Ep. 221: How Do I Even START Writing My Book? Bonus Episode

In this bonus miniepisode, Rachael talks about how to start writing your book when it’s all you want to do and you’re still not doing it. Also: how to lay groundwork in a first novel in a series for the next book without letting down the reader, how to deal with a revision letter, and how to use a foreign language in context! 

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. 

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #221 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. So pleased that you are with me here today on a mini episode day. I didn’t have very many questions. And then suddenly I had them. Bunch of them. So let’s move into answering some of these awesome questions and a reminder you can be a part of this by being at the $5 level on Patreon, patreon.com/Rachael, and this is kind of like a mini coaching service. You can send me questions whenever you want about anything, which is pretty cool. And I collect them until I got a whack of them to go through. 

[00:00:55] So this is from Alan Tansley. Alan, you’ve been waiting the longest. Thank you for your patience. I’m writing the first book of a trilogy. I know that part of the second book will cover events which take place during the same time period as the first book, but using a side character as a new point of view. I want to lay some groundwork now so that it doesn’t feel as though it comes out of nowhere. My question is how do I do that without making a promise to the reader that this event slash mystery will be dealt with in the first book, I don’t want to end up with a disappointing ending because I accidentally created intrigue, which never gets resolved or even explored. First of all, it’s huge that you are thinking about that, the fact that you are thinking about it knows that you are going to be treating it sensitively enough. And here’s my answer, and it comes from the first two words of your question. I’m writing, I’m writing the first book of a trilogy. While you’re in the first draft, don’t worry about it too much because you’re going to get it wrong. You will absolutely get that balance wrong. And then, and that’s normal. You should be getting that wrong. It will be impossible to get right the first time through. When you’re in revision, you’re going to make it better. You’re going to make it as good as you can. And this is one of those things that falls into the editor’s camp. You, as the author will never quite be able to see if you have sprinkled in the information enough so that it feels resonant in the next book, but not so much that your reader of the first book gets impatient because you don’t solve that question.

[00:02:37] You will not be able to see whether you have done that right or not. We are never able to objectively view our work in a way. That is real and true and we rely on editors to do that. And every single person listening to this who publishes their books will have a professional editor, whether your agent sold your book, and now you’re working with an editor at a traditional publishing house, or whether you have hired your own very professional editor to help you with this book. You’re not going to be able to see this with your own eyes. So in a way I hope this is a relief to you, do the best you can, but don’t do worry about doing it right. You’re going to need help with it anyway and the project sounds really exciting and I encourage you to keep going and get that book done. Okay. It’s been a while, maybe it’s done by the time you listened to me saying this. Okay. 

[00:03:27] This next one is from Jill Ross Nether. Hi, Rachael, I have a question that I suspect might be a bit too complex for a mini episode. No. But I’ll throw it out there anyway. Do you have any tips or suggestions for getting emotion on the page? I write light middle grade fantasy and my agent and the editors, she’s sending my book to like my premise, the action and the humor, but in the immortal words of Peewee Herman, everyone has a big but. They aren’t connecting with it on a deep enough level, which I’m believe is code for not enough emotion. This is something I’ve always struggled with. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. 

[00:04:03] Yes. And here you all will get my very many very fast version of a lecture I often give, which is that our brains run like computers. They’re always running these simulations. When we are reading words or watching something on a screen, our brains believe that it is about to happen to us in a very real lizard-like back of the brain way and we can’t control that. If something jumps off the screen at you, in a horror movie, you know, a jump scare, you recoil and scream because your lizard brain says that that thing is going to jump off the screen and get you. The front of your brain knows that it can’t, back of your brain cannot figure that out. When we read books, if we are told something, we can’t feel it. However, if the words are put into language that then run like a simulation on our brains, we can understand what the author is talking about. And that sounds strange. So let me make that clear if you are writing olfactory words. So words like lavender, and, what else is smell – a vanilla if you’re talking about the smell, if you’re reading words that are talking about smells, your olfactory cortex lights up as if it is about to smell the object. If you read that somebody jumps on a skateboard and balances, your motor cortex is getting ready to help you balance 

[00:05:34] Everyone, when it comes to processing emotions to get to your question. Everyone feels emotions in very, in a very similar way on the viscera. So the middle part of our body, like our throat, our chest, our stomach, our heads, all these things kind of in the core of our body, also things do flash out to our hands or legs or extremities. These are things we cannot control and they are also things that everyone feels in a very similar way. As I mentioned. The problem with finding what these things are, is remembering what they are. A lot of us, when we’re writing about visceral feelings, default to the things that are easy to think of like palms being sweaty, or throat being tight. For me because I’m a chronic migraine suffer, I always think of the head starting to hurt. When we show these bodily reactions on the page, your reader will understand what is happening emotionally with your character. A thousand times better than they would. If you said she was stressed or she was angry or she was lonely, if you show the things that are happening in their body, instead of, so it’s basically really showing versus instead of telling, don’t worry about telling them your reader, that this person is sad. Show instead where those emotions live in people’s bodies. 

