How To Write The Thing (Fast) Part 1: Preparation
or: how I gear up to write novels in six weeks
Two days ago, thanks to some dictation intervention with otter.ai, I finished a rough, hideous draft of my February short story—my third of the #storyamonth challenge. It’s a 2450-word a horror story set in the moody woods of Vancouver Island. Phew! I’m officially two months into this challenge. Initial reflections?
My brain hurts.
Writing short stories is so much harder than novels. I feel like I have to be on the whole time, to be sharp and running at 110% to be even moderately successful, you know?
Novels are different. Once I front load all the cerebral work with a novel, it’s just a matter of getting the words down. The novel is a game of smashing yourself into a wall over and over again. Forcing your way through. Brawn over brains.
And I love it.
In real life, anyone in my family will tell you that I have all the physical presence of a pocket-sized marsupial, wide-eyed and spindly-fingered. But as a writer, I am an ox. I am muscular and I know it and I trust it. I work-horse my way through novels, relying on instinct, pre-writing preparation, and sheer stubbornness.
A short story is like a puzzle made of glass. If you force it, you break it. It’s frustrating. In January, I tried to force myself through a short story the way I would a novel. As a result, I now have to rewrite the whole second half. Which is fine, it teaches me good revision, etc. etc., but ugh. I’ve never had to do that with a novel.
But wait, you may say. What do you mean you’ve never had to trash the second half of a novel? Isn’t that part of the art of novels???
Nope. Not for me. (Not yet, anyway.)
I’ve thrown out whole projects, but no, once I’ve committed to a project and written it beginning to end, I’ve never had to throw out more than a scene here and there.
But Isabel, you may say. What in the actual blue hell. HOW?
Gee, I’m so glad you asked! The answer is preparation. An actual shit ton of preparation. And I’ll tell you all about it in this month’s newsletter!
Mid-way through writing it, I realized I would need to divide this “how to do the thing (fast)” novel-writing newsletter in two: the prep issue (this one) and the execution issue (coming April 1).
But I’ll get to that in a minute. First, I am going to put my February favorites and news up here at the top for readers, because man, have I got a lot to say this month. Below, I dive into the nitty gritty details for writers. Catch you on the flip side! —xx
February Favorites | books, stories, and music I disappeared into over the last month
The Harvard Business School Family Business Handbook, Josh Baron and Rob Lachenauer: my uncle, Rob Lachenauer, wrote a book! Has your uncle written a book? I THOUGHT NOT. (If he has: I apologize for being so loud, I am just very excited you see.) Do you have a family business? Know someone who does and want to nag them about how to do it better? Cozy up with some essential reading from the man who taught me how to cure hiccups. (Or at least a very good placebo.) Order it for you, your public and university libraries, or for your own uncles.
The Year of the Witching, Alexis Henderson: atmospheric horror-fantasy, as if The VVitch and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina had lovechild (with immeasurably better writing than Sabrina. I said what I said). I imagined the main character, Immanuelle, as Tati Gabrielle’s Prudence the whole way through. I devoured it in a day and eagerly anticipate the sequel. Henderson is a rising star to watch!
White is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi: this is the month of the books with Witching in the title, it seems, and I would have it no other way. A twisted take on the haunted house of the capital-G Gothic tradition. (Red-level content warning for pica, other disordered eating, and body dysphoria. And I mean red-level.)
Beloved, Toni Morrison: a long-overdue reread and I’m taking it slow. I first read it for an English module as a first year at St Andrews—I had never before nor ever since been so deeply impacted by assigned reading. Returning to this seminal text as a horror writer ten years later, I am left breathless by Morrison’s exquisite characterization of woman and man, world and house. It’s the kind of writing that seizes you and holds you in a trance.
Can you tell what kind of reading mood I’ve been in lately? Don’t worry, it’s not all grim and serious down here: I also sneakily devoured Sarah J. Maas’s latest offering last week. Verdict? Well, let’s just say my PhD dissertation is about emotions and formulaic literary devices in popular literature (albeit medieval and Turkish); while I certainly could say Quite A Lot on those topics re: this particular branch of the Maas oeuvre, I am also of the school of Letting People Have Nice Things in dark times. Including myself. Yeah, the book was a narrative dumpster fire, but it was also incredibly entertaining.
