How Do You Keep Yourself Writing to the End? #IWSG

The writing process is a mysterious beast. Just as no two writers are the same, their writing processes differ, as well. To complicate matters, processes evolve over a lifetime. This is something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot, lately–for obvious reasons. I had a rough time with drafting the sequel to The Blue Bar.

So the Insecure Writers Support Group Question for this month pleased me, because I know that the answers from other writers might help my situation.

Here’s the writing process question we are responding to this month: When the going gets tough while writing the story, how do you keep yourself writing to the end?

Over the years, having listened to many writers talk about writing–from absolute beginners to mega prizewinners and bestsellers–one thing has been clear to me. Not all of us enjoy the writing process equally. Not all novels or short stories follow the same process. Writing one novel may give you some experience and skill, but unless you’re writing endless iterations of the same novel with different characters and settings, writing the next novel is an entirely different experience.

Personally, writing You Beneath Your Skin taught me the nuts and bolts of writing a novel, and took me many years. The next, which I froze after a small submission round and hope to revive again, took about three months for the first draft, and less than one year to be submission-ready. Maybe it will need another draft now that I have grown as a writer, before I can shop it again.

The Blue Bar began as a 90,000-word-draft written over a month in 2019. It took me two more drafts to part ways with my last agent, and another two before I got my current agent. Two drafts with her, and two drafts with the editor.

I began the outline of the sequel end of last year, in November, and began writing it after Christmas. With life, and the copyedits of The Blue Bar getting in the way, it took me all the way till April to finish a draft. And I struggled. A few times, I felt like maybe I couldn’t write anymore.

This was my first attempt at a sequel–and even though the plot doesn’t completely follow from The Blue Bar, some of it does, and the cast of characters is almost the same. It felt like too much of a leash. I couldn’t kill characters at will, nor add random entries to the cast.

At times the story ground to a halt despite the outline. On those days, I tried my best to understand why. Here are a few steps of my writing process that kept me going:

1. I journaled about the knot–for the last ten years I’ve scribbled down my writing struggles in a diary. In it, I usually write down all the issues I face in a given story or with my writing in general. When I got stuck with the draft, I wrote about who knew what in the story up until the point where I couldn’t write further. Then, I tried to figure out what the characters would do from there, and how I could make it surprising, yet inevitable.

2. I read as much as I could, outside of the genre. Sometimes, when writing a crime story, the ideas begin to flow when I’m reading a non-crime story.

3. I picked up free-writing, and for each scene tried to figure out the POV character, what they wanted, what they needed, and whether they were likely to get it.

4. I also dug deep into what was in it for me–what part of the next scene might be exciting to write, and why.

5. More than all of this, though, I gave myself permission to write absolute crap. Drag it to the finish line, I told myself, even though I knew there were unresolved threads hanging.

As a result, I now have a draft, one that my agent likes and says has ‘good bones.’ It will need at least one more draft before I submit it to my editor by the deadline as per contract, but, it IS there, and that’s the important thing.

In the coming weeks, I’ll focus on the re-draft. For now there’s practice. I’m revising earlier work, outlining more stories, and whenever possible, learning new craft aspects to build up my writing arsenal.

What about you? What is your writing process like? What do you do to keep writing till the end when the going gets tough?

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Today is the first Wednesday of the month post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

Founded by the Ninja Cap’n Alex J. Cavanaugh, the purpose of the group is to offer a safe space where writers can share their fears and insecurities without being judged. This is a wonderful group–if you aren’t a part of it, I urge you to join in!

The awesome co-hosts for the September 1 posting of the IWSG are SE White, Cathrina Constantine, Natalie Aguire, Joylene Nowell Butler, and Jacqui Murray!

 

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My own crime novel, The Blue Bar will be out this October with Thomas & Mercer. It is already available for preorders. Add it to Goodreads or pre-order it to make my day. Adding on Goodreads is an easy and free way to support my writing, and I’ll be ever so grateful!

There’s also this giveaway you can enter to win 6 books due out this fall, and THE BLUE BAR is one of them!

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