On Drafting and Courage

My drafting process, and how a piece of dialogue I didn't remember writing got me thinking about bravery

When I’m drafting a new book, my process is very much two steps forward, one step back.

I linger at the beginning—cycling between drafting and brainstorming, outlining and polishing—until I have a sense of the plot plus 50 or 60 pages in which the voice and setup feel right. For the last few years, my books have sold to my publisher on proposal rather than as complete drafts, so I get feedback on those 50-60 pages and a synopsis and revise, and then they go to my editor in the hopes that she’ll acquire the book based on what I have so far.

Then I push ahead, turning off my editing brain for short bursts of drafting time every day until, inevitably, I get stuck. I reach a place where I decide I need to go back to figure out a certain relationship or storyline before I can tackle what comes next. So I return to earlier sections to add, refine, and cut. I incorporate new dynamics into old chapters and make my way back to the place where I stopped before. Then I turn my editing brain off again and push forward until I reach the next roadblock.

This stopping-and-starting method means that it always takes me longer than I think it will to finish a draft. But when I do reach the end, a lot of the story is in pretty solid shape, and I’ve read most of the scenes in the first three-quarters of the manuscript many, many times. Every once in a while, though, I draft a scene with my editing brain turned off and then don’t go back to rework it, even as I return to the scenes on either side of it.

There’s a scene like this in the draft of my next novel. It takes place during a summer creative writing class at a library, and I’ve revised the beginning and end of the chapter it’s part of—the moments just before and just after class—because those bits were important to understanding the main character’s relationship with a new friend.

But there’s a small part that takes place during the actual class, and I haven’t touched it since I wrote it during a drafting sprint last winter. Recently, I printed out my whole draft-in-progress to read through while I was on a retreat at the Highlights Foundation, and I was surprised by these few rough pages I barely remembered writing.

Reading through my draft at Highlights!

I have no idea if any version of the scene will end up in the finished book, and it will certainly need work if it stays, but there’s a piece of it that I keep thinking about. It comes when the creative writing teacher asks the main character, Grace, to share what she just wrote during a writing exercise, and Grace declines because what she wrote isn’t “good.”

The teacher doesn’t force Grace to share but says, “I encourage you—all of you—to talk back to that voice in your head that tells you something is good or isn’t.” And then a little later, she says, “I want us to give ourselves the freedom to write something we know isn’t good—because that might pave the way to something great.”

As I read my almost-but-not-quite complete draft on the porch of my cabin at Highlights, I felt like this teacher I’d made up was talking to me as much as to Grace. Those words—good and great—aren’t clear-cut or objective when we use them to describe stories. But there is a certain richness and depth that I admire in the books I love most. I’ve refined my writing process over the years to avoid letting a story run away from me and writing chapter after chapter that I’ll have to scrap. But now I’m wondering: do I still give myself a chance to play and take risks in my writing, or am I sometimes too quick to polish and pin down—to hurry up and make my story “good”? Could I make more space for playfulness and expansiveness and still pull together coherent proposals and meet deadlines so I can try to keep publishing books on a fairly regular schedule?

I’ve also been thinking about Chelsea Eberly’s profile of Tae Keller in the Horn Book, which ran after When You Trap a Tiger won the Newbery Medal. The whole profile is lovely and powerful (as is the book—talk about richness and depth!) but one part really stayed with me. It reads:

“When Tae delivered the first few chapters of the “tiger book,” the main characters were all there in their final forms. Lily, quiet and observant; Sam, angry and frustrated; and their mother, distracted and saddened by the impending mortality of her own mother. Any of the subsequent drafts could have gone to copyediting and been published, but Tae was always striving — she believed the book could be better. As Lily’s halmoni says, ‘When you believe, that is you being brave.’ Tae’s writing is an expression of bravery.”

I love that description of Tae’s writing as an expression of bravery. I followed along with Tae’s stories on Instagram as she revised (and revised) When You Trap a Tiger. You can still find those videos in her story highlights (it’s highlight with a tiger next to a pencil and paper), and it’s so inspiring to watch them after having read the stunning finished novel. She talked about how many drafts she’d been through, how some things still weren’t coming together, how many notes she’d left herself in the margins, how many times she doubted that she’d figure it all out. But she believed, and she kept striving. She was brave.

For me, the scariest part about drafting and revising is the feeling of not quite knowing how a lot of different threads will come together. It’s gotten even scarier now that I’ve published books and can envision people reading what I’m working on. It’s uncomfortable to have a fuzzy sense of what I want a story to be—and to know that if I let that vision stay too fuzzy, I’ll lose my way, but if I try to pin it down too early or too neatly, I’ll sacrifice some of the richness and depth I want my books to have.

But there’s nothing more inspiring or satisfying to me than reading a book like When You Trap a Tiger, in which so many layers are woven so gently, not pulled too tight. I can often feel as I read a book I admire that the writer stayed open and hung in there through the messiness—that they didn’t hurry to narrow the story’s scope or pin each piece into place.

Writing ambitious books means finding a way to balance intuition and logic, openness and structure, research and words-on-the-page time, work and play. And it takes a whole lot of courage. As I move toward finishing this draft of my next book, I’m trying to make sure I don’t let my two-steps-forward, one-step-back process turn into one step forward, three steps back because I’m too scared to stay in that fuzzy space.

I’m trying to let myself write scenes that aren’t good without hurrying to fix them. I’m trying to be brave.

News, Resources, and Essays:

Okay, get ready for me to hit you with a lot of links here…

Coming Up Short is now officially out! Woo hoo! If you enjoy this newsletter or have enjoyed my other books, I hope you’ll consider getting a copy, and if you’ve already read it, I’d be so grateful if you could leave a rating and a short review on Amazon (you don’t have to buy the book there to review it there) and/or on Goodreads. Those things really help to spread the word. If you’re an audiobook fan, you’ll be able to get it on audio soon; the audiobook releases from Tantor on 8/30.

I’m so pleased that my 2019 novel Up for Air continues to find new readers, and I hope fans of that book will also love Coming Up Short, since it’s another sporty, summery story that partly takes place on Gray Island. Jess Andree designed these adorable “travel back to Gray Island” postcards that I’ve been sending out to some bookstores and Up for Air supporters. If you or someone you know would like a postcard, let me know and I’ll write a quick note and send it!

I also created a free guide for educators and book clubs which includes discussion questions about Coming Up Short, creative writing prompts, cross-curricular activities, recipes, and other fun stuff. There’s lots of other content on the educators page of my website, too, including a short trailer that Dan Haring created, with music from bensounds.com.

I wrote two personal essays related to Coming Up Short—one about the yips and one about expanding the definition of “strong girls” in middle grade fiction, so if you haven’t gotten your fill of my essays from this newsletter, you can check those out, and I did an interview for my friend L. Marie’s awesome blog. You can also watch the recording of my book launch with Cordelia Jensen at Children’s Book World or my Instagram live chat with Emma Kress.

I’m really looking forward to being at the Chappaqua Book Festival in October and NCTE in November; if you’re at either of those places, I hope we can connect! And I’m currently booking both virtual and in-person visits for the coming school year. Please be in touch if you’d like to set something up.

Recommendations:

Speaking of rich, ambitious stories, I was blown away by Nina LaCour’s adult debut, Yerba Buena. It’s gorgeous. In middle grade, I loved Michael Leali’s charming, hilarious, moving, and timely debut, The Civil War of Amos Abernathy, which has a really fascinating and ambitious structure. And I’ve been loving listening to Write Where it Hurts, a podcast about writing and mental health.

Until next time! Wishing you courage in whatever way you need it. Thank you for reading!

Love, Laurie