evolution of the writing process

Back when I started this writing experiment (in a serious way; not talking about the adolescent poetry or the grad-school novel or even the screenplays written mostly out of irritation with a certain person) I wrote dialogue.

LOTS of dialogue. The first eight novellas were mostly dialogue! Those took a lot of rewriting when I decided to clean up the backlist in 2017. They were set up like dialogue pages of a screenplay, with next-to-no narrative. I still occasionally go back and fiddle with them (things that are only in e-book should never be considered ‘locked,’ if you ask me). Last year I took one of those early novellas (which had already been rewritten into proper narrative) and turned it into a novel (BEAT). That was right after I took one of the later novellas and turned it into a novel (EXPOSURE).

Making the things bigger may have been an unintentional but inevitable consequence of trying to make the things better.

Process A was: introduce characters; show them falling in love; give them a happy-ever-after (or at least a happy-for-now). Writing my contemporary romances that way for five years taught me how to establish the characters (where do they live, what do they do, how do they speak), how to write snappy dialogue, and how to create and resolve conflicts that were mostly minor. Well, these are novellas: a love story written in less than 25,000 words, as the early ones were, simply doesn’t have space to deal with big conflicts.

It’s certainly possible. But then you are writing mostly about the conflict, not about the love story, and I prefer to focus on the love story.

Novella number eleven took me to a more substantive place with conflict. VINTAGE is a second-chance love story, as several of my novellas are. James Levine and Silvia Moreno were college sweethearts who fell apart when she changed majors (and, of necessity, schools). Nine years later they try again. Their love affair in the now doesn’t have the same conflicts. It has, in a sense, the memory of conflict. There are also external conflicts, of the family + money variety, which carry over from the past.

Once I decided to take the time to work out that more substantive kind of story, all the novellas got more substantial. When I did the series rewrite, I tried to bring everything up to the level of VINTAGE.

Then FACE THE MUSIC happened. That’s a full-length novel and was originally published as such. But it started life as a novella. The problem was, there were problems. I couldn’t resolve things at the novella length. I couldn’t even resolve them at twice my usual length. It took going to 84,000 words to get Mike Borodin and Paula Ross to the happy ending I wanted for them. Along the way I killed one of my other characters, which was painful for Mike and Paula but also stressful for me.

That decision had another unintentional but inevitable consequence: every single thing I’ve written since then is informed by the knowledge that this happens. In early 2017 in story-universe time, this character dies. The event reverberates throughout the series.

And that led to my new process. Process B starts the same. I write from beginning to end, and almost never use an outline. Instead I figure out all those essential story elements - these are romances! - and write the essential scenes. Then I go back and fill in, much as I did when I was turning those early novellas into proper narrative. Then I go back again and fill in more, as I did when turning novellas into novels. Because at novel length you have time to get into the characters’ heads, and time to show them doing what they do outside the central relationship.

I guess I do this because I need to know where the story is going before I know what’s missing. A longer story has room to deal with conflicts in a more relaxed, organic way. Writing a scene that happens in the last 30% of a story helps me see where the characters’ pivot points are. Where do they realize there is a conflict? How do they decide to deal with it? Do they deal with it well, or do they screw it up? If they screw up, what does their love interest do in response? How does each of them change, or at least compromise, in order to make their love affair work?

A thing I’m working on now involved a certain event which I originally envisioned as affecting one of the characters a certain way. When I actually wrote his reaction, however, it went an entirely different way - a way that made more sense for the character as I’d designed him. So that meant going back to fix this or that earlier in the story. It also changed how his lover was going to behave, and therefore how everybody around them was going to behave.

One of my recently-completed novels is in the alternating-POV, 1st-person narrative form I used for MILLION DOLLAR DEATH and TODAY, TOMORROW AND FOREVER. For this new one, I wrote from beginning to end, straight through, and have revised only slightly since I finished. I did, however, take a lengthy break at the 50,000 word mark, because there was a secondary character whose own story was going to inform the back 30% of A WINNING HAND, and I had to write that story before I could finish the novel. Both of the main characters’ voices change a bit from beginning to end; the influence of the outside characters is part of that.

The same sort of thing happened with the BEAT expansion. I had already substantially completed a work-in-progress novel, but what happened in BEAT affected what was going to be described in the other novel. The work-in-progress has actually evolved because of the novella-to-novel expansion but also because of yet another novel that I wrote in Nov/Dec.

There is a lot of stuff in the hopper, and all of it is related.

Nothing is a prerequisite for anything else! I try hard to make each thing a standalone. I know some readers want F/M romance, some are okay with F/F or M/M, some prefer F/F or M/M. My book descriptions make it clear what kind of romance each title is.

And another point would be that yes I write fast. But I don’t simply blather from word one to word 65,000 (or 80,000 or 94,000). By the time I publish something it’s been put through the concordance and timeline tests, it’s been put through the standalone test, and I’ve read it through multiple times since hitting ‘the end’ to try to catch any typos, word-choice-failures, or other line-edit stuff.

There is, in short, a process.