Okay guys—I finally want to share a little bit of info on my next novel before (a) I forget to in the midst of a disorganized mess of blog post ideas I have and (b) so that if I become a little less active on this blog from here to the end of school, it’s probably because I’m devoting more time to working on it. It’s really hard to balance writing both a blog and a novel while also having school to do. Let’s just say I’m counting down the days for this school year…
We should probably start with how I selected this next story. It’s kind of funny, really. I planned on writing a completely different story than this one for my second novel but eventually decided against that one for the time being, just because I thought it had themes that were redundant in literally tons of books and were too cliche. I CAN think of themes that nobody has hit on that I’m dying for them to, or if they attempted to try and address a theme I wanted them to (and I have read stories that tried) I wasn’t satisfied with it. Mainly because I thought they could go way deeper, which it seemed like they were afraid to do. Well, lucky for you all, I’m not afraid to go really deep in my writing (because I promised I don’t write fluff…), so my stories may be quite depressing. 😉 No, just kidding, kind of. I try to have a balance. Like anything I do, I want my stories to be authentic. But you have to be willing to dive deep to make that happen. To ask the hard questions that you may not even have answers to.
But I never planned for this grand, deep novel when I wrote a scene for it. Actually, I wrote the first scene for it—which was actually the beginning of the climax in the plot—on my way up to Estherville for Thanksgiving in 2016, and yes, I blogged about that! I even blogged about me writing on the way—it’s all in this post. At the time, it seriously meant nothing to me. It was just a short scene I was doing because, well, I was bored, and I was taking an online writing class, so I wanted to get some practice in, and then remember how in that post it said the rain was relentless and my mom was having a fit about it? So I just wrote a scene about that. When Mom found that out, she wasn’t the happiest at being in my book, but I assured her that it wasn’t really her, just the hot male lead, so she had nothing to worry about!
That’s where it began. I didn’t have any intentions of continuing it. But then we had a big writing project in English class (!!! my faves !!!), and for part of mine I did a short story. I decided to elaborate on what I’d wrote, but go back to more like the rising action. I think our word target for the short story was somewhere around 700-900 maybe? So I created a plot outline just for a chunk of the story, thinking it would just be a short story. I think I planned out nine chapters, and then I saw the word count for my plot outline was over 1000 words… So I wrote out all the chapters into a continuation, which my teacher also read and left me much appreciated feedback, and honestly that was what inspired me to turn it into a whole novel. I knew there was a lot of themes I could pack into just a single story, and they just kept coming to me with time. So here we are.
As far as the actual writing process with this one, it’s been a pain, to say the least. I don’t know why. I don’t remember having this much trouble with my first novel, maybe because I knew that was my first one, so I didn’t have expectations? But it was GOOD that way—it created one of the rawest pieces I’ve ever wrote, despite its seemingly endless imperfections (ugh…querying…don’t ask…we’re a long ways from there). But now with this one, I am overthinking it so badly; it’s driving me insane. I’m trying to drill it into my raging perfectionist mind that rough drafts are supposed to suck, but I don’t know if it’s working. I started the rough draft sometime around the beginning of freshman year, and then somewhere around the new year, scrapped the whole thing—all 30,000 words. And I started over. But that is good, because I could tell I was trying too hard, and it was killing my story—it didn’t have the authentic, easy flow to it that it has now. I have 10,000 words currently—this last trimester of school has been killing me, so I’m hoping this summer I can take off with it.
It’s funny because I just took a shower and am pretty sure I just thought up the entire ending to this novel now—because normally I wait to come up with my endings. Oh, the life of a writer.
For right now, this is all the details I can share, but if you have any questions about this book or my writing or process or anything like that, then feel free to leave a comment below, or you can ask me on my FAQs page or contact me here, if you prefer. I’m happy to answer questions and may do more blog posts along these lines in the future if that’s an interest! Thank you all!