writing a book – Julie Liddell Whitehead

Of Two Minds

I am realizing that I might need to take a break from my work-in-progress, Looking for Home. I’m in the last third of the book, and I suddenly just dread sitting down, opening it, and writing. There’s a multitude of reasons why I could be stuck–the other two sections were more drafted, while this one is not. The events in this section are hard scenes to write. The character goes from a teenager to a battered wife and on and on. I don’t think I have a handle on the main character in this section.

What I do know is I feel bored with it. And if I’m bored writing it, you’d be bored reading.

But there’s a really good argument to be made for keeping on. I only have a few chapters left before I have a full draft. You can’t edit and refine what you haven’t written yet. The discipline is the key–if you keep showing up for yourself, eventually you’ll break through. Always finish projects, Neil Gaiman said. You have to keep your forward momentum going. I felt this way close to the end of Hurricane Baby and pushed through because I had something to prove.

And that’s all very true, too.

But I no longer have anything to prove right now.

I do know I’m about to go through a time with my book launch where my mind will be distracted. I want so much to enjoy this time upcoming. Maybe making working on LFH only a sometime thing after going through the whirlwind of events with my launch.

Ill have to think some more. Any advice, drop it in the comments!

New Notebook

I bought a fancy pink suede blank lined notebook today at a Renaissance fair this weekend. Not sure I will ever write in it, but I might. You never know.

(I can hear all the blank notebooks already stashed in my office desks mocking me from afar. You? Write? Ha!)

I’m going to, though. Just you hide and watch.

Revision Finished

Revision number I’ve-lost-track is in the books. Now I am cleaning up typos, etc. in the typescript. I have a ton of backwards quotation marks. Not sure how that happened. I’m proofing a story a day while waiting on another read by various people and seeing what they have to say, and then I’ll dive into another workover based on that feedback.

I’ve collected a list of small presses to send to in the first round–they are all hospitable to Southern lit and I hope one of them takes an interest in it. I am looking over publishing guidelines and all those details to get them fixed in my mind so the final copies will hold up.

So Hurricane Baby is a few steps closer to reality. I hope you are enjoying this trip into the innards of writing a book. I’m still going to be posting on how everything goes with the new revisions and all the developments I anticipate in this journey. Come along for the ride!

Hard-Won Knowledge

Well, something interesting happened yesterday. I have always been a very particular writer. I write it out and don’t finish a piece until every word is as good as I can make it–the first time I write it. I am used to turning out very clean copy in a first draft and not having to revise. I’ve never been one to subscribe to the “crappy first drafts” mode of writing–where you just get a bunch of stuff on the page and sort it out later.

But yesterday I did exactly that on this fiction project. I was writing one of the last stories and wanted to get everything down that was in my head about this scene, but I realized halfway through that it needed more attention than I was giving it–I was “telling” a lot in summary when I needed to be showing it in scene.

But I just kept plugging along and finally finished what I could do that day. I went back and read it and made a big cut, and immediately the scene felt a lot better. Now I need to go back and put in the scenes I was summarizing. I have never really been able to revise my own work–I think it’s all good until someone tells me otherwise, then I can see how to fix it. So I think yesterday was a step forward for me as a writer in that I know I have to fix it and know what I have to do to fix it. Instead of just thinking it’s wonderful from the get-go :).

So today’s craft tip–go ahead and write the garbage. At least sorting through it later will help you separate the recyclable from the trash and find the treasures within that you didn’t notice at first. I’m awfully late to this awareness, but I’m glad I finally have it. Happy writing!

Drafting Tips

Writing your story from beginning to end sounds like the right way to go, right? You write the beginning, the middle, the climax, the denoument, and the end. Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, once noted that the last third of a book usually took up only the last ten percent of the time to write, either from confidence in your story or maybe the narrowing of options for alternative endings.

But what happens when you don’t know what happens in the next chapter? My solution for that with Hurricane Baby was to write sections as I thought of them. I wondered about if Judd and Laine divorced over Wendy, how long would it be before Judd started dating again? I knew not long—he had a reputation as a womanizer in college and was still relatively young. So I wrote a scene where he met his second wife six months after his divorce was final. Ray would eventually figure out that Judy Ray wasn’t his—studies show that a child’s similarity in looks to their father peaks around two years old, so Ray would notice she did not favor him or his family in any way by then. What would he do?

I put the scenes I was writing in sequential order in the original manuscript as I drafted each one in my notebook. I would fill in what I thought would connect them as I went. The final scenes were the third ones I wrote. I knew where the story was going to go—but how did I get it there?

Sometimes the characters up and surprised me. Dr. Jack Rawson turned meaner and meaner with every scene I wrote him into. His playing-God ego was huge, and it led to Wendy being so uncomfortable around him that the scenes were excruciating to write.

So instead of writing linearly, where you write the first scene first and the last scene last, try going where the answer to the question of What happens? is burning a hole in your imagination. Write that scene. You may keep it, you may not. Pencils have erasers, and a computer comes with a delete key for a reason, right? If you’re blocked on the Next Thing, try the next Next Thing and see what happens.