[00:07:00] As I started to say, the problem is kind of breaking out of your own rut. I always default to tight throat and a headache, there’s a hack for this. And this is a fantastic tip. I think everybody should go out and buy The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becky forgot her last name. The Emotion Thesaurus, basic- I buy it. I would recommend buying it on Kindle and then getting the Kindle app for your computer, if you don’t already have it so that when you’re working on your book, you can just bring it up and go to the table of contents. And just randomly, I have it open in front of me and I clicked on the chapter for eagerness. And if I were to be asked where let’s see, I haven’t looked at the things yet. If I wanted to show eagerness on the page, I might show, fluttering. Like a fluttering feeling at the top of the lungs. I think that for me, that maybe is eagerness. But in this book, you get to go to the page that says eagerness and the internal sensations and hey, a fluttery stomach, increased heartbeat and expanding feeling in the chest. So there we’ve got fluttery and the chest feeling, so that connects it to mind, breathlessness, adrenaline causing alertness. For each of these emotions there’s also, so there’s these interior signals and there’s also exterior physical signals. So if your character is looking at someone, they can read their emotion by what they’re looking at and what they’re seeing.

[00:08:23] So for eagerness, those kinds of things are fiddling with an object, squeezing the hands at one sides. Speaking in a bubbly or loud tone, rushing one’s words, strong eye contact, all of these things that you can drop into your book that then run on your reader’s brain, like a computer simulation and tells the reader at a very base visceral level, what this character is feeling and suddenly, this is the secret sauce for so many of us. I am quite sad that it took me so long to learn this trick because honestly, I don’t, I have a problem with emotions in my own body. I am very good at compartmentalization and I don’t always understand what I’m feeling. And I’ve learned to look inside my body and see where I’m actually feeling something. And then I’m able to figure out how to put it on the page, but this is a tip, a hack that will change your writing so much. It’ll bring it just up to that next level. Your reader will be able to connect with the character on the page in a way that they were not able to before. So Jill, helped that, that’s a good answer for you.

[00:09:36] Okay. The next question is from Sarah Bailey. Thank you, Sarah, for your patience. And, this is a really good one that I have been looking forward to answering. I will also say that my wife is in the room next to me because she’s having a dog meetup on zoom. So if you hear a voice in the background, hopefully it’s very, very thin. You can’t hear very much. And, that’s what they’re doing, which sounds fun. Okay. So Sarah’s question. I heard your call for questions. And I nervously wasn’t going to send one in at first, but if nothing changes, then nothing changes. So here it goes. How do I start writing the first draft? I’m my own worst enemy and recognize I’ve researched myself right into analysis paralysis. It’s like my brain shuts down and refuses to form coherent thoughts. The second I try to leap from a few pages of thoughts, snippets of scenes notes on character, story threads, to the actual craft of a story drafting stage. I know I just have to do it to break the wall and I still haven’t done it. Extra planning and outlining ends up with another notebook, tossed away and discussed, and no planning at all is antithetical to my being. I have listened or read so many blogs books, podcasts for many, many years at this point on how to start. And every idea sounds so amazing till I sit down and try it for myself. Then my brain freezes again, writing this, it seems like maybe I just don’t want it that bad or I’d love, or I’d be able to do it, but I want to write empowering female fantasy fiction books.

[00:11:02] Every time I’ve tried to set the dream aside, it quickly starts climbing. It’s clawing its way back till I can’t ignore it anymore. I do want it that bad. And I’m so sad that I haven’t been able to honor myself by fulfilling this dream. Anyways. That was a lot. Thank you for your time. And the reason I’m so thrilled to answer this, or at least speak toward it. Sarah is that you are sharing the feeling of so many people. There are so many people listening right now to this podcast and to many other podcasts and reading books and all of that who are wondering the same thing and are feeling the same frustration. And I love that you asked it. I sat in that frustration for years and years and years, I think that, I think almost all writers have pushed through this time and have gone through this kind of pain. And it is pain. This is your dearest dream, and you want to do it and you’re not doing it. So it is pain. I love when Becca Syme talks about the essential pains of writing.

