Hello, you wonderful reader!
I hope the last month has been fruitful and/or relaxing for you. I’ve been head down with writing every morning but despite the hours I’ve spent working, progress has felt incremental.
🏁 The Completion of the Outline
I have finished — or mostly finished — the outline for Seen in Silverbridge Book 3. As I ran through in my last missive, the process for restructuring Nicholas’ draft was time-consuming, intensive and very satisfying. After hours spent on Google Sheets swapping scenes around, rewriting mystery and emotional beats, combining chapters and slicing unnecessary subplots, I compiled the chapter outline into Scrivener.
Yup. I’m a meticulously planner.
Usually at this stage, I feel confident jumping into a first draft. Something stopped me this time. I knew if I started now, I’d overwrite. Inevitably Luce, Huds, Faven and Rodney will refuse to do exactly what I’ve planned for them to do, and they’ll take me on side quests which burn hours of my time only to be cut in the second pass.
Terry Hayes (author of the epic spy book I Am Pilgrim) said that he doesn’t plan his books, he just has a loose idea of what’s going to happen next and goes for it. For his latest book, The Year of the Locust, he wrote over one million words during his nine-year drafting process. He’d write a chapter, find himself exploring a tangential subplot, write eight more chapters, and realise he needed to go back and delete it all. I don’t want to do this when I draft. The Year of the Locust took eleven years to complete.
Going off-script is a normal part of the drafting process and to be enjoyed, but often I’ve found myself deviating from my outline so much that it’s clear the outline is the problem. I want this outline to be concise and clean and representative of the finished book I want to write.
🖨️ The Printing of the Outline
To avoid a bloated drafting process, I decided my outline needed yet another reread and round of edits. This wasn’t an easy decision. It took a strange amount of impulse control not to jump straight into drafting. It’s been two full months of planning this book — when would I let myself actually write the thing? I felt like a racehorse scratching at the ground before the doors burst open at the start of a race.
While I love writing on my laptop, I didn’t fancy the idea of rereading and rewriting the outline digitally this time. I wanted to hold it in my hands, a romantic idea. Rewriting a manuscript physically isn’t something I’ve ever done, despite multiple ‘How to Write’ books recommending the process. I decided it was time.
I joined my local library. They have a great printing deal. I exported my outline from Scrivener with double-spaced lines: it came to 51 pages. At £0.12 a page, this set me back £6.12 and took less than an hour of administration time. Worth it.
This felt way too cool, seeing it all printed like this.
☀️ The Reading of the Outline
It just so happens that my printing of the outline coincided with a trip to Spain that Julia and I had planned a month ago. As part of living in London for a limited number of years, we agreed to capitalise on our proximity to Europe as often as possible. We chose accommodation in a small town in the mountains with a pool and high-speed internet and felt confident we could work abroad productively.
While we were there, we worked our normal full-time jobs. I’m currently editing a TV series shot in New Zealand earlier this year and I’d recently finished a new round of cuts that I felt confident would garner effusive praise from the network. Unfortunately, the feedback wasn’t as sunny as the weather we were enjoying in Spain. I spent the entire week on video calls with my collaborators discussing how we were going to completely re-order the series … which left precious little mental bandwidth for writing.
Look at that! How bloody romantic.
Despite the tumultuous emotions I was experiencing due to my day job, I managed to pull the manuscript out of my bag and read by the pool a couple of times. I made notes with a red biro and felt like a real writer. It didn’t take long to read through and I was pleasantly surprised with how boldly the necessary improvements presented themselves to me. There’s something to be said for reading a physical copy of your writing. It felt easier in some way. I flicked through pages, crossed lines out, jotted notes in the space between the lines, and felt like a sculptor chipping away at a block of marble.
So how, in an entire week, did I only manage to get through 40% of the outline?
⏰ The Realisation of the Trip
Working abroad was delicious. Julia and I cooked on the barbecue most nights, drank wine on the rooftop while watching the sun go down, and got a few shades darker sitting by the pool. However, full disclosure, there were some bad points: we had our flight delayed four hours so we arrived at 2 am which led to us spending a lot of unexpected money on a hotel for the night and a new hire car; I had constant struggles with the internet; and the wooden desk chair played hell on my ankylosing spondylitis meaning I slept terribly the entire trip.
The trip was fantastic for the soul but terrible for productivity.
I thought that by now, in July, I’d be drafting this book. But I think I’m still a week or two away from even starting. I can only hope that when I do start, I’ll power through the drafting process with abandon, utilising all the tricks I’ve learned over the years to assist me in speed-writing a first draft.
Luce, Huds, Faven and Rodney might even stick to the plan and follow my outline, too.
I’ll keep you updated. Until next month, happy reading and writing.
Emerson x
📣 Shout Out to IT by Stephen King
Every time I read a Stephen King novel, I’m struck by the ease of his prose. The voice of his characters, and his narrator, whether it be first or third person, is a joy.
IT has been on my To Read list for a long time and I decided to finally tackle the 1200+ page behemoth. I’m enjoying it immensely.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Stephen King’s books is the meandering storytelling. The plot is simple, yet it takes dozens of pages to progress through the core storyline. More interestingly, it never feels slow or boring because the writing is just so fun. Every scene is entertaining in and of itself, meaning I’m never thinking, ‘Okay, I get it, can we move on to the next important plot point, please?’
It’s a really fun book to read.