on creative process

a brief note of encouragement

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“Today’s task isn’t to write the book. It’s to connect with it.” So many people have reached out to me about the New Moon in Gemini newsletter, saying that they deeply connected with the idea therein (based on a quote from Matt Bell). I’m glad it has offered a reframe. I believe that the relationship we build with a new piece of art is one that grows slowly and over time. Rare is the chance meeting with someone you feel like you’ve always known, and even then, there are particulars of their life that have yet to be revealed. And so it is with the ideas that come to us that may, eventually, turn into Something.

I’ve been talking so much about the writing process lately that I thought it only fair to share some of my own.

I’ll start with something that is not, for me, a regular occurrence: a deadline. I recently set the goal to finish the current iteration of my WIP by September 1st. I am giving myself a two week grace period for finishing, but since I head to Iowa to teach in mid-September, that feels both firm and motivating. I spent too many years teaching in a PhD program to suffer under the illusion that I would be able to maintain a 1k+ a day pace while in the classroom.

I usually am the first person to tell folks to be gentle and reasonable with themselves when drafting. That is because a good many of my clients start writing a book, brand new, and give themselves the aforementioned kind of deadline, expecting that a book should immediately just pour out of them immediately. Of course, this does work for some people.

But it has never worked for me.

I am only just now setting this deadline for myself nearly two years into working on this book, long after the idea first dropped into my head. I have spent the last 18+ months wandering in and out of a draft, just as I did with my first book, Heretic — a slow, years-long, incremental build that eventually led to a ferocious rollercoaster where I discarded hundreds of pages and wrote a brand new draft, start to finish, the summer of 2018. (That was the draft that got me signed with my agent.) Similarly, these last few years have witnessed much shower-thinking and shower-singing to my character playlists, much pacing and muttering to myself in my kitchen hoping my partner doesn’t walk in and think I’ve lost it.

one of my favorite representations of the writing process in a film, ever // greta gerwig’s little women

It takes the time it takes to feel your way into a story, and I have, at long last, dislodged (enough of) the rhythm from my body to actually write with some consistency.

I could not have set this deadline for myself before now, and thank goodness I’ve learned enough about my process that I did not try. I have learned that I first have to spend time — probably more time than I’d like — figuring out what the book is and wants to be. (And I know there’s much still to discover! But there is, at last, enough scaffolding to move forward.) I have spent months writing into long-since abandoned characters and storylines. I got 40k+ words into one draft last year before scrapping the whole thing and starting over from scratch. But this does not discourage me. It energizes me.

I’m getting closer to what the book wants to be. I can feel it.

Composting is an essential part of my creative process. Building track for the train that is yet to come is never time wasted. It all contributes to the eventual book — or, for an even further in the future book that I haven’t yet consciously sorted. How wonderful! How brilliant! the way our art-making minds works.

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