my grandma has done more than one year). I love adding richness to a world this way.

To be honest, I haven’t exactly gotten the hit-the-ground-running momentum I had at this point during the process last time, but that doesn’t mean anything good or bad. This book needs a little more time to stew. If I did a cannonball into the last book when I started my drafting, for this one I got my feet wet, and now I’m touching my toes to the water after I’ve been out of the pool for a while.

One thing I have to remind myself, and maybe you do too, is that some of my processes in the Before Times involved in-person writing events, writing at coffee shops, the library, having lunch hours in the office to write. I'm hoping that I can get back to a couple of those (not the office) the next time I start a book. I've been coping with that by slowly cleaning off and rejuvenating my little back deck with a container garden and a nice chair that can feel like I'm somewhere new for a while as the weather warms up!

If you’re currently working through Camp NaNoWriMo and you aren’t sure you’re doing this whole writing thing… right, then the one thing I want you to take away from this is this: you are doing it right. Focus on finding what works best for you. Keep the parts you like and get rid of the parts you don’t. As long as “write words” isn’t one of the parts you get rid of, you’re still a writer. Even if you wait a long time between some of those words. Best of luck if you’re doing NaNo! Still best of luck if you’re not. We'll all come out the other side of our process for the book we're writing, and decide what to keep and what to let go of later.