[00:12:06] And I think this is one of the biggest. For most people for a lot of people, I will say what it comes down to is the gap is IRA Glass’s theory of the gap. The reason we want to write books is because we have amazing taste. We are great readers. Therefore, we know what good writing looks like. Good writing however, is a whole book and many drafts later, plus editors, plus copy editors, plus proofreaders, plus all of these things so much time is put into the books we read. That is what a good book is. And we know a good book when we read it. When we read what we actually write in those few halting sentences, it is nothing like the feeling of the book we want to put on the page. And that is so devastatingly disappointing that it is too hard to hold. It is too painful and too upsetting. And we don’t do it because it hurts too much. We’re also not thinking this consciously, we’re not sitting at the desk going, this is too painful. I’m not living up to my potential.

[00:13:13] No, we just know we can’t do it. We don’t know why it’s frustrating. We get angry at ourselves. We get sad and we walk away. There’s only one, there’s only one real fix to this. And it is the reason why national novel writing month, NaNoWriMo is so popular and so, and has contributed to so many amazing published books. The only way through this is to get a little bit more comfortable with writing crap. We’re never going to be comfortable with writing total crap with writing total shit we’re never, ever going to be happy about that. It’s never going to feel good, but we have to learn how to do it because that’s the only way to get a product that then we can revise and make into something good. No one sits down and writes a good book. Literally no one sits down and writes a good book. There are like five people in the world who revises, they go and end up with finished books that they are proud of, but those are in the vast minority of writers. And you can only know that you’re one of those in that vast minority.

[00:14:22] If you are writing, revising, as you go and completing good books on a regular basis that are then getting published, then you’re in that. Otherwise, if you’re having this stuck feeling that you’re having Sarah, you’re one of the people that has to barrel through a terrible draft and it is painful. And humans, as I often say, we are built to avoid pain from a existential level. We do not like to do things that cause mental pain, physical pain, obviously we move away from those things and it does take accepting, this is not going to feel that great. And then we put that feeling. I always talk about like putting it in the side car here. It is letting it rest there, sitting down for half an hour or a 20, 25 minute Pomodoro session and writing terrible words. And maybe inside there, there’s one sentence that doesn’t suck as much as the rest and then making that the reward. Making the satisfaction you get actually be doing the work of writing crappy words of a crappy book that you are sure you will never be able to fix.

[00:15:36] That is what we all have to do and there’s no easy way to do it. However, I will say that in the quit cast, which is on YouTube again, Becca Syme, she talks about why her most recent video is Why Am I Not More Productive? And she’s talking a lot about open and closed loops. She believes, and I believe that the best way to get your writing done, if you’re struggling with actually doing the writing is to write first before you open any loops that are not closable like the internet in any way, shape or form. You should write first before you look at your phone, before you look at any technology. Go ahead and walk the dog and make the coffee and take the kids to school or whatever. But once you enter into the vastness, that is the internet that is always going to be pleasurable and be giving you dopamine hits. And it is so much harder to then go to your work and try to do something that is painful and that you’re not good at because nobody is good at a first draft. I have written, I don’t know how many books, 27, 28 books. And I am still bad at writing them. And my first drafts are terrible. And I know that you have already absorbed a ton of information about writing.

[00:16:48] You already know about story structure. You probably know about character arc, you know, all of these things. And that is also a stressor because now that you have a huge library of knowledge, every time you do put down crappy words that also don’t do anything to advance a plot or advanced a character you get stressed out about that too. All of that, I’m just going to say repeatedly is normal and that’s part of the essential pain of writing. None of us can do it any other way than to do it badly. So ask yourself, have you tried writing for 25 to 45 minutes a day, five days a week, in order to get a set number of words, that is what works for a lot of people. For NaNoWriMo it’s 50,000, you’re just driving towards 50,000 words. It doesn’t matter how you get there, and then you can revise it later. If you are trying to write a longer book, maybe you’re driving towards 70,000 words or 90,000 words, but you just keep putting terrible words on the page until you hit that goal. And then you can start thinking about making it into a good book. And it really is a process of sitting down and rewarding yourself, not for writing well, or for writing the book of your heart. The book of our heart never exists. The book we imagine in our minds that we want to write is never the book we write, and that is also and also holds its own level of essential pain. However, the book that we create, the book that we revise, the book that we breathe the life into is always a better book than we imagine. Always. It’s always better than anything we can imagine, but when it doesn’t look like what we want and it lands on the page, it hurts.

