Finding the thematic itch
Eager to start a new project, I rushed the one I was working on...and it cost me. Some thoughts on the 'thematic itch" that drives a novel and finding the courage to start over.
So I’ve been very excited to dive in to my next book project, which I’ll tell you more about later after I get a host of permissions from my publisher, but in the meantime, I’m still working on my next middle grade series, The Princess Protection Program, which is coming out from HarperCollins/Greenwillow next year.
Book 1 in the series is done and off to the designers and printers and all the wonderful people who make an edited manuscript into a book (a cover reveal is coming soon…). I’m currently writing the as yet untitled sequel.
And this is where the drama begins.
The process for every book I write is a little different. Sometimes I have a very detailed outline before I start and sometimes I just have bullet point notes. Often I write what the screenwriter James V. Hart calls “signposts” that track the heartbeat of the story. As I learned how to structure a story largely from him when I was a baby writer, I usually do the signposts before I start writing. It’s worked for me many times.
But sometimes, I use outlining and planning as an excuse to avoid starting. I believe there’s magic to writing prose that you can only find by actually writing the prose. It doesn’t happen in the outline and it doesn’t happen in the daydreaming. It happens by building word after word and sentence after sentence and seeing how the gravity of each of those building blocks pulls the story and the characters along in surprising and delightful directions. It’s the Nike philosophy of creative writing: just do it.
So, with Princess Protection Program 2, I just did it. I started without much of a plan. I knew my character and what her essential desire was and maybe some of the obstacles she might face, but they were vague or not thought out. I started because I had to write a book even if I didn’t know what the book was about. So said the contract!
I figured the magic of starting would do the work for me. I’d jump off the cliff and learn to fly on the way down. That had worked for me before too. When I wrote the last book in the SkyBound Saga, I had no idea what would happen. In the end, after some agonized drafting, I found the story and I’m very proud of how I ended that trilogy.
I began writing this sequel on faith and optimism and I wrote fast. 30,000 words in less than a month! And the finished book was supposed to be somewhere around 40,000 words when I was done, so I was close! Hooray!
Except something wasn’t right. Events unfolded for no reason. Characters did things and spoke, but there was no spark beneath their actions or words, no heft, no life.
It’s hard to know when a narrative is working, but it’s easy to know when it’s not. I couldn’t name why, just that something was wrong. There was nothing driving the story. It felt aimless, even though the plot was direct, exciting, and action-packed with some genuinely funny moments.
I kept going. I’m not Lot’s wife; I don’t look back while I’m drafting.
I often counsel young writers to write through creative blockage, write through self-doubt, silence judgement and just write! I am (or was?) a firm believer—at least in terms of creative process—in the adage that when you’re going through hell, keep going. The only way out is through. Once more unto the breach! Etc.!
I wrote more, taking my unfortunate characters further and further down the road they were on…which was the wrong road. It did not rise up to meet me. Suddenly, on Wednesday morning, I couldn’t write another scene. For 2 weeks, I agonized, and made notes and tried to make different things happen. And none of them worked. I’d hit a wall. Or was I stuck in a well?
I tried some other tricks. I skipped ahead to a more fun scene to write, but it still fell flat. I tried writing a chapter by hand. Nope. I talked the story through with a friend, with a stranger, with my dog. Nothing. I bribed myself to meet arbitrary word count goals (my bribe was Pretzel Shortbread from Lost Bread Co. here in Philly).
Then I printed out what I had and started to read it through. I didn’t even need to finish. After about 20 pages I couldn’t deny it wasn’t working. I’d made a wrong turn early, with the entire plot and I had to face that fact. Weeks of what felt like wasted work.
The author Adib Khorram describes realizing these wrong turns as akin to the 5 Stages of grief, and I went through them all. I’d been in denial for weeks, I got angry at myself and at my manuscript and at my characters. I’d tried to bargain my way out with the different tricks, different bribes for myself hitting arbitrary word count goals, and I got mildly depressed about it, wallowing and languishing and letting the days pass uselessly. But then, with some deep breaths and the inescapability of deadlines, I found acceptance, and I knew what I had to do.
