I wrote my first novel at age eleven. I remember coming home from school and parking myself in front of the computer, one of those old hulking boxes of a Mac. The story came straight from my head out through my fingers, through that blinking Word cursor into form. I didn’t outline. I didn’t have a plan. I don’t remember even stopping to think, although I must have. I just wrote.
I’ve been making a concerted effort recently to really take apart my writing process, so I was curious about this old, first manuscript (and a second one that I wrote immediately following it). Turns out my first novel was some 79,000 words long and—who knew?—entitled Queen Tempest. Naturally, when I printed up parts of the story, I placed this fiercely titled item into my pastel-colored unicorn binder.1
The book ended with a stern warning to the reader: “This is the end of the story. No more writing past the last sentence[…]. Unless the writing is done exclusively by The Author, Callie Bates. Anyone else, off limits. This means YOU!”
(My dad liked to sneak into my stories and type, “And then they all died. The End.” The indignity!!)
Well, precocious I may have been, but 11-year-old Callie was, well, 11. What I’m really interested in is my process.
They say that writers can only teach others how to write the way they write, so for many of you, this post may be abstract or even unhelpful. But on the off chance that some of you create intuitively and a bit like you are wandering through a twilit wood guided by your heart and the whispering of an eldritch raven upon your shoulder, maybe this post will offer some validation and perspective.
After completing two novels, I completely rewrote them both by age 13/14, then did not finish another book-length2 project until I was about 25. I’ve blamed becoming a teenager, lacking confidence, chemo brain, etc, but it’s interesting to note that my reading followed a similar pattern—I often pooped out in the first quarter or third of a book, as I did in writing a story.
But I wrote so many words. Tens, hundreds of thousands, probably. These fragments drift around my computer, tantalizing me even now. But at the time, I couldn’t figure out how to spin them into the right shape.
Around age 25, I started to discover craft books. I absorbed advice from all over the place. The three-act structure, Save the Cat beat sheets, writing a shitty first draft that is improved on revision, writing a short first draft by hand that is expanded on typing up before being revised, an extensive (and somewhat exhausting) revision process involving a lot of paperclips, etc, etc. And I did complete novels. Some of them even got published! I even managed to write outlines/synopses for books I hadn’t written yet, a feat that seemed completely impossible for the way my brain works.
However, in the last couple years I’ve started to notice a pattern in my first drafts. The first part of the stories have that magic taste. I want to sink in and swim forever in these sparkling words. But after that…they often go in directions that just don’t feel right.
Here’s what happens: I can only “see” so far into a story. I need a synergistic combination of visualizing the story and then hearing the words in my head before I begin to write—if I jump the gun after only seeing, I’ve made a misstep that I often struggle to undo.3
Once I write the first part that I am seeing and hearing (this could be a few pages, or twenty thousand words), usually kind of fast because it’s built up in my head, I wear out and have to cycle back. And this is where I seem to be pushing forward too fast. I want the assurance that I will finish something. I don’t want to get distracted by the dreaded plot bunny. I have thoroughly absorbed all the well-meaning advice that if you don’t stick your story out to the end, you will never finish anything ever.
But…what if “sticking it out” isn’t the right process for me? What if I need to write it out, then…step back, or even step away? What if I need to wander over to another project and let loose all the stuff that’s been building up in my head for that one, then come back to the first project and work on it again?
I’m posing these as questions because I’m still trying to figure this out! But I do know that when I write what I think I “should” write at a certain point in the story, it bothers me. Even years later, I know which parts of particular stories came from the wild, woolly, foggy, mysterious and beautiful forest of my imagination, in which I can see no further than about ten feet ahead and where all the most delightful and most “me” words and ideas and images and feelings come from—compared to the parts that I thought I “should” write.
And let’s not even get into how my brain completely freaks out if I tell too many people too soon about a project—pulling it out of the mystery and making me wonder what others will think about it. (Usually people are very kind, but doing this too soon can detrimentally change my relationship with the story. It’s like that famous Steven King quote about writing the first draft with the door closed, and the second with the door open.)
This doesn’t even begin to touch the process of revision…which is a whole other kettle of fish, as they say. I will say that I recall writing teachers scolding me: “You need to learn to revise!” without actually teaching how to do it—as if it was intuitive for absolutely everyone but me, an intuitive writer. I could only revise by completely breaking the story apart and fundamentally rewriting it—probably because that was the only way I knew to get myself in the flow.
Anyway, if your eyes haven’t glazed over by now, you may find the work of Becca Syme, a writing coach, interesting and helpful. I feel particularly “seen” by her book Dear Writer, Are You Intuitive?
If you write, how do you do it? What’s your process like? Stay tuned, as I’m sure I’ll have more to share about mine as we venture further into this new year.
Although it was not one of those googly My Little Pony type unicorns. I have always preferred a dignified realistic-looking unicorn that reads books, and yes I am laughing as I write this.
I did finish shorter things—short stories, essays, a novella. However, it must be said that these were for college classes and without deadlines and expectations, would I have completed them? Don’t know.
I wrote a post a while ago about types of intuition and creativity — read it here: