On process: in the literary salt mines

Some of you may know that I had a loooong fallow period, creative fields sown with the salt of grief and left to go to grass. Before that began I had a beginning of a new novel, some 20,000 words of it, which was then abandoned in the weeds, as it were, for those fallow years while I had my hands full with living, and caregiving, and keeping up with administrivia, and grieving, my mind full of the things that NEEDED TO BE DONE and no time to wander in story. The voices in my head were silent. It was all I could do to just check in every day and say, yes, I am still here.

Towards the end of last year I went back to those 20K words. Picked them up. Put them down. Poked at them. The voices began to whisper.

It is now March of 2026… and somehow I have a 1oo,000+ novel on my hands, the first in a series of three that will tell a complete story arc.

It’s been… something of a slog. First I realised that those extant 20K words were not the beginning of the novel at all, so I started again, literally, from scratch. There was a whole story waiting to be told before we got anywhere near the words I already had. A whole lot of NEW words. And then I had to come to terms that I had not known my main characters nearly well enough to tell their story before I began this tale. Put a pin in that.

I used to write “alone” as it were, long before I met and married my best friend, my first reader, my first editor, my one-man cheerleading section for when I stepped into a puddle of doubt. But for twenty years my process had been pretty much write a story/chapter/scene/section, take it upstairs to where he was, show it to him, read it to him/have him read it, get his thoughts, go back and make it better. And that worked well. Now, I have to remember how I used to do all these things myself, and enlist the help of a couple of beta readers who have been catching my oopsies so far. But I have been forcefully reminded of why writing is such a lonely job.

Returning to that pin… one of the more interesting experiences in this particular process was returning to a conversation had by two of my characters. When I got there, I tweaked that passage a little but not by a whole lot, not on the surface of things. It ended up as almost nearly the same conversation as had been said before, between the same two named characters. But *neither of those characters were the same as they had been in the original piece of dialogue between them*. The rest of the book had happened, had changed them, had deepened them. They were having the same conversation in almost the same words but the undercurrents were completely different and they were saying things with very different meaning.

I still have work to do on this thing (for one, it isn’t even quite finished, yet). There are tweaks and edits to be done, and I am already thinking that I am going to be second-guessing myself on a lot of things because… people… this is the first novel-length thing  I have actually written in more than five years. I am rusty, I know it. The end result of that is that I am going to worry it to death, that it has to be better than my usual values of “I’ve done my best”, and that I will still be afraid when it goes out into the world, afraid that I am not enough as and of myself any more, that readers will be able to see all the seams and the patches, that it simply won’t… can’t… compete… and yet I have written pieces of it that make me nod and go “oh yes this”… and there is that epic conversation conversion, which worked… and I am starting to reclaim those fallow fields. My hand is on the plough, and the story seeds are ready in my hand.

Watch this space.