writing Archives - Tess Wilson Books

Ninety thousand words appear on the screen in front of me. That’s ten thousand too many, and I’m not going to trim that extra ten by cutting a word here or a sentence there. It’s time to read, review, cut, and polish. It’s time to edit.

I am often asked if writing is hard. My answer is simple, and one that I have commonly heard from some of the greatest teachers and philosophers I have known: Everything is difficult, until it is not. Sometimes it is hard to get started. Sometimes it is difficult to stay focused. Sometimes it is challenging to follow the path the story wants to take you down. But all of these things get easier with practice.

It is quite easy to write poorly. It is harder to write well, but that too, gets easier with practice. And following another writing wisdom that I remind myself of daily: you can fix a bad page; you can’t fix a blank page.

So I guess the truth is: yes, I find writing easy.

I have enjoyed the rush of Nanowrimo, successfully completing a 50000 word first draft of a novel in the 30 days each time I have participated. I have been inspired by fresh ideas late in the night, pumping out 10000 words in one sitting, crashing in the early hours of the morning. As I have said before, sometimes I feel like I am just a puppet with my fingers on the keyboard, and the stories just write themselves.

Writing is easy.

And then there is editing.

Editing is slow and painful, exhausting and thankless.

Writing is inviting all your friends to a party. Editing is being told to choose only two from twenty that you can actually invite. Writing is the party. Editing is the Sunday morning clean up that takes all day, all week, all month. Months. Years.

Long after the excitement of “The End” and the premature celebrations of success, editing lingers, promising hour after unending hour of assurances that what you thought was good, needs to actually be a lot better.

Writing is beautiful. Editing is brutal.

So writing is not hard. But producing something worthy of being read is. And as much as I struggle, and procrastinate, make excuses and go off on tangents with diversions and distractions to avoid the cumbersome task, in the end it is not so thankless. Hopefully the thanks is in the story, made all the better for the effort of the edit.

There are a lot of blogs and resources out there telling ‘would be’ writers (or, as I call them, writers) how to write. I don’t want to do that, because I think it is different for all of us, and each writer needs to find out through experimentation and practice what works for them. But I am happy to share how I write.

The creative process for me isn’t a set method or system. Words come to me in many ways, starting with what I call a snippet – a scene, a character, a conversation, a fraction of dialogue, a moment between characters, a look, a confrontation – sometimes a few concrete ideas or story lines, and at the other end of the spectrum, a dream (sometimes a daydream, sometimes a night time epic adventure) featuring a fully formed story complete with character arcs, plot and climax, the entire epic drama, fresh to me upon waking, requiring only a keyboard and time to translate it onto a page.

Okay, admittedly, that has only really happened once. And it was amazing.

I wrote down as much of it as I could the morning after, certain the rest would stay solid in my memory. The clarity of the characters, their journey, the whole saga was so vivid and clear… It didn’t. What I wrote down that morning is all I have of that story. When I read my notes, I can still remember the dream. But it does seem like a lot more work to progress it beyond notes into a draft manuscript than I thought it would be that morning when I woke up with it. It is ‘shelved’. That’s what I call it when I have works in progress that I have set aside to ‘rest’. It happens more than you might think. For every book I finish, I have a handful more that got lost somewhere in the process. I like to think of them as stories not yet ready to be told, rather than failed manuscripts.

The reality is, a fully formed story is not the way it usually comes to me.

Most often it is a snippet. An intense conversation in my head about a random something, between some random people. I write it down. I write what they say, what they look like, where they are, why they are talking about this thing, and I gradually get a sense of who they are and what story they belong to. The story most often comes last. The people in it, always first.

Occasionally there is more of an idea for a story: I was sitting on a ski lift once, riding to the top of a mountain, feeling the weight of my snowboard dangling from my feet, feeling the cold on my cheeks, and I thought, I want to write a book about a girl who rides a snowboard for a living, following winter around the world and competing in competitions as a career. So I did.

Sometimes there is a what if…? What happens to everyone at the end of Damaged Goods? was a question I asked myself… and answered by writing companion novels from other characters’ points of view.

What I never do though, is write what I think you will want to read.

Okay, that sounds weird. Of course I want you to read what I write. Yes, I am writing and publishing because I want my stories to have an audience, and I want to have a readership. Of course I do!

But I remember an editor wanting me to change a character once. At first I was affronted, and felt defensive about the criticism. I tried to step back, consider their point of view, harden up and take the advice on board for what it was. Eventually I wrote pages and pages of justification and rationale for keeping the character the way she was in my head, knowing I didn’t want to change her, but thinking I would have to battle to “save” her. In the end though, the editor’s response was, “Okay!” The fact that I knew why the character I created was the way she was and I felt strongly enough about her to protect her the way I had written her, to not change her to make her more appealing or likeable, that I wanted to keep her real to me with all her glorious contradictions and imperfections, was enough to satisfy the editor. After all, perfection isn’t real; there is no such thing. I try not to write expectations. I write characters the way they are in my head, the way I imagine they would be in life. It’s the only way I know to keep it real. Keep them real. Keep me real.

I don’t have process for plot, or a process for planning. I am much more a pantster than I am a plotter. I almost always start with the characters, and let them take me where they need to go. As I have said before, sometimes it’s really hard work. But usually I just feel like a puppet on with my fingers on the keyboard.