New Novel Madness - Picking a new project

As a writer, there is nothing more awesome than finishing a novel. Recently, I completed the first draft of the last book of The Corpus Chronicles and am currently editing. If you haven't written a series before, take that amazing end-of-book feeling and multiply it by 1000. Seeing the last book printed out on my desk in physical form rather than on my computer screen was the most surreal thing I had ever experienced. My entire indie-author journey up to that point had been The Corpus Chronicles. The series had been my blood, sweat, and tears for the last two years. No matter what I was doing for all that time, the series was always, without fail, at the back of my mind. And then, suddenly, it was over.

Of course, I still have plenty of editing to get through, along with beta reading and cover art, but for the most part, the heavy-lifting is complete. I'm no longer expending the majority of my energy each day into pushing the characters to grow and evolve, in structuring the outlines of subplots and backstories, and putting down one new word in front of the other. In short, I'm no longer building anything new. Instead, all my time is going to marketing The Corpus Chronicles, reviewing new and awesome books from other indie authors, and my very (cough) studious student life.

However, as someone with a deep love for writing, without that building component, something feels horribly off. I've heard from others that this is something many people experience after finishing a major project, but for me it is a first. Before The Corpus Chronicles, the only books I wrote were for fun rather than publication. The stakes were much lower back then, and consequently, so was the mental blowback after finishing a project.

After finishing The Corpus Chronicles, everything in my life was thrown off, from my normal mental state of mulling over plot ideas to my daily schedule. My natural solution was to dive right into a new project. However, it proved to be much more difficult than I had imagined. Usually, my mind is constantly swimming with new plot ideas, and while I was writing The Corpus Chronicles, they came up so frequently that I came to resent the project I had chosen for its length and the consequent time commitment, and I was eager to finish. I wrote down all the brainstorms in a notebook when the ideas came and continued my work on The Corpus Chronicles.

After I finished the last book, I went back to that notebook and leafed through it. I picked one idea, wrote maybe a vague outline or a few pages, and then hopscotched to another, and then another... you get the picture. Nothing was grabbing me, and now that I had the time to write a new book, the new ideas stopped coming. Trying to force them was as agonizing as not doing anything at all. I read through article after article online on writing inspiration. I tried to think back to how I got the idea for The Corpus Chronicles. It was just like everything else I'd written thus far: It had just popped into my head one day and evolved into something feasible with time and patience.

So where was the disconnect? I had plenty of ideas in my notebook, but for some reason, I couldn't get them to grow. I also wasn't getting any new ideas for the first time in my memory, and I believe the two phenomenon were closely related. Maybe it's just a symptom of the postpartum depression us writers get after we finish projects, or maybe the mental block is stemming from somewhere completely different in my life. I don't think I'll end up figuring out what it is exactly. Maybe the only way is to keep working through the last book's editing and wait for that elusive little spark of inspiration to ignite. It certainly can't be forced.

Until next time.
-Your friendly neighborhood coffee zombie

Why I love outlining and also why I shelved an old manuscript

I know some writers love writing organically and swear by it, but in my experience, all it leads to is a giant, incoherent mess. I wrote my first manuscript (which I shelved) organically. I thought out the main points of the story ahead of time and had that big picture in my head as I wrote it, and I was absolutely in love with the characters and plot. I worked at it for six months, bleeding my brain dry, until that amazing moment when I was able to put down the last sentence. I printed out the monstrosity and let it sit on my desk for two weeks, proudly reveling in my creation. After I had had enough time to sit with it, I picked it up again and read through it. 

Here is what I realized: the plot, while still awesome, was full of hundreds of little moving parts that, instead of forming a working machine, looked more like a pile of scrap metal. The beginning and middle were slow and dragged on for an eternity. One of the character's name changed halfway through (oops). The ending was incredibly rushed (probably because of coffee-fueled excitement on those last few days). The reader got slapped with a crisis, deaths, and other craziness without any time to breath. 

Of course, first drafts are meant to be thrown out, so I got to the revisions. I went through packs of red pens and reams of paper as I hacked away at my manuscript, draft after draft. And when I was finished: It was good. It wasn't great. It was adequately paced and the different elements were more in sync with each other. It was an enormous step from where I began, but it was still very far from where I wanted it to be. I had a choice - keep going with that manuscript that I was starting to lose faith in, or move on to a new project, let things stew, and revisit it later.

I decided that I wanted to keep going, even though the smart move probably would have been to move on. Then my laptop got stolen. I was on draft ten or eleven and the last draft I had backed up was five. Guys - back everything up. I cannot even begin to describe how insanely devastated I was. But, to put a positive spin on it, maybe that was the push I needed to put that manuscript to the side and get on with something else.

I had my first idea for EOA (which was wayyy different to the version that went to print) and I started jotting some stuff down. I didn't go into it with the intention to outline, but I did just to organize the story better in my head. Because of this, I feel I was able to allow for the evolution of the ideas I had without going through rewrites. The point to which my rough draft of EOA got to was the level that my old manuscript wasn't able to reach until seven or eight drafts in. 

Nevertheless, EOA needed a lot more work, but it was a much more enjoyable process than with my other novel because the entire time I was writing, I had a clear map of where I was going. I outlined book 2 during my revision process and was able to add in little bits of foreshadowing and questions, the resolutions to which I'm cranking out now. 

Okay, last bit about outlining - when I get stuck on one chapter, I can just hop over to another! When you outline a story ahead of time, it is a lot harder for you to get roped in by writer's block, as there should be a chapter for any emotion you might be feeling on a particular day.

So that's my advice. It's definitely not a formula, so keep an open mind and be willing to give different methods a try and do what works best for you. Also, shelving a manuscript is not the same as giving up. You can always revisit it at any time, or pull from it to add to a new story. It is not wasted time. You learn with every sentence you write. I could not have written EOA without everything I learned from my previous manuscript. And maybe, once I'm finished with the Corpus Chronicles, I'll come back to that old story with fresh eyes and more experience and pull all those loose ends together.

-Esha