Starting something new is hard
A dispatch from the first-drafting trenches
There’s this thing that happens, from time to time, when you’re someone who writes for a living: every once in a while, you have to start something totally new.
That’s where I am right now. I’ve got one freshly revised book draft out with beta-readers. Another finished (at least, for now) project is with my agent. Which means that for the next few weeks/months, I can either sit around and twiddle my thumbs…or I can start trying to write something new.
It’s always a good idea to focus on what’s next. I know that.
But starting something new can be hard.
Over the past week and a half, I’ve written approximately 2,800 words of a middle-grade story I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while now. I know what this book is about, in a big-picture sense: who the two main characters are, the themes I want to explore, what devices and metaphors I will use to get those themes across.
What I don’t know is…anything that actually happens in the plot, aside from one or two very broad story beats. Nor am I sure precisely what the narrator sounds like. How she thinks. How she might want to tell the story.
Every book is different, but my creative process often involves playing a little bit, at the start. I’ll write a possible opening scene. I’ll let the characters kind of introduce themselves to me. I’ll see how they might want to talk to each other. Then I might jump ahead to a moment of conflict, if I have a sense of what’s coming. Or, at minimum, I might take the characters to a new setting, to see how they interact there. A version of this early fumbling around might end up in the finished manuscript. Or it might not! Either way, I’m learning a lot as I go.
I don’t usually outline (or beat sheet) right out of the gate. I like to have a sense of the voice before I enter planning mode. I also want to see what about this story or these characters sparks my interest.
Basically, I need to find a way in.
Every single book I write starts from a different jumping-off point, and thus the drafting process asks something different of me each time. Depending on the project, I’ve gone in…
Plot-first: the book began with a premise or story arc. For example, The Thirteenth Circle’s basic plot was always “two middle-schoolers team up to investigate a mysterious crop circle phenomenon.” MarcyKate and I started our collaboration by brainstorming a sequence of key plot points we wanted our story to hit.
Character-first: the inspiration came from a character’s emotional problems/journey. For instance, How It Feels to Fly began as “a teen ballet dancer struggles with body image and anxiety.” With that book, I knew who my narrator was from the get-go, but it took a few false starts to determine what kind of situations I needed to put her in. I had to figure out what kind of story I wanted to build around this character.
Of course, these two approaches can and do overlap. With The Thirteenth Circle, baked into the premise was the fact that one character (the “Mulder,” for my “X-Files” fans) believed in aliens, and the other character (the “Scully”) absolutely did not. Those important personality traits were in play from the very first chapters we wrote. With Tally Tuttle Turns Into a Turtle, meanwhile, I knew not only that a kid was going to transform into a turtle, but also that she was nervous and shy. As with The Thirteenth Circle, I began the drafting process with kind of a character archetype, on top of some plot benchmarks.
The book I’m toying with now is a slightly different beast. Like I mentioned above, I know the big themes, but not the specific details. I know what I want to say, but not how I need to say it. I don’t even know if the one gigantic plot point I am sure about happens closer to the start of the book (the rest is aftermath) or the end (in which case, it’s the climax).
Hence the trial and error!
So, yeah. Starting something totally new can be hard.
I’m doing a lot of percolating right now. A lot of staring into space. A lot of quiet grumbling at my screen.
I haven’t yet found my way into the story I want to tell.
But I’ll get there.
Maybe soon. Or maybe I’ll need to set this project aside for a while, until the pathway presents itself. (Some books take years to crack!) Either way, I’m making progress, because I’m making a bit of what’s inside my head exist on the page.
When you’re starting something from scratch, do you have a particular strategy that helps you get over the initial hump of, Ugh, this is hard! Or do you just grit your teeth and plow forward until you break through?
With gritted teeth from trial-and-error-land,
~Kathryn
I'm exactly here right now 😵💫