News

I’m getting a lot of feedback on Twitter, Face Book, and My Space about how much you are enjoying the deeper peek into how I write my books, but in reading some of the responses I realized there’s a problem. A lot of you are beginning writers or at least people with many fewer books under their belt than me. So I thought I’d be clear that this Merry book DIVINE MISDEMEANORS is writing very differently for me than any previous book, even previous Merry books, so the process is different and may not be conducive to your process.

Allow me to explain. When I was a beginning writer and had never finished a book, or even sold a short story I sat down to break that first book barrier. I hoped to sell it, but the first hurdle is writing the damned thing. It feels like such a mammoth task to fill that many pages with words you create out of thin air. It was intimidating the first time I tried it, and it’s still a little daunting some 27 books later, 28 if you count my short story collection. My writing process has changed over the years, so I thought I’d share the process that allowed me to finish that first novel.

First, I was working full time in cooperate America. I was an art editor, of all things, for a large corperation. Not my favorite job I’ve ever held, most artists find the cubicle farm hard on them and I was no exception. But it was a good job straight out of college, amazingly good, and for a woman with a biology/ English degree it was excellent. So I was happy to have it, but I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do forever. I wanted to make a living as a writer. That meant books. Short stories, even if I sold one someday, would never be enough to live on.

Now, I’m not going into how to get that first book length idea, because I honestly can’t tell you where the idea came from. If I ever knew I no longer remember, but I can tell you the first scene came into my head in college during a lit or writing class. Not from anything the class was teaching me, but just one of those random thoughts, images. Books often come to me like that first. The interesting thing is that the first image that makes me want to find out what’s happening and how they got to this point seldom makes it into the book. This was true of NIGHTSEER my first novel and is still true of most of my books. Not all, but the majority. The first image is inspiration not really part of the book. It’s the tease that gets me intrigued and makes me willing to do the work to see how it all turns out.

But how to write a novel and work full time? I got up at 5 AM every day before work, and I am not a morning person, at all, but I found that at the end of the day my job had drained me so that I had nothing left to put on paper. Getting up at 5 stumbling to the computer and doing 2 pgs. Just 2 pgs a day, at least five days a week. I usually worked part of one weekend, too, but the five days a week were the most important. For me I need the momentum of regular pages to keep the book alive in my head.

So, pick a time you can devote to the book uninterrupted, then 2 pgs a day for at least five days a week. Here’s the real trick you do your 2 pgs, but you don’t revise as you go. Why not? Because I, like most writers, am a prefectionist. If I start rewriting too early in my writing process I become overly critical and the piece never gets finished. No rewrites during first draft. None.

Also, no going on line to research something, or to the library to research something during the first draft. I’m going to assume you did some preliminary research before you started the book, or that it’s something so interesting to you that you’ve read simular books, or have a hobby that helps you understand the basics of what you’re doing. But if you go on-line the internet will eat your writing time. It will, you know it will, so don’t do it. Libraries are dangerous places for writers because we love to read. You can always find one more book, one more piece of perfect research to help that certain scene. It’s a way to procrastinate, don’t do it.

First draft is 2 pgs a day, at least five days a week, no revision. Because the biggest hurdle for most first time novelists is the thought that they can fill that many pages with a story. 2 pages a day and at the end of the year you have a respectable pile of pages beside the computer. It looks like a book. It gives you confidence that you can indeed do this crazy thing.

Now if you come to a scene and you honestly don’t know something important, this is what I still do to this day. I hit cap lock write NOTES; AND TYPE MY QUESTION. LIKE WHAT DOES 14TH CENTAURY WOMEN’S UNDERWEAR LOOK LIKE. DID THEY EVEN HAVE ANY? Then you skip it. You move on. You’re getting your main character undressed to go to bed, just undress her and have her sleep, don’t go near the internet or the library to find out about the underwear unless you are much more disciplined than I am. If so, good luck, but for the rest of us mere humans, don’t go. That fight scene, intimidated, skip it. You know who wins. It has to be your hero, she can’t die here, so skip the whole fight scene, figure out if she was wounded, or who she killed, put the cap note on and keep moving.

Second draft is just doing a global search for NOTES; and now you can look on the internet, though be careful because some sites do not require a post to be researched at all. Just because it’s in print on the internet doesn’t make it true. I still use the old journalist idea of three sources if possible. So now find out what 14th centaury women’s underwear looks like. Now go back and flesh out that fight scene. This is the draft where you fill in the holes. Street names, banquet foods, whatever. You’re filling in.

Third draft is where you begin to polish the writing. Now you’re ready for the 70/30 rule. What is that, you ask? It means that of any first draft, and because you haven’t revised your writing yet, not really, third draft is actually still first draft for writing. 70% of any first draft is garabage. 30% of that draft is pure gold. Trouble is you have to write the whole 100 % percent to get that 30 of gold, because the garbage and the gold are all intermingled with each other. You have to write the whole book to find the good stuff, but now you begin to winnow it down. You begin to rewrite, to cut, to revise. You fix that 70% of garbage and you try to make it match those magical moments of that 30% of gold.

I did seven drafts of my book before I sent it off to an literary agent. Seven drafts is more than I’ve ever done on any other book, but it was my first and I was learning as I went. The above is how I wrote GUILTY PLEASURES, KISS OF TWILIGHT, and most of the first ten books of my career, counting a STAR TREK and a TSR book. As I went along the garbage quotient went down. My first drafts are closer to 70% gold and 30% garbage now. Some shining books are 90% gold and only 10 % garabage. But every book has still been written as above, though I do research as I go now sometimes if it’s something that will seriously effect the plot. Police work is like that, get it wrong and you are screwed and have to do massive rewrites later as I did with SKIN TRADE. So sometimes a little research saves you, but I am a much more certain hand at the wheel of a novel now. I know I can do it because I’ve done it 28 times before. There’s confidence that comes with that.

DIVINE MISDEMEANORS the current book that I am blogging and tweeting about is writing differently from any book I’ve ever written. I am walking away letting it stew, because forcing it in my usual bull-in-the-China-shop way wasn’t working. It’s fun to share my writing process with you, and if you find it helpful, great, but I just wanted to be very clear that this book is not how I wrote most of my novels. I wanted to share with you the above rules that got me through my early ones, and have helped I believe four other writers to complete their novels. Two have sold. So it works for people other than me, and if I had tried to write my first novel the way I’m writing DIVINE MISDEMEANORS it would never been have been finished, because I would have lost confidence in it with this stop and start approach. So, here is how I started out, and you’re getting peeks into how I’m doing it now. You change and grow as a writer as well as a person, it’s just the way of things.

I hope this was helpful, and you now how have two very different ways to write a book. Good luck.