I love getting letters from readers. In particular I enjoy it when teens write to me and tell me they’re working on their own writing projects. They ask me some great questions, and even though they’re beginning writers, most of the principles that I find myself passing on are things that, beginning writer or experienced writer, even now that I’m published, still apply to my writing process.
So I’m sharing today a question from a reader named Grace:
I was wondering how you stick with writing on one topic for a whole book let alone 3 books. I have a slue of journals with stories that never quite passed the 50 page mark. I just lose interest because it is not quite time for the climax and back ground knowledge and thickening the plot can only go so far. How do you keep your self interested until the end of the book?
Interesting that she asked me this question, because it’s something that I struggled with. Before I wrote Prom Dates From Hell, I also had a whole mess of projects/books that I’d started but never finished, for exactly the same reason. I would lose interest and abandon one project for the next shiny thing.
Even now I deal with this; I don’t abandon the project, but there’s a point in every book (The technical term, for me, is “Chapter 4.”) where I bog down, convinced the book is horribly boring, and I suck, and writing a whole big book is an insurmountable task. It doesn’t matter than I’ve done it five times now. Every single book, I look at the mountain of plot I’ve got to climb, and wonder how I’m ever going to manage it.
Now, pre-book-writing, a couple of things helped me: I wrote a bunch of shorter pieces so that I got used to finishing things. A short story can be 4 pages, or it can be 40 pages. But it’s good practice being able to get a beginning, middle and end into a short space. There’s no space for the boring stuff.
For a book, the rise and fall of the plot makes for natural goals. I don’t just plan one climax at the end. I have several turning points that are like mini-climaxes over the course of the book. This is not just about plotting an exciting book. It’s about giving myself goals that don’t seem so waaaaaaaay far away and unattainable.
If you think about the book as a series of successively higher hills rather than one long, tedious climb up a mountain, it really helps. And since those parts are usually fun to write, it’s both a goal and a reward. (I love to write the scenes with the heroine and her love interest, so I tell myself stuff like: well, I have to get through this scene where they explain how magic works, but then Maggie and Justin get to fight then make out… er, I mean make up.)
And to Grace and everyone else (that is, ALL of you, because I’ve never met a writer who didn’t have books and books of scraps and starts and bits and pieces)… Whatever you do, NEVER throw away those journals! One of my abandoned projects turned into the idea for my September book (The Splendor Falls). Way back when, I had an idea for a story about a ballerina who breaks her leg and goes to stay in an old house with a ghost. The setting and whole rest of the plot ended up being completely different, but it all started from about 50 pages of story I began (then abandoned) in high school.
So, whether you’re a young writer, a not so young writer, beginning or experienced, on those days when the book seems too huge and the end too far away, just think about it in chunks. After all, you can eat an elephant one bite at a time.
