How I write

In the next few hours I will hopefully be getting GG4 (title to be announced, release date June 2010) back from the fabulous, the glamorous, the famous Editor Jen.

At that point, I will have a few weeks to do what will ultimately be the fourth draft.

At this point, however, I have nothing to do but click refresh on the email every five seconds and worry about getting the book good because at this point, it's finished. It's a whole story--beginning to end. All the things that have to happen in it are happening. But the big job--the big worry--is making them happen well. That, my friends, is what's going to be keeping me up nights between now and the end of the year and what will also potentially make this blog a quiet, gloomy place for the next few weeks.

(Just hit refresh. Nope, no email yet.)

For the last week or so while Editor Jen has been working her magic, I've had some time to sleep (which I do at a world-class level, I must say), read (THE DEMON'S LEXICON by Sarah Rees Brennan is a fabulous, dark-ish fantasy for slightly older teens), and start putting some thought into my next project (which will probably be Heist Society 2.)

And, of course, I've had to think about HOW I write. This is a question I get in one form or another quite a bit and, honestly, it's a question I ask myself--especially at this stage in the game.

When I'm getting ready to finish one book and start another I always think about how I can do it better--how not to make the same mistakes, how to avoid whatever pitfalls gave me fits the last time.

But this is a big thing I've come to realize: the mistakes matter. The pitfalls sometimes show me the way.

People frequently ask me if I outline and the answer is no, not really. I know some authors who write 20-80 page outlines that summarize how chapter 20 will open and what characters will be in the scene that ends chapter 32. I do not outline to that extent.

What I do do is storyboard.

Storyboarding is an old screenwriting practice where you write scene descriptions on notecards and then move them around as a way of visually "seeing" the entire movie.

I do that. And when I start a new book I usually know several big things--Cammie will be with Macey at a political convention; there will be an attack; Macey will be in danger all semester; the girls will go about protecting her and trying to get to the bottom of things; there will be a BIG fight on election night; the stage will be set for a very big book 4.

Those were all the things I knew when I started GG3, but those aren't specific scenes. Those things do not a detailed outline make.

I wish I knew all the little things at the beginning, and I've tried outlining--I really, truly have. The problem is that everything sounds good in theory, and until I've tried to write something I don't know if will work or not.

The other problem is that having a complete outline kind of takes the fun out of it for me.

For example, probably my favorite scene in Heist Society is one that I had no idea was going to be in the book until it was just there--on the page. It features one of my favorite characters and I had no idea he existed until Kat knocked on a door and there he was.

Looking back, I absolutely cannot imagine Heist Society without that scene, but six months before I started the book I didn't know it was going to be there. Heck, six minutes before I started writing it I didn't know.

Great books write themselves, only the bad books have to be written, F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, and that has always felt very, very true to me.

For me personally, outlining always feels like writing a book--me, the author, planning and theorizing, and making things up. Having interesting characters who are facing an interesting and compelling challenge and then setting them loose upon the page feels like letting a book write itself.

Call me crazy, but I think books are always better when the author gets out of the way. (Note this is not to say that people who outline are in the way--it's just that I feel that way when I outline. Some are perfectly capable of letting the characters rule even in outline form. I can't.)

I wish I wrote differently. I really, truly do. I wish I could say exactly what was going to happen and how long it would take. My books would be easier. The writing would go faster if it were like baking--here is the recipe, there are the ingredients, it will take this many minutes beginning to end.

But it's not like that for me, I'm afraid.

And I don't know how to change it, so I won't.

As I stand here at the end of GG4 and the beginning of Heist 2 I have a book that had a lot of missteps and pitfalls and mistakes and I have one that is a blank whiteboard and about a dozen post-it notes, spread out in the barest, most basic bones of a story.

At this point, when I think about Heist 2 I have far more questions than answers. (Why did person A want object B? How does Kat learn Secret C? Where is Character D and why isn't he here?) I don't know the answers to those questions!

But I will. Someday a few months from now I'll have answers to all of them.

And that, gang... That is how I write.


-Ally

ps...I do not mean to imply in any way that people who outline are writing incorrectly any more than I, as a right-handed person, can say that someone who is left-handed doesn't know how to use a pen or a knife. We are just wired differently, we outliners and non-outliners. We just have to write with the hand that feels natural to us.





(Just checked email and it's here! It's really here. I think I'm gonna be sick.)