Introducing: What I Learned the Hard Way
I’m excited to start a new blog series. It’s loose on theme (and flexible) but let’s go ahead and call it What I Learned the Hard Way. I’ll workshop the title. I’m going to be posting every Monday, Wednesday and Friday all throughout May on various topics. Some will be concrete craft topics, some will be more emotional topics in publishing, but I hope that all are “overly honest.” (My brother once said that’s how I was on a publishing panel he attended, and I like it, as my brand.)
This one’s going to be a little more concrete, because I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic over the last few months, including pre-pandemic! I know, I know. I can remember a time when I got on airplanes and went places to talk to people about books or whatever. What a time.
Incubating Book Ideas
I’ve talked, in person, online, in my newsletter, and on podcasts, about how I need to incubate ideas for a long period of time before I write them. I usually start writing a book 18 months to 5 years after I’ve conceived of it. This isn’t a hard and fast rule of course--and interestingly, it doesn’t seem to apply to picture books for me, at least not yet--but for the most part, it holds true.
I imagine my brain a lot like a somewhat messy studio apartment. There’s an overstuffed and overflowing file drawer with a sticky note on it that says TAXES!!!!!. The fridge door is slightly ajar, wasting power, and there’s another sticky note on the front of it that says TAXES!! JULY!! And the kitchen is where I do all my writing work. I have a four burner stove. I set some things to simmer on the back burners, I’m chopping up ingredients for other recipes to the left, and my front burners are my active stories.
Strangely, though I’ve been organizing my brain like this since I was a child, I’m not the only one who thinks this way. It’s neat that we all use the same metaphors. Some people have more burners, and some people have fewer burners. That’s all fine.
It takes me a long time from, “Hey, I should cook something” to actually cook something. Both in real life and in this metaphor. The journey from feeling like I should pull something together, to figuring out what I’m in the mood for, and what the ingredients will be, and making the ingredients into the size and shape needed for the recipe all takes time. And then I put it in a pop and let it simmer.
Sometimes for a few months, sometimes for a few years. Everything takes the time it needs to take.
The Girl with the Red Balloon I wrote very quickly, but the first draft was vastly different than the book that exists now. Kai kind of had the role Sabina has now, there was a 10,000 word circus in the middle (I’d just read the Night Circus), Benno’s chapters didn’t exist, Ellie was kidnapped by the Stasi, Ellie actively did magic...it was a very different book! I also wrote it too fast--I should have let the idea sit. And ultimately, I rewrote it a year later, keeping the loose premise and character names, and that’s the version that was published.
I did that with a lot of books at the beginning. I wrote them too soon. I learned the hard way (see how I worked that in there?) that even if I’m excited about a book IDEA, I need to wait until I have all the pieces I need. I have to tap the brakes. My excitement is usually over premise, not over the meat of the story, and I need to have all of those things that don’t come quickly before I can write. What kinds of things don’t come quickly? At least for me?
Plots. You can laugh. They’re essential to the story, right? But my plots are always the BIGGEST change in a story from first draft to second draft, and if I write a book too soon, they’re inevitably the things I have to keep changing several drafts in. See above for the example about THE GIRL WITH THE RED BALLOON, but did you know that the first draft of SECOND POSITION involved Aly being kidnapped and held for ransom? True story!
Other things that don’t come quickly for me:
Voice. That’s another thing I get mostly from spending time daydreaming about the book. Sometimes a voice hits me like a ton of bricks (see also: Ilse in THE SPY WITH THE RED BALLOON) and sometimes it takes me a LONG time to suss out (see: the protagonist of my current novel, Wolf in THE SPY WITH THE RED BALLOON).
Tone. This is one of the most crucial elements for the type of story that I enjoy telling, and it’s one of the things that I need to let rise to the surface. Some people use mood boards for this and I used to do that a lot, but I find that right now, I just listen to music and let myself feel the book rising.
If I write too soon, I have the wrong plot, the wrong voice, and the wrong tone. That basically means I’m wasting my time.
So I let the ideas simmer.
Most of the time, they simmer before I start writing. In June, I’m writing the middle grade I’ve been thinking about for two years. Maybe three years! I remember coming up with the idea on a drive home from DC (remember when we went places? Visited people?) and texting friends from a gas stop like oh, I have this idea. And then promptly not writing it.
Because it needed to simmer. I daydream and think about it, I test out different voices in my head, but that’s like doing a quick stir and taste test. I’m not actively writing it.
But you might know all of this. Other creators have talked about this.
Something I realize we don’t talk about enough is
When do you know a book idea is READY?
This is where you get mad because I can’t give you a hard and fast answer. I can only tell you how I know a book is ready to move from back burner to front burner.
I know because I want to write the book after that initial “OOOH SHINY IDEA!!!” glow has faded. It usually fades, and if it never comes back, that book just quietly sits in my freezer, like the rest of the things I put in there “for later” and always forget about. That’s okay.
But when it comes back and it lingers, and it’s what I think about when I’m shampooing my hair and what I’m thinking about when I’m walking to buy groceries once a week and what I’m thinking about when I’m doing the dishes, then that’s a book that’s going to stick around through this long simmer time.
When I hear bits of dialogues, it’s closer. That’s not me sounding like I should talk to my therapist, but it means when I’m daydreaming, I’m dreaming up voices that are not my own, having conversations together.
When I hear bits of dialogue and am daydreaming up scenes that are not just people walking around and having feelings, it’s much closer.
When I can feel and know in daydreams a logical sequence of events (Ellie runs away from Kai at first, but he catches up with her. They have to hide from secret police. He confers with Mitzi and they agree to take her to a safe house) that come with feelings (Kai’s worried--he doesn’t like that a balloon malfunctioned like this, and he needs this job. This job keeps his sister safe. He loves Mitzi. He hates that he’s trapped in East Germany. This girl--this girl who says she’s American and who might be from another time--she’s really pretty but he really really needs to focus on something else right now. (It’s hard though.)), and I have mentally conjured up the internal voices and the spoken voices for each POV character, then I’m there.
That’s when I’m ready.
For those who want me to go back to the cooking metaphor, here’s the recipe I use for “okay, go write this.”
1 cup of voice
1/4 cup of tone (that’s enough to get me started)
1 cup of plot
1/3 cup of feelings
2/3 cup of dialogue
2 cups of setting (it’s hard to write my books without REALLY knowing the setting and time period)
Combine in a bowl and mix briskly. Use a medium saucepan (I write books between 70-100k) and set to medium heat.
Now write the draft.
Sometimes that comes to me quickly. Sometimes that takes time.
Sometimes I start cooking and go, oooh, you know, this needed to boil down more (that metaphor works SO WELL for writing) and move it to the back burner again.
Sometimes I get the recipe wrong. It’s a delicate balance. I’ve had to throw it out and start over. I did with Spy at least twice. I did with a MG I love dearly. I’m using most of the same ingredients to set it on the back burner again, but I’ve tweaked proportions for that one.
But I need all of those elements to move it from a back burner to a front burner. If they aren’t there, it isn’t ready.