Writing Process Blog Tour

A few months back I was invited to be a part of the Writing Process Blog Tour. If you aren’t familiar with this, it involves different writers responding to questions about their writing process, then passing the same questions to other writers, and so on. Back then I didn’t feel I had to the time to take it on, but a few weeks ago I luckily got a second chance. This time I was tagged by Melissa Gorzelancyzk. Her debut young adult novel ARROWS will be released by Random House / Delacorte Press in January of 2016. It’s the story of Aaryn, a wayward cupid, and Karma, a dance prodigy whose destiny is derailed by the power of a single arrow. You can find out more about Melissa on her website, and can add her book at Goodreads here. Melissa and I are both lucky enough to be represented by Carrie Howland of Donadio & Olson, Inc. Whew. Lot of links to navigate through in that paragraph. Here’s a nice picture to look at as a reward:

And here are the questions Melissa handed off to me, with my answers.

      -- What are you working on?
In the big picture I’ve got four projects going right now, although one is by far getting the most attention. I’m currently working on the newest revision of my middle grade novel Following Infinity. It’s the story of how a thirteen-year-old named Molly struggles to cope with the death of her younger brother Michael. She takes a cross-country road trip with her cousin and grandfather to visit the dream roller coaster her brother never had the chance to ride, which leads her to unanticipated levels of self-discovery.

      -- How does your work differ from others of its genre?
I always intended the story to deal with delicate subject matter in a way that doesn’t sugar-coat how rough Molly's experience is. I want it to reflect honest feeling, even when it gets dark and emotionally brutal, which I think it's safe to say it does at points. I also think that when compared to a lot of middle grade currently out there, my story leans in a more literary direction. At least that’s what I’m aiming for.

      -- Why do you write what you do?
The short answer, since I just expounded on this not long ago on the Middle Grade Minded blog: I see myself as less of a middle grade writer and more of a writer living in a middle grade world. For me it’s always been more about what story needs to be told than anything intentionally directed toward or created for a specific audience. Writing was never as much of an active choice for me as something that organically began to happen when I needed it. I write middle grade now because that’s what I see in front of me every day, and that environment is rich with stories. But that doesn’t mean middle grade is all I’m ever going to write.

      -- How does your writing process work?
It can all begin with a character or a setting or a premise that intrigues me enough to keep thinking about, and when that extra bit of something interesting arrives and kicks everything to a new level, the dam bursts wide open. The sitting down and typing business most people think of as writing happens in some form on most days, but the brainstorming and development and note-taking and character inventories and speculating and organizing and assembling is almost constant, from before I start the first draft until I think I’m done revising. When I am at the keyboard, I’m usually listening to a playlist that’s been carefully constructed to reflect the tone of whatever I’m working on, and if I’m in serious flow state writing mode I’ll have the music playing from another room so I can’t interrupt myself to change songs. I’m a pretty quick and adaptive thinker, so once I have an idea of where the story will be going I can often just start working and let it roll out in front of me, sometimes following what I had planned but sometimes pulling me in the direction of new discoveries. Often I’ll stand up and pace around the house, talking to myself to outline upcoming moments or to act out dialogue exchanges between characters. Once everything in a project starts coming together and I know I’ve got something serious on my hands, that backyard part of my writer brain will always have something going on related to that work in progress.

Afterward, the revision is hard, long, tedious work. It’s reading chapters forward and backward several times over to find typos and grammar fixes that can’t be excused in the name of voice. It’s searching for how many times I’ve overused my usual writing crutches and then rewriting around them. It’s running the story through several different filters, usually one at a time, trying to find the good bits in all the unnecessary. And then doing it all again and again.

My turn to tag: I’m passing on the fun to Lara Chapman and Daniel Kenney, two of my co-conspirators from the formidable Middle Grade Minded blog. You can find out more about them on their websites below, and look forward to their process posts coming in the next week or two.

Lara Chapman
Daniel Kenney