“Darkest Hour,” Charlotte OC: achey, cinematic, moody pop at its finest. Her work has everything I crave: songwriting depth, vulnerability and soul, some serious pipes, and drama. I’ve loved Charlotte OC since discovering her somewhere online back in 2014; her album Careless People (2017) was (a) well worth the wait and (b) always on heavy rotation for my writing playlists.
News
My film and TV agent has moved house! Katrina Escudero can now be found at Sugar23.
My website is down at the moment! I’ve switched website providers from Wix to Squarespace and my domain transfer is taking a minute. (Hot tip: screw Wix. Stupidly overpriced. Do not bother.)
You may recall I was meant to have Big News for you by now, but *gestures vaguely at the powers that be* sometimes things move slowly in publishing, you know? I promise exciting things are coming. Just you wait. ;)
How To Write The Thing (Fast), Part 1: Preparation
Ages ago, in 2016 or 2017, I wrote a blog post that sketched out the steps I took to write a solid fast draft. That blog is long dead and my process has since changed, so I figured it was time to re-articulate The Thing.
(Disclaimer: over the years, I have learned so much by seeing how other people do. Adopting methods and tweaking them, tailoring them to best suit me. I have also learned just as much by trying things, realizing I hate them, and chucking them out the window. I wish for this newsletter to be my way of paying it forward to the next round of writers: I am showing you how I Do, so please adopt, adapt, and definitely abandon at will!)
As I sit down to write this, I am reminded of a quote by Leigh Bardugo, author of the masterful YA duology Six of Crows, the Shadow & Bone trilogy that’s now on everyone’s Netflix adaptation watchlist thanks to that heart-stopping trailer, and, more recently, the Adult horror novel Ninth House:
Let go of the idea that somehow you can outsmart a first draft. Because I have never met anybody who can.
To which I say: that’s because Leigh hasn’t met me yet.
(I am joking.)
(Kind of.)
My obsession with process stems from a desire to outsmart that first draft. Like many writers, I often think I enjoy having written more than the act of writing itself. Because of this, I try and make writing go as smoothly and quickly as it can possibly go. You heard it here first: I am a loud and proud rip-off-the-bandaid writer.
But I strategize quite a lot about how to rip that bandaid. So to speak.
Before I so much as write the first sentence of a novel, I spend between two weeks and two years on preparation. (It varies wildly; see below). Without this preparation, or with incomplete prep, I falter midway through the book. I grind to a halt. Sometimes, the book never lifts off in the first place.
I break this preparation down into six steps: Idea, Story Genius, Save the Cat, Chapter Divisions, and Zero Draft.
1. Idea
Ideas come to me in pieces. Sometimes I sketch out a scene from a nightmare when I wake up. Sometimes, I am listening to music or on a walk and see a scene as crisp as a still from a movie. Other times the image is murkier; I can put my finger on the mood it conveys, the *vibes* if you will, but I don’t know much else. (Often.) Sometimes, I’m in the midst of writing something entirely different and a character strolls into my mind fully formed. (Rare; delightful.) Sometimes—and perhaps I should see someone about this—I hear voices or snatches of dialogue bouncing off the inside of my skull while I’m in the middle of doing something else. It’s usually while I’m doing something physical but mindless, like running, commuting, doing dishes, or cooking. (I have burned many a skillet of scrambled eggs while jotting down ideas.)
Everyone has their unique alchemical idea-brewing process. I’m not here to force mine on you. I’m here to tell you what I do next, when I have an image or idea I absolutely do not want to let go:
I write down literally everything I know about it.
I open a doc in scrivener, date the top (I am obsessive about dating things), and write a header that literally says “everything I know”: the rest follows in bullet points, a messy transferral of every snatch of material from my brain into legible letters. I act like I’ve been given a bowl with the remnants of chocolate cake icing and a spatula: I go after everything.
This doc—which I call a “notedump”—becomes my repository for everything to do with this particular idea. I chuck all sorts of material in there. Anything that occurs to me in freewriting sessions, during the day, anything. Dialogue. Books that I’ll need to read for research. Atmosphere. Vibes. Lists of things I don’t yet know.
Here’s an example of the very beginnings of the Idea stage, from a YA project of mine that is still simmering. I jotted these ideas down on my phone while in the middle of doing something else (burning dinner, probably):
14 May 2020
[redacted] x Mistborn
Noble houses like 7 or 9 of them
The [redacted] are assassins used against other houses as they jockey for power
they’re exes; he broke up with her bc his parents told him too
She’s been assigned to assassinate him
Confrontation where he swears to [redacted] in return for his life; they must work together now
And it goes on from there… for like 14k words. And I’m still brainstorming this particular project.
This stage is often longest stage. Like the YA writer Adrienne Young has said in her excellent Instagram stories about process, I am also very superstitious about when a project is ready to move into the next stage. Too often have I started projects too early only to see them trickle out or flop magnificently on submission.
That being said, my latest manuscript bounced straight from the idea stage in Sept 2019 to drafting in Nov 2019 and was a great success. Moving forward, I think I will be ushering my babies more quickly out of this incubation period.
Given the fact that I’m in the process of interrogating my own beliefs about when ideas are ready, I’ll just say this: sometimes, an idea is ready because you have deadline and it has to be ready or you don’t get paid. Other times, it’s because you’re literally jumping out of your skin to write it and can’t imagine working on anything else. These are equally valid reasons to start.
My personal bottom line requirement for moving onto the next stage is this: (1) you have at least one main character, (2) you have a rough sense of their place in their world, and for whatever reason, these two facts are interesting to you.
2. Story Genius, by Lisa Cron
When I was a wee fledgling writer in 2014, still high off the success of my first NaNoWriMo in 2013 and convinced I was ready to have a stab at my next book, I read Wired for Story by Lisa Cron. Reader, it turned my world on its head.
See, I had been furiously writing under the mistaken belief that enough scenes lined up in a row with characters who were suitably angsty did a novel make. It did not. A novel needed story, not a string of events, and I realized that as talented as a prose stylist as I was (thanks, college poetry phase), as passionate as I was, if I didn’t have story structure, I didn’t have a novel.
I began to teach myself story. It was not easy. Still isn’t. I forced myself through John Truby’s Anatomy of Story; I worked through Libbie Hawker’s excellent Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing, which taught me so, so much. I learned to see arcs. I learned to structure chapters and scenes. I learned that a character must change, and that their change needs to be difficult in order for the reader to have a satisfying experience. Things really began to click when Lisa Cron published her book Story Genius and I got my wee paws on it in spring/summer 2018.
Let me preface this by saying Lisa Cron is not for everyone. She’s dogmatic about how outlining > discovery writing and is unafraid to be abrasive about it. If you know that kind of approach or voice will ruffle your feathers, you are well within your rights to not like her. But I urge you to check out Story Genius all the same—and perhaps start with this podcast interview for a taste of her voice—because she has valuable insights on what she calls the character’s core misbelief and how that will drive the story beginning to end. I 100% ignore her suggested method for outlining, but I return to the first half of her book and the prompts she has for free writing about characters and their past for every project I’ve worked on since 2018. After reading her book, I had plots that were powered by character change, rather than characters moving flaccidly from one end of a plot to another.
The first thing I do is sit down with a character and my clunky ol’ faithful, the Alphasmart Neo 2, and free write through these questions. This process is messy. It’s disjointed. Canon/backstory/misbelief changes over the course of the exercise, but by the end of it, I have a very strong idea of the character, their misbelief, their need, their end emotional state, and their beginning state. (NB: If I am planning a dual-POV book, I do this for both characters.)
The last thing I do is go through what Cron calls the “plot test questions.” I freewrite a bit about my intended plot, then I drag my ideas through the following interrogation:
Can the problem sustain the entire novel from the first page to the last?
Can the problem build?
Is there a clear-cut deadline, a ticking clock counting down to that consequence?
Is the problem capable of forcing your protagonist to make the inner change that your novel is actually about?
Will the problem’s impending consequence force my protagonist to struggle with her misbelief?
Regardless whether or not my protagonist achieves her goal, will the approaching consequence cost her something big, emotionally speaking?
For me, this whole process usually takes about two to three long free-writing sessions and ~6-8k words of brainstorming per POV character.
Then I’m ready to move on to fleshing out and finessing the plot.
3. Save the Cat! (The Jessica Brody version)
I looked down my nose on screenwriting beats for the longest time. Truby’s book is dense and old-white-man-y, full of examples from The Godfather that make my eyes roll back so far in my head they’ve gotten stuck twice. (Not really.) For years, I steered clear of Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!, despite hearing rumors of novelists using his screenwriting beats to great success to structure their books. I saw that the kidlit author Jessica Brody had rewritten the text specifically for novelists; I still wasn’t tempted. Then, in September 2019, I heard from someone in my Pitch Wars cohort that Jessica Brody had a class on her book Save the Cat! Writes A Novel on Udemy (a Skillshare-esque platform)… and that it was on sale for $11.
