The Bananabook Method
Well, this month’s newsletter was going to be about queer mentorship and going to the retirement party for my first openly queer teacher, from back in middle school. But I ended up not being able to go because, after 2+ years of dodging it, I got covid.
I’m 90% asymptomatic (thanks, vaccines!), but my kiddo also has it and is 100% asymptomatic and I’m looking after her by myself, so I hope you’ll forgive me if this missive has a bit less sparkle to it than I usually aim for.
My go-to activity when exhausted is watching cooking shows. Which is funny, because I am renowned for being bad at cooking. I am lit-3-microwaves-on-fire-within-a-2-year-period-by-making-easymac bad at cooking.
But I like the process. I like listening to people narrate how and why they do something they love. I also adore the Netflix series Abstract for just that reason- artists at the top of their field talking about their history with their creative process. It’s soothing and inspiring all at once.
I know writing process posts are a staple of this kind of newsletter, but I’ve shied away from it. I have no idea how many of you write, how many of those who do would care about my admittedly extremely specific process.
But hey, I love listening to British people expound on gluten development, so here is part 1 of my writing process.
I make no claims that this is a correct, ideal, or broadly useful writing method. But, it’s quite a tour of how my brain works and how I navigate writing a multi-novel, multi-POV novel series even when it doesn’t. Which is as frequent as you might expect from someone whose snack attempts nearly lead to accidental arson on the regular.
I start with a brainstorm, which I think is pretty usual. But even at this stage, I have to make accommodation. Because my short term memory is hot garbage (please note that I don’t have any shame about this. My memory can be a raging dumpster-fire without my whole self being any sort of flaming refuse.). It is so bad, in fact, that even flipping from page to page in a notebook can throw me off when I’m in the wildest, most open early stages of a brainstorm.
So at some point I developed the habit of using large rolls of recycled/recyclable paper that I can scrawl huge webs of ideas on, based on the barest seed of a story idea.
So, I might write out a character’s name, and draw themes around them that I think this story might poke at. For example, Issac could connect up to bodily alteration. Then, on the other side of the sheet, I may see that I have a new, super powered trans character who also has an important relationship to the idea of bodily alteration. I connect her bubble to the bodily alteration bubble and boom! I have two characters with different relationships to the same theme. That bubble then spawns sub-bubbles exploring how these relationships differ.
That gives me a wishlist. I know I want the narrative to get these two characters in a room together, where they both have to interact with this theme. Delicious conflict and philosophy ensue. The wishlist can also include things like meetcute for Yael or follow up on the reunion I promised at the end of book 1.
That gives me enough information to start to figure out the character arcs for my POV characters. How do I need each of them to change from chapter 1 to The End? If I know a character has got a ton of theme stuff going around redemption, or insecurity, or secrecy, then I have a pretty good idea what they need to work on. My wife jokes that my books are just really brutal Treatment Plans to guide my characters to better mental health. That is…going to be a lot more true in some books than others.
Next, I develop the antagonist and the plot. That’s right. Up to this point there’s no plot. I might have a general concept, but there’s no villain yet, and I don’t know what’s actually going to happen. Instead I take the character arc each character needs, and figure out what a barrier to that might look like. It could be a supervillian, it could be a Faustian bargain, or a phobia I keep shoving in their path.
Then I step back, and try to braid those multiple character’s barriers together into as streamlined and coherent a driving force as possible, so the book isn’t 800 pages long and basically a collection of short stories.
And then, finally, I start to outline. Like a lot of authors, I use index cards. I color code them for POV, to make visual scanning easier. This lets me switch around the orders of events repeatedly while still looking at everything at once. Eventually I reach a point where I’ll also use very small stickers in the corners of the cards to help me track where various plots/themes are popping up.
The outline that this generates takes me a couple months and, critically, it is a lie. I know it’s a lie. I know it doesn’t represent an actual book I will actually write. It’s a small child’s comforting blankie. A placebo. A pair of lucky socks before the big game.
I know that, but I need it anyways.
One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever got wasn’t from a writer- it was from my painting instructor in highschool (another early queer mentor). I had a tendency to panic in the face of a blank sheet of paper or a naked canvas, even when the task was to reproduce what I was seeing in as straightforward a way as possible. I can hear his voice in my head with such perfect clarity he must have said it to me a hundred times.
“Get something down to correct.”
Since I can’t hold a lot of data in my head all at once, I need something on the page that I can tinker with and interact with. Something to fix. So even if the outline is an exercise in planned obsolescence, I have to have one.
And this is when things get ridiculous. Because after I laboriously create an outline that addresses the character arc beats, relational beats, as many items off my wishlist as possible, and, of course, the actual plot of the story, comes the real work.
Let me introduce you to “the banana books”.
It is a cliché among both visual artists and authors that they buy a lovely sketchbook/notebook, only to become frozen, unable to put pencil to paper in case they mar the beautiful object of pure potential with some subpar mark. I was like that as an artist, and my wife, Ty, anticipated that I would be the same with written notebooks. She also knew that free-flowing brainstorming on paper, in a more storage-friendly format than big rolls, would help me write.
So years ago she went to the drug store and bought me the most ridiculous, cheap little banana-emblazoned notebook she could find. She presented it to me proudly. “You can’t be intimidated by writing in this!”.
She’s so brilliant. I love her so much.
It worked perfectly. They became key to my writing process. For years she bought me every absurd little cheapie notebook she could locate. We called them all banana books, after that first one.
And I use them to, among other things, plan out every main beat in every scene in the entire novel. Pages ping back and forth between bits of dialog and organized outlines of scenes and scrawling, rambling question-and-answer sessions with myself as I chase possibilities around my brain until I star the key ones and weave them into the scene plan.
These days, I’ve lost enough of my fear of the blank page that I invest in 400 page moleskine grid-paged books with organized indexes in the front and bookmark ribbons.
I even toss in a few bucks to have “Banana Book, Vol _” emblazoned in gold on the cover, as a talisman against perfectionism and writers block, just in case.
And that’s where I am now with Second Sentinels book 3 (working title is Scrapped Gods). Yes, I’m outlining book 3 while I edit book 2, because that lets me know what I need book 2 to set up for me. It’s fun. Like a puzzle crossed with an obstacle course.
I’d love to hear about your relationship to process with whatever you love to make!
Thanks for reading,
Lee Brontide
Thank you for joining me for another month of Shed Letters. If you know someone who you think would like to join us, please feel personally invited to share any of these emails, or send them an invitation to sign up here. And remember that Secondhand Origin Stories is available for free as an ebook here, or in paperback form from your local independent book shop.