~~Diary of a Novel, vol i~~
the story thus far
One very helpful thing about investing a good amount of time in blogging or newslettering or whatever you might want to call it is that it really helps you clarify what you actually want to write about.
Being on a regular schedule, even if not a particularly intense one like my own, just forces you to prioritize. Instead of indefinitely dwelling on an enormous, amorphous cloud of ideas, when you actually sit down to write, you very quickly realize whether or not what you thought you wanted to write is something you would actually like to write. It’s going to take time and you could theoretically spend that time doing something else. There’s sometimes this odd moment where as you’re writing one thing, you feel more of a pull toward writing something else… and you begin to realize that that something else might actually be the thing really worth investing your time in.
I’ve been going through this process recently.
I’ve had plenty of ideas for this Substack (so many drafts on my dashboard), but in the midst of them all, I have felt a very pointed draw towards one thing. Of course, I want to keep talking about Japan. I want to move through those Chihayafuru and Mistborn posts I’ve been planning as well. But above all, one thing is starting to stand out.
I want to talk about my book.
(And frankly I just want to work on my book more, which, as someone who’s been trying to get into a regular writing habit for over a decade, I count as a big win. Yay for momentum.)
On many levels this makes sense to me. Writing fiction is absolutely my priority as a writer. I enjoy it more than many other things in life in general quite frankly. I find fiction as a reader to be both more meaningful and more enjoyable than non-fiction nine times out of ten. As a writer, it’s also really nice to feel a constant desire to work on your book and figure out how to hone your craft. At the end of the day, I do care about my book living on beyond me far more than I do my newsletter living on beyond me. The latter really is meant to serve the former, and to otherwise just be fun for me.
On the other side of things, it makes no sense at all. I don’t have a written book. It’s getting there, end of the year is the goal. But I don’t. And in order to maintain the integrity of the project, I also have a pretty firm principle of “no sharing the details of the book until at least a draft is done” (even moreso publicly). Even with my friends and family. My writer’s group lovingly mocks me for this, claiming they’ll believe my book exists when they see it. To which I enjoy dramatically revealing my word count spreadsheets to them. But alas, they say that could all be made up as well. I look forward to presenting them with a projected 200k manuscript in the near future to silence them eternally.
In any case, when it comes to The Book, I like to keep my cards very close to my chest. Always have, and probably always will. Except in one area.
I love talking about the process of writing, and I love hearing other people talk about the process of writing. Different routines, working through writer’s block, methods of outlining, figuring out perspective and voice, the visceral emotions one feels when reaching a turning point in the story. I love it all.
Because writing is in many ways a solitary experience. It is very private, very intimate, and at times can be lonely. Hearing the experiences of other writers going through that very same process is very encouraging. It’s a bizarre kind of camaraderie that is kind of hard to explain outside of just experiencing it.
And recently I’ve been really inspired lately in particular by a YouTuber I follow named Christy Anne Jones, who has been vlogging the process of writing her novel while simultaneously sharing next to nothing about the content of the book. She has both regular vlogs and vlogs of her attempting famous writers’ routines.
(Yes, I link the Sanderson one because I like Brandon Sanderson.)
But anyway, I’ve really been enjoying these videos of hers, and I watch them pretty much every time they come out in the background whenever I’m, like, cooking dinner or something. They capture the feeling of writing a novel so well and have served as one very real source of encouragement and inspiration for me recently. And honestly, they make me want to read her book someday in a way few other things ever could.
So… long story short, I’ve kind of begun to realize that I’d like to do something similar to her and the other authors out there who have taken to the Internet to share their writing progress and process. Especially as NaNoWriMo season is coming up and I am beginning to mentally reorient myself towards the close to all consuming experience that it is. Not on YouTube of course, as I don’t really have the time for that, but on here! It’s not going to be the only thing I write about on here (at least that’s not my current intention), but you definitely can expect more of it in the future.
While I will certainly be keeping the content of my novel as private as can be as long as can be, sharing bits and pieces of the process of creating it is something that I feel very comfortable sharing and would also just really enjoy sharing. Plus, God willing, it will be really fun to look back on someday if my novels ever take off.
And so we are here…
Diary of a Novel. Volume One.
The Story Thus Far
Fun fact. I have been conceptualizing this book, what is planned to be the first book of a five book adult fantasy series, for over a decade. Since 2011?
Yeah, it’s been a while. I’m pretty loyal with my writing projects. I don’t really relate to the common writer problem of having too many ideas to choose between. I tend to just layer my ideas into this one big project. I do have a few standalone ideas too that I might try to publish first to test the waters before I go for this dearest one to my heart, but that’s another topic of discussion entirely.
What matters for today is that I’ve had the ideas for this series in my head for a long time, but for a long time, the ideas were just ideas. They were very loose when I began all this as a sophomore in high school. I had a very nebulous, generic fantasy quest concept with a few major plot points and character backstories I knew I wanted. Some of which are still present, others of which are not, most of which are now secondary to my more mature ideas now.
In any case, I did NaNoWriMo several times in high school and college with very little to go off of and never got beyond the first couple of chapters, restarting every time. As life picked up a bit, I took a step back from NaNo for a while, just letting myself brainstorm for my later college and grad school years. And a lot of this brainstorming was really good. It was a less tangible form of progress, but it laid very real and essential groundwork for what was to come. I’d struggle much more nowadays without it.
One helpful tip on that note though. I tried to make sure as much of this as possible was very active brainstorming, meaning I had a pen in hand to work out my ideas and make sure I wouldn’t forget them as often as I could. This is a rule I try to follow to this day, and I do so much more strictly now. Always record the ideas, you may lose them otherwise. Make the maps and family trees, sketch out major beats of character arcs, scrawl out scattered bits of dialogue. However brief. Even if you think you’ll remember them. Write them. There have been so many times when I’ve looked back on this stuff while drafting and found solutions to problems my past self apparently knew the answer to, it’s great.
