Turning Ideas into Books: The Writing Journey

In the writing world they ask if you are a plotter or a pantser. Do you plan out, or plot, your book in advance or do you fly by the seat of your pants. I’m more of a humming bird with some plotting and pantsing thrown in. My mentor, Jen Storer, calls it the Swedish Chef style.

Then there’s the beginning, middle and enders. 

Do you love beginning a project? Where every thing is new and shiny and it’s exciting and all a bit of an adrenaline rush. Or do you love middles. The initial drama has subsided and you are climbing steadily to the climax and describing everything on the way.  Perhaps you thrive on the joy of the rush to the end where you break the tape.

I’m talking about writing, although in my experience,  it applies to much of life as well.

I love the thrill of a new idea and following the story to see where it goes. I am definitely a beginning person. I have a lot of ‘started stories’ that I have collected over the years. They started from attending copious writing workshops. Hundreds of writing prompts that started somewhere and ended up in a folder. 

I was frustrated, at the time, I felt like I was leaving all the characters stuck up a mountain with no end in sight.

It bothered me a lot. I felt as though my characters were frowning at me and tut tutting because I hadn’t got back to them. The thing is, I was learning how to write and that’s what happens. Lots of writing. Practice, practice, practice.

Then I decided to write a book. I wanted to bite the bullet and take some characters all the way to the end of their story. When I made the decision to write a book, I had two stories I had been toying with. One which arrived in my head with a complete plot. I could see the beginning, the middle and the end. The characters where shadowy, but there. A rural setting in Australia. 

The other story I’d been playing with was a fantasy story with dragons and shipwrecks and other dimensions. I wrote it by following the story as it unfolded. It was a thrilling ride until it ran out of steam and needed work. I thought it was a failure because the connections seemed to evaporate. I knew where it was going but not how to get there. It also started to feel more like three books. I had too many ideas and not enough experience.

Between the rural Australian story and the dragon adventure story I was getting myself into a tangled mess of words and plots and character arcs.

Around that time Jen Storer gave me some excellent advice. I was trying to juggle both stories and getting nowhere fast. Jen said I needed to pick one story and run with it. It’s important to know Jen also says: there are no rules and you are in charge.

It made sense to me to choose one story and stick to it. I love shiny things and I’m easily distracted, especially when it gets to boring bits. I faithfully followed my newly  concreted ‘law’ and chose one story to work on. The rural story, the one that came with the plot. It seemed the logical one to focus on. Being a complete plot was tantalizing. Surely I couldn’t lose track of the story. The other one, the super scary fantasy novel was much more exciting so it was a hard choice. Side-note: the super scary fantasy novel isn’t a scary story, it’s how it makes me feel when I think about writing it. It scares the living daylights out of me and I’m not sure if I can pull it off.

I’d never written a book before so it was all new ground. I kept the ‘law’ I’d made and never wavered from the story. Even when it was boring the pants off me, even when I couldn’t bring myself to write anything. The characters sat around talking to each other. They were bored too. 

Thirty-two thousand words in, I lost my mojo. What if I had picked the wrong story? What if no one wanted to read stories with horses. Maybe I can only write fantasy. What if I can only write short stories and bad poetry.

Don’t get me wrong, the rural story itself is not boring, it has exciting things happen, not magical fantasy stuff, more like bushfires, kidnapping, cattle rustling and generally dangerous times for the characters. I started to feel as if I might not be able to pull it off, put all the pieces together and make it work. My subconscious took over to protect me from the big scary rural Australian story and everything stalled. Again. How interesting.

I have a tendency to do this to myself. I tie myself up in undoable knots until I don’t do the thing I really want to do. Meanwhile, not working on the rural story makes me feel like a fraud. My motivation evaporates and my creative energy is sucked out the window.

The other day I dragged out the zzz file and looked at all the old unfinished stories. Not the super scary fantasy novel, just all the ones I started with prompts in various workshops. I read them to my husband while we were on a long drive. My writing has improved a lot since I first wrote them way back in 2008. The characters were just where I left them. Waiting for me to take them somewhere. Anywhere. I could see where I was trying too hard and where I was overdoing the description or trying to be more prosaic. They were full of weasel words cluttering up the page and taking up space. Apart from that they were pretty good. With a tidy up they might even make quite good stories. It’s hard for me to judge though because I fall in love with each character. 

It never ceases to amaze me how the characters appear on the page. One minute I’m looking at a prompt, a word, an object or a feeling and the next thing these characters start appearing. They pop into existence, each one wearing a great cloud of unknowing, floating around them, like a cloak. Each one with their backstory and all their hopes and dreams complete yet undiscovered. They are ethereal, tantalising and slippery and I’m excited to be discovering who they are and how they speak as I write. Soon we’re half way up a mountain in Wales getting ready to wake a sleeping dragon. I say ‘we’ because it’s as if I sit on their shoulder as they trek up the mountain. They tell me their hopes and dreams and then they slowly reveal their backstory. Their family members, the dramas they have gone through to get here and where they are headed. 

It’s like some kind of magic. 

Sometimes I fantasize about my family stumbling across my zzz file after I’m gone. I imagine them finding all my characters wandering around in a great fog of unknowing, waiting to go home, to go anywhere.  I really want those characters to find their way. More than anything I want to write those two magic words: The End.

Sometimes I feel like a fraud for not finishing my stories yet, but I remind myself that I am still writing. This blog is part of that. I have written something once a month for the last six years. I am also regularly working on my husband’s rock and roll life story. I’m sort of ghost writing or co-writing, I’m not entirely sure what you’d call it.

Hang on a minute, isn’t that breaking the ‘law?’ Choose one story and stick with it?

No. There’s a loophole. It’s not really ‘my story’ so I’m not technically breaking any laws. I might feel like I’m not writing anything at the moment but the seventy thousand words in the rock memoir say otherwise. Writing is writing is writing — right?

I want to finish the rural Australian story and I want to take those characters home. This is not about publishing, it’s about finishing. Holding myself accountable works for me and I thought I would start a weekly online writing group. I bit the bullet and put the word out. I now meet with a couple of writers for an hour or so each Monday morning. We meet on a zoom call, I set a timer and we write.

So far so good. It’s easing me back into the rural Australian town and I am slowly making friends with the characters again. They were a bit miffed at being ignored for so long and quite excited to tell me all the new ideas they had while I was gone. Now I need to find a sledge hammer for those stupid laws I keep making and find a way of stopping the cement truck from making its regular visits.

Thank you for reading. I really appreciate the feedback and encouragement. It helps much more than you will ever know. Wish me luck!

I’d love to hear what works for you in the comments.