Okay fine, I thought. Let’s give it a go. I dragged my laptop to the Wellcome Library, one of my favorite places to write in London (I was living there with my husband at the time), and started watching the course. I had to pause the videos and pull out my Alphasmart very soon thereafter, because ideas began going off like fireworks in my head and I had to get them down as fast as possible.
Staring at a beat sheet bores me stupid. On the other hand, listening to Brody talk through the beats and what types of things should happen in each beat just worked for me. I watched her brief lectures, then paused and wrote. Watched, paused, wrote. Rinse, repeat. Several hours later, I stumbled blearily out of the library, blinking from computer screen eye strain, so elated and dazed that I nearly got mowed down by Euston Station commuters on my way to the platform.
I now had a working outline for what would become my first horror novel.
Because I knew I was working in a specific tradition (horror) I decided to trawl the internet and see if I could find a beat sheet for horror movies/novels. I found this one on Tumblr. Following these beats allowed me to introduce the monster (in this case, a haunting) in a way that felt natural to the reader, that played on their built-in expectations, and drummed up their anticipation.
4. The Plot Graph
This is the part where you’re either going to say whoaaaaaaa, kiddo, you’re cracked or yes!! I am stealing this!! (Please do!)
At this point in the prep process, back in fall 2019, I had notes from Story Genius, my Save the Cat outline, and that horror beat sheet bouncing around in my head. I needed to see them all together in front of me in chronological order, so I did what any self-respecting spouse of a financial data analyst does: I made a table.
Not all of the boxes are perfectly filled out. Sometimes I stick Story Genius stuff in the right-hand column, but not always. Sometimes I have questions. Other times I know precisely what happens and write it all out in brief, to-the-point sentences. (I’m not showing you those boxes because hello, spoilers!)
This, I think, is my greatest drafting secret. As I put together my plot graph, I can actually see the whole story from a bird’s eye view. I find holes I didn’t anticipate. I realize arcs are misaligned or imbalanced. I can see which characters are superfluous, or can be combined with other side characters. I can see when subplots begin in the wrong places, or if they must be streamlined/thrown out. If I sense that the action of the climax is off, I tweak it to better echo the main character’s arc.
These are all problems that, if they appeared in a complete novel draft, would be enormously difficult to fix. Sometimes fatally so. One might have to chuck out the last 40k and rewrite it, or even start again.
Because of the plot graph, I am able to fix 80% of these Achilles’s heel problems before I write a single sentence.
*mic drop*
But I’m not done yet, folks!
4.5 Bonus: The ZCP Questionnaire
As I do all of the above, I continue to scribble down ideas about the characters and the world of the book. I chuck these all into my notedump.
If I am writing a book that requires a lot of worldbuilding, this is roughly the point in my preparation process where I turn to the Reddit-famous Zaharam-Chapelle-Parunas Ethnographical Questionnaire.
Disclaimer: this is a massive list. It’s also not applicable to every single project. For example, the horror novel I describe above is set in 19th-century Mexico. My worldbuilding work came from old school jaunts to the university library and browsing JSTOR. If, on the other hand, I were writing a space opera and creating a whole new civilization, these are the questions to which I generally turn. I never go through every single question—usually, I pick a question and begin to free write. Ideas spark and collide; characters wander in and out. I follow until I run out of things to say, and then I pick another question. Repeat as necessary. I try not to sweat it too much at this point—broad strokes are sufficient. You’ll come up with your best and most detailed ideas later in the thick of drafting (*whispers* and those will be most relevant to your characters anyway).
5. Chapter Divisions
Once my plot graph is adequately populated and I have a strong sense of my world, it’s time to put everything into a document and divide it into chapters. I usually hate this step—it’s difficult and tedious, and as I work, I sense the futility of my task. So much will change and shift as I draft. Some chapters will shrink or be subsumed into their neighbors. Others will double in size.
That being said, the chapter division step is vital to my process. I know my chapters are roughly 4000 words each (maybe a little shorter at the beginning and the end). When I have the rough number of chapters my book needs, I learn two very important things: (1) how long the book will be and (2) how long it will take to write.