But I could only ever make so much progress this way. Brainstorming does not make a book. And so… 2021 came along.
It was a big year. I got married. I finished grad school. I got pregnant. All wonderful things, the big life changes everyone knows about. But also that year, a quieter shift occurred. A friend of mine texted me in September/October asking if I was planning on doing NaNoWriMo that year. I’d actually been thinking about gathering some friends together to do the challenge myself, so I told him yes and we resurrected an old writing discord group another friend of mine and I had tried to start up previously.
And I did it.
I wrote 50,000 words in one month (three members of our group did, and a fourth completed a smaller goal she had set for herself), and it was cathartic like you wouldn’t believe. It wasn’t a complete novel. Not even close. I skipped around. I didn’t reach the end. But it was 50k in a month, more progress than I had ever made before at a pace I could hardly conceive of.
I was enthralled on one hand and baffled on the other. Enthralled because it was an incredible success. Awesome, wonderful, I was so happy. Baffled because… I had no idea how little I understood my own book without having made a proper attempt at drafting beyond the first few chapters. There were so many holes and so many new things I learned. It was a mess, and it was really fun. I didn’t care that it was bad, because I had so much fun making it. I was taken by a newfound sense of confidence. The book wasn’t anywhere near it needed to be, but it could get there. I just needed to keep moving and give it the time it needed to grow.
I had heard the advice of “just write, first drafts are never what you want them to be, you’ll never be ready beforehand” so many times before. It was largely true, and that was so freeing.
Going into 2022, I set out to bring my patchwork NaNo draft to completion. However, as I tried to fill in the gaps and finish it, I realized that just wouldn’t work. There were too many holes, and it was time to start from the beginning again.
So began what I started to call draft 1.5. I made sure the early chapters were done before NaNo, and I updated my outline to streamline the process. November 2022 came around, and with it came another successful NaNoWriMo. I even finished a day early!
I wrote almost straight through, and things were much, much better. Some of the first draft’s text made it into draft 1.5, but for the most part, it was original. And of course only the original text counted toward the 50k. I skipped one or two minor transitions and bracketed what I wanted to put in there later, but what I had written was relatively polished. I was largely able to continue forward in the early months of 2023, and it probably would have been theoretically possible for me to write straight through to the end, using this year’s upcoming NaNoWriMo to finish it off.
But… drafting is a roller coaster with lots of ups and downs. Sometimes you take one step forward and two steps back. And that was the real next step for me.
There were one or two big things that were bothering me about my draft 1.5, and at the start of the summer I realized they were making it more difficult for me to write forward and finish the draft. I resisted the idea of going back to revise mid-draft for a while, because I had approached draft 1.5 with the mindset that it would be the first finished draft. “Just write the first draft and don’t look back until it’s done” is a common bit of writing advice that I had begun to internalize. And there is a validity to it for sure, especially when you’re in the thick of something like NaNo. But all writing advice, particularly process-based writing advice, is a tool. The moment the tool begins to hamper your progress is the moment you need to take a step back and ask yourself… should I be using another tool?
And for me, this June, the answer was yes.
I needed to troubleshoot problems and make a stronger foundation for myself to move forward. And so I did. I took the step back and set out to make the necessary revisions to a few of my NaNo chapters from last year, and, while not intended, that turned into revising almost all of my NaNo chapters from last year and even adding a few new ones. I’m still actually in the process of doing it. It’s different enough now that I’m calling it draft 1.75 lol.
There’s a little part of me that feels frustrated by this, as it’s put me in a position now where I feel like I’m racing against the clock. I really wanted to be further ahead than I am by the time August came around. I’d still like to reach a particular point in the narrative before NaNoWriMo 2023, so I can finish the whole thing during NaNo and then do some revisions in December before I share it for the first time in a draft swap with friends at the end of the year.
But the draft is so much better for it.
Every time I sit down and write, now most days of the week, it feels like things are coming together. Constantly. It’s great, and it’s worth it.
It’s taken so, so long to get to this point. So many half drafts and outlines have gone into the creation of this thing… but the finished draft feels so, so close. And it might actually be pretty decent too? Fingers crossed???
In any case, it’ll be fun to capture the last of that here as it happens… though it’s even going to be a long journey from there. We’re definitely not going straight for publication, not a chance.
I’ve been asked on occasion by friends and family who know I’m writing this thing… “When can I read it?” or “When are you publishing it?” And in many ways that’s a fair question. It comes from a place of genuine curiosity. I don’t mind it. But I kind of often laugh and shrug it off… because I literally don’t know how to answer the question. Books just aren’t written in a straight line. That might be an outside assumption, it might even be an internal expectation. But it’s not how it works.
At this point, I can say it’s a goal to finish a first draft for my husband and mutual writer friends by the end of the year… but a more widely readable one? Let alone a publishable one?
It’ll be ready when it’s ready.
I’m okay with that, even though I don’t really know what that looks like yet. I trust I’ll know when I do. The key difference between now and five years ago though is that I’m sitting down most days to work on it. That’s what counts. Step by step, we’ll get there.
I hope you’ll be able to enjoy the little glimpses you’ll get along the way.
That’s all for now! Hope you enjoyed reading as always! It’s very technically Monday morning at 1:40 am as I’m typing this last bit, but I haven’t gone to bed yet… so I still count it as Sunday. (2 am after a re-read and edit lol good night)
But if you happen to write books, fiction or otherwise… how many drafts have you gotten through? Either just up until now or until the finished projects? How’s that all going? Comment down below and we can commiserate about the most bumpy road that is drafting.
Until next time, thank you and God bless! You’ll be in my prayers as always :)