How to Write a Romance: Chaos and Order
You can always get more pens. But you can’t get more time…
The Rumpelstiltskin Job
My little economist’s brain has always loved the idea that I have a Rumpelstiltskin job—you start with nothing except a blank page and you craft the whole darn thing out of vapor. Straw into gold. The only major investment is my time.
The flip side of this, though, is that time is the most precious resource I have. Fifteen years ago when I decided to make fiction my new career, I am sure I did not fully appreciate the constraints of my personal capital.
Nonetheless, I set about learning how to craft a novel. The result of a novel is completely linear. You take all your big ideas and your imagery and drama, then you distill the story down to a single line of text. If you were so inclined, you could print that sucker on a roll of paper and stretch it out down my country road. Waylaid—the book I just finished—is almost 98,000 words long. So you’d probably end up pretty far on your travels.
(Spinning yarn is essentially the same task—make a fluffy, voluminous thing into an orderly strand. Rumpelstiltskin and I have so much in common.)
The reader should be able to pick up Waylaid and find that it reads seamlessly, from a snappy starting point to its poignant ending. That’s my hope anyway. And when I look back on the graph of my writing progress, it’s very orderly. See?
This chart is a liar, though. On any given day I did a lot of deleting and rearranging that the reader should never be able to see. And a peek at the graph of my daily word count tells a more accurate story.
Now that’s more like it! There are days of hefty progress, and days where I barely move the needle. And there are days when I don’t write a single word because I’ve printed the whole book out and I’m reading it straight through. I find I have to do that at least twice a book, because it’s hard to hold the narrative arc in your head.
But you stumble toward the finish line somehow. Hopefully the finished product is as smooth as buttercream frosting. And just as tasty!
P.S., a recommendation:
This week I read a terrific blog post by KJ Charles called How to Write a Book When You Can’t Write A Book. It’s a terrific little meditation on making choices in fiction! Don’t miss it.