So how do I start this step? First, I take all my material from the right column of my plot graph and I put it into a document as a long, solid block of text. Then, I study it and identify places where natural chapter breaks could occur, based on the genre and the age category of the project. It is all deeply unscientific. Sometimes, I’m wrong, and as I hinted at above, will later have to stop in the middle of drafting to either consolidate or break up chapters.
During this step, I continue work that began in the plot graph step: sniff out potential problems; kill them with fire. I tweak subplots, figure out if a character’s introduction happens in the right place or not, tighten emotional arcs, finesse the ending, etc..
Sometimes this step takes a day. Other times it takes three, or five. But it’s worth every minute of mind-numbing work. Because then…
6. Zero Draft
…I write my zero draft.
In one of Laini Taylor’s Patreon newsletters last month, she chronicled drafting the last few sections of her WIP, one that had been giving her a lot of trouble. I adore Taylor’s writing. Her prose is beautiful, yes, but really, no line goes to waste. Each one hums with emotional resonance. But this gorgeous product is hard won: Taylor writes frankly about how she struggles with perfectionism in her process. In one post, she cited this quote by the poet William Stafford:
I believe that the so-called ‘writer’s block’ is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance... One should lower one’s standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It’s easy to write. You just shouldn’t have standards that inhibit your writing.
This belief is central to my drafting process. If you disagree, I don’t know how useful my rambling will be to you. But I beg you to keep an open mind.
I am one of those writers who become absolutely paralyzed by uncertainty. Zero drafting has helped me overcome that. By putting a messy, zero draft on the page first, when I actually draft later, I (1) know exactly what I’m supposed to be doing, (2) have faith that what I’m doing is leading me to the end on the best path possible (thanks, plot graph!), (3) trick myself into pretending I’m just revising or expanding what’s already there, when I am actually writing brand new-material.
To write my zero draft, I take one of my handy-dandy already-divided chapters. Pick one, any one—because all the chapters are already in the right order, I feel free to work out of order (which I never do in the proper drafting step—but more on that next month). Some chapters have two sentences to their name. Others have delicious scenes that I’ve played over in my head sixty times and I’m just drooling to write.
I sketch them out.
(Oh! Quick aside: this is a good moment to point out that I work exclusively in Scrivener. I love how easy it is to pop between chapters and how I can use the the split-screen feature to look at two docs at once. Lmk if you’d like a newsletter all about how I use Scrivener!)
My zero drafts are full of what I call blocking, a term borrowed from my high school dance/choreography days: I use them to track my characters as I move them across the stage. Throw in some dialogue. Move them again. Adjust the lighting. Next scene. Next chapter. If I have material in my notedump that is relevant to the chapter I’m working on, this is the point at which I move those notes over and weave ‘em into my zero draft.
Here is an example of a zero draft from the short story I was working on earlier today:
Scene 4 - Wake. Grace is gone. Katie looks around and starts screaming. Esther says hush it’s all right, she’s just in the kitchen or somewhere else. Katie is having a panic attack. Esther picks her up. Calls for Grace. Silence. Search for Grace in the house. It’s empty.
“It’s Them,” Katie cries, pointing at the playroom door.
It is ajar.
Esther puts Katie down. Runs and goes to the door—
“No, don’t go in!” Katie shrieks. Her voice is hoarse. “Don’t go in! I can’t be alone!”
See? It’s a mess! (And this is edited for clarity, even!) It’s legible to me as the writer, but it’s not actual prose. It’s a bunch of declarative sentences, some dialogue, and stage directions.
And it does its job.
Because of this zero draft work, when it came time to flesh out the above scene, I knew exactly where to put my effort: the eerie emptiness of the house. The rising panic of Esther, the teenage babysitter whose charge has gone missing in the night.
And because I already sketched out the ending, I didn’t have to worry about how I’d get there. I just wrote.
I am able to draft novels in six weeks because when I start, I have already done all the difficult work.
All I have to do is follow the path I laid for myself.
I put on my blinders and focus on what’s directly in front of me. I move one step at a time down the road, down the zero draft. Sentence by sentence. Scene by scene. Throwing myself at the wall over and over until I break through into the light.
I am able to put my hands on the keyboard and let the mad pony run.
But this is all a conversation for next month.
Until then, I hope you all take care and keep masking up. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment below or reach out to me on Twitter! (@isabelcanas_) I’m not around there as frequently as some (*waves hands vaguely at mental health*), but I absolutely love talking about process with fellow writers!
I’ll be back soon. —xx