Writing Fun Facts | Part Two

I was about 100 pages into the first draft of my book when I happened to have a Zoom discussion with some writing colleagues from around the country. They asked me how my writing was going, and I told them that I was in a huge rut, stuck at just over 100 pages in. Collectively, the boxes bobbed with the participants’ heads nodding in understanding. “Ah. The 100-page curse,” someone said. “Keep going. This is where a lot of writers quit because it gets hard.” Rather than feeling discouraged by the news of the curse, I actually felt uplifted. It made me feel like a real writer. I was normal. I was a member of the crowd. I don’t feel I was ever at risk of giving up. I knew where my story was going, but it felt like the ending was so far away and I had to make so much happen to get there. As you know, I kept going. I finished the book. I reread it, revised it, rewrote it over and over until it was how I wanted it. And I’m so glad I did. The first draft doesn’t need to be good. It just has to be done so the next steps can happen.

I may be “normal” when it came to the curse, but I don’t know that there’s a lot more that can be considered typical when it comes to writers and their strategies. As I wrote in my previous blog, every writer does things differently, each genre has different expectations and word counts, and writers themselves sometimes have weird quirks when it comes to finding their writing motivation. Dan Brown, for example, has stated that he used inversion boots and hung upside down when he needed to clear his head during writing sessions. Victor Hugo, it is said, had people take away his clothes so he was forced to stay working rather than leave his home. And Truman Capote wrote best while lying down, calling himself a “horizontal writer.” The message in these stories? Nothing is normal, yet everything is normal when it comes to writing habits. 

A question I am often asked is how I made it from beginning to end with my story. People want to know what that looks like, if I started with a summary or an outline. For me, I worked from an outline to start, but I veered away from using it as the characters started to tell a different story. It is said that there are typically two different kinds of writers: plotters and pantsers. Plotters are those who tend to plan every detail before they draft. They know the chapters, the characters, the twists. Pantsers are those who write by the seat of their pants, not following any certain plan and discover the story as they write. While I have always been told that people fall into only one of these categories, I’ve found myself to be a little bit of both, not following along specifically in either lane. Even when I’m writing nonfiction, I tend to start with an idea or a concept, then plan a few things – perhaps the beginning and the end – and work my way through. 

I mentioned Stephen King in my previous blog, so I’m going to mention him again. He mentioned something in his memoir, On Writing, that I loved. “Kill your darlings.” I love this for two reasons. Number one, it makes me think of how writers need to create characters and then make things hard for them. If we don’t give them some sort of challenge, we don’t have a story to tell. Sometimes we need to kill those darling characters we love – or at very minimum, make things very difficult. Number two, oftentimes we need to cut out parts of our stories that we really love but don’t necessarily need. My first draft was almost 110,000 words. The published version is about 95,000. I had to cut a lot of content that I loved because it didn’t drive the story forward nearly as much as it should have. This is both tragic and beautiful. Of course I’m bummed that I didn’t get to use the pieces that I felt were rich, but also know that they weren’t right for this particular book. The good news is that those ideas aren’t gone. They aren’t wasted. They may or may not be perfect for something to come later, and I’ve come to accept that. By the time I use those scenes or ideas, they may even build to become something better than they ever could have been in Fool Me Twice.

Writers can make the outline or not. They can kill or save their darlings, grieve the loss of the 15,000 words they had to cut. The curse can strike around page 100. But either way, the only way to write the book is to write today, tomorrow, and again and again. Sometimes writing is more about doing what works for you, even when you’re stuck, even when you’re tired, even when you don’t feel like doing it. That’s not failing as a writer. That’s being a writer.