I had to start over, fresh, and this time, I needed a plan. A real one, not just a list of events, but a map of a story. Back to basics. After 32 books, I still have to remind myself of the fundamentals every damn time!
So I thought about my main character, about her flaws and her needs. I reread the fairy tale she comes from and I asked myself what drew me to making this book her story. What did she need to learn in it? (not what the readers needed to learn…dear god, never that! I am not about deliberate didacticism in children’s books! My books have themes and values, but not lessons! )
On my whiteboard, I paraphrased something that I love from the screenwriter Craig Mazin (hmmm, a lot of my writing mentors are screenwriters…is that because I don’t have an MFA? A question for another time). Here’s, roughly, what Craig says in his great talk “How to Write a Movie”:
The purpose of the story is take your main character from the ignorance of the thematic question to the embodiment of it.
Oh!
Right! Stories are vehicles for change, a way to upset a stasis, and a way to show a character going on a journey, literal or figurative! I didn’t have a strong enough thematic question for my protagonist, so she felt like she was wandering about for no reason. Not only that, I didn’t know what I wanted the book to be about, which is often just another way of saying what the thematic question is.
Moby Dick isn’t just about a hunt for a whale. It’s about revenge or fate or humanity’s folly and so on. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow isn’t just about video game designers making a game, it’s about friendship and art and collaboration and growing up. The thematic questions the author has drive the incidents that press on the characters, which in turn makes the story about something more than mere events.
I don’t always think of it as a question (I didn’t with the above examples), but more as a thematic itch. The idea that scratches at my brain until I have to explore it through fiction.
For example, in my dystopian novel Proxy, I wanted to explore how the oppressed and the oppressors are all captive to neo-liberal capitalism and how our shared humanity can overcome that. And so Syd and Knox each have to go on a journey toward that realization. Every event of the novel pushes them there. That is what gives the story propulsion.
Or in my Battle Dragons series, hero Abel sees dragons as a tool for his own awesomeness or failure—everything is through the lens of himself, but through events of the story, comes to learn that everyone is the protagonist of their own lives, even the dragons.
My characters have their own desires, often at odds with thematic itch I’m worrying at (that creates drama!), but it’s that thematic itch that gives the story its spark and gives the characters actions purpose, even if they don’t know the purpose yet.
And so, for Princess Protection Program 2, I went back to find my itch. I sat and I breathed and I thought and reread fairy tales and I thought some more and I breathed some more and I knew the itch I wanted to scratch: Can we truly transform from who we’ve been by leaving our past without facing it?
With that question in mind—not a groundbreaking question to be sure, but a very human one—I made a new outline! With new signposts and incidents that press on my character’s assumptions about herself and her life and her place in her world! And the outline poured out of me!
Now it’s time to start over. The work I’d done wasted wasted. It was necessary to find the story I needed to tell, which is different from the one I had been telling. Getting ir wrong was part of the process. And I’m not throwing out all the writing I did —some of it may still yet be useful and repurposed, but I am starting a new document with a blank page. This time, I know my purpose, I know my character’s wants and flaws and I know how I’m going to press on them. This time—I hope—I’ve found the spark. There’s an itch I want to scratch.
The great thing about writing is that if I’m wrong, I can always begin again.
But I’ll probably cry first.
And eat of a lot of pretzel shortbread (y’all it’s so good…)
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And while you wait for my next book(s), I’m still adding new chapters to this interactive story over on StoryLoom, where, with a free account, you get to be the main character and produce a day of the local news. Check it out, if you want to:
I'm curious about your experiences related to this post: Have you ever had to start to a creative project over from scratch? Was it the right move? What do you need to do to start a creative project well for yourself?