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If Your Writing Process is a Mess
In theory, writing a novel should be simple.
Or so it strikes me.
You come up with an idea. You develop the idea, you meet your characters, you wrangle the plot, you make an outline — beginning, middle, and end. And then you write the damn thing, beginning to end. You finish a draft, you revise the draft, polish the draft, write a query, polish the query, sign with an agent, go on sub, sign the book deal.
Easy, peasy, lemon-squeezie.
It should be a fast, reliable system. An assembly line, if you will, churning out a book a year or thereabouts. You have no control once the book leaves your hands, but on your end, the books should flow quickly and effectively. And they should be good.
That’s what being a professional writer’s supposed to look like, right? Isn’t that the dream? Isn’t that how you make it a career?
Unfortunately, my process looks nothing like that. God knows I wish it did.
My process is unpredictable and unreliable, especially when the ideas start coming in. At first, I hoped this disaster would only be true for my first book.
It started as a story about a girl mourning the death of her best friend. Then it became a three-book saga of their entire friendship, from beginning to end. And then the…