[00:18:27] So you are normal acknowledging that and making the reward, just getting terrible words done is the only thing that works for most people, honestly, most successful writers, they just have to get the bad words on the page first. I know I’m harping on about this, but Sarah, write back and tell me how you feel about that. Other people, reach out and contact me and tell me how you feel about that advice. Okay. Y’all I have got to say that it is incredibly hard to, do a podcast and this is the only time I can get it done, while listening to my wife in a dog meeting. All the dogs are squeaking things. She’s throwing things for the dog. So it is pretty fun. I wish I was also in that meeting, but I’m very glad to be here. 

[00:19:11] Okay. Last questions come from Michelle. Hello, Michelle. Okay, Michelle says in Miami, almost everyone knows some Spanish words. It’s part of the dialect. My editor asked me to translate the non, the non-super obvious ones. I feel like the translations lose the flavor, but does not translate it. Lose the reader. How do you intertwine translations so the cadence doesn’t break? Okay. So this is something that people feel differently about. And perhaps my answer is flavored by the fact that I live and grew up in California and Spanish is everywhere, but I do feel like there are a lot of Spanish words just in the air in America, right. The question always is, can the reader pickup through enough context to know what was said? Readers don’t have to understand everything. They just have to be able to follow along. And I personally really like it when I see things I can understand and I’m picking it up by context. We honor our readers by letting them do a little bit of mental work and readers like that. They like to be asked to participate in thinking about this book. Yes, some readers might get frustrated by not knowing every word and those readers are going to get frustrated about something anyway. As long as you are not giving information, that is absolutely necessary for every reader to have, and the conversation can be followed contextually. Then you do you, you get to make that decision. The reason you’re asking it- I think is probably because you don’t agree with all of her suggestions on this. Follow your gut. Trust your gut, not the ego, which always says I am right about everything in my beautiful book. Make sure that it’s your gut telling you that it’s the right thing to do. And then, and then do that follow that editors are fantastic and they’re absolutely necessary. And we don’t have to do everything that they say. 

[00:21:10] Okay. Number two question. Last question. What is your process when you get your edits back from the editor? I feel like you answered this before, but I can’t remember. I read everything over, made notes on stickies. And then I’m leaving in the bigger comments from the editor that I need more time to review and doing the smaller edits first. Is that about right? Yeah. So if your editor is not telling you, which my editors often have to pull your book apart and put it back together again, then yes, that is a perfect way to do it. If the editor’s revision letter is bigger than that and addresses a lot of structural problems, then you’re probably going to want to go back to and start ye oldie process of revision. And, Michelle has been through my revision masterclass, but for those of you who haven’t, you can listen to episode number 108 of this podcast and that’s kind of how I recommend doing revision, or episode number 177, which is how to do revision passes. So if it’s a very, very large overview pull apart, put back together again, structure just very briefly, I recommend making a sentence outline. Doing a lot of thinking about what you want to change and then re-outlining, and then starting from there.

[00:22:25] But if your book is already in the shape that you know that it wants to be, and your editor agrees with you, then yes, make those ideas to yourself on post-its. If post-its work for you, but I think they work for a lot of people and then leave those bigger comments inside the document and handle them when you get to them, when you arrive at them. And at that point, hopefully your vision will be helping you to answer those things. I kind of tend to work through my manuscript from top to bottom after I have read all the notes inside the document, and I’ve read her revision letter and taken some time to really put the two things together and marry those two things. And then I tend to start at the top and work all the way through. So I do the big stuff and the little stuff at the same time as I’m going through in order. However, if it’s making you feel more confident to address the smaller sentence level questions, and then go back to the big stuff. Absolutely great. The only time I would say that might be a bad idea or not ideal idea is if you’re fixing sentence level questions on scenes that might need to go. That might need to be lifted out and removed. But Michelle, I don’t think you’re in any danger of that because you understand this whole process. So, but for other people who want a deeper dive into revision, check out episode number 108 and 177. And Michelle, it sounds like you’re doing it exactly right for you.

[00:23:49] Thank you everybody for coming to this mini episode show that was really, really interrupted by dogs and car horns. And I don’t think a show has ever been like the universe is saying stop recording Rachael. So I’m going to stop recording right now and wish you happy writing my friends. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.