HOW I WRITE ... NOVELS

I have two completed novel manuscripts and one in progress, my process for writing which have similarities and differences.

First, I think of an idea. It is just a tiny speck of thought with no development or detail. My first manuscript's idea extended from the job I had at the time as a paralegal. At first, I had the idea to write a story around a U.S. Supreme Court case supposing it was decided the opposite of what it was. So I found interesting court cases on the Internet and read books about famous Supreme Court cases. Eventually, I settled on a story about a teenage attorney.

The idea for my second novel, Missing Emily: Croatian Life Letters, came to me after meeting my friend from Croatia. In June of 1991 when civil war broke out in her country, I had just finished my junior year of high school; my baby cousin had died about 1 1/2 years before; and my boyfriend, a foreign exchange student, returned home and didn't write to me like he said he would. And I was so wrapped up in my own problems, I had no idea that there were children, like my friend, living through civil war, awake at night afraid someone would break in to slit their throats in their sleep. I thought about what might have happened if my friend and I had contact during that time. The idea was born.

My current novel takes place in 1860 - 1861 in Camanche, Iowa, where I grew up. A tornado ripped through the town on June 3, 1860, which, legend has it, prevented the town from growing larger than the neighboring and currently largest city in the county, Clinton. For this book, I chose the setting and time frame and then worked to build a story around that.

I love to research and did so for all three of my books, though less on the first one when I just looked up court cases to find a realistic one to base the story around. For Missing Emily and my current work, I performed extensive historical research. Missing Emily's involved several conversations with my friend, books, newspaper articles, and documentaries on the breakup of Yugoslavia. For my current book, I researched newspaper articles about the tornado and then books about the civil war, Iowa and Clinton/Camanche history, and life in the 1800s in general. Even as I write the book, I'm researching by reading novels written either in or about that time period, the civil war, and other young adult historical novels.

I had an outline for my first book; I developed the characters as I went along. I performed more character sketching for my two most recent books by writing character profiles, descriptions, and thinking about their personalities. I had a difficult time outlining Missing Emily; it was hard to invent a way to tell both of their stories using just correspondence while still showing rather than telling. I went back and forth with it and then finally threw out my outline and just plowed through it. I am working from a bare-bones outline for my current book. For all of my books, I've known generally where I wanted the story to go and how I wanted it to end but had varying difficulty figuring out how to do it.

I type my novels directly into the computer, saving backups of backups and emailing the partial manuscripts to myself to serve as an additional backup. Though it takes me longer than I would like, I strive to just get the whole story out and then go back to add to it, fill in any holes, and revise. If I think of a question while I'm writing, I make a note to myself and move on. I have a critique partner for my current book and have participated in some additional feedback sessions but I am still just striving to get the story down. When I'm done, I'll go back, gather all of the comments and suggestions and incorporate them into the manuscript.

So that is how I've written my past and current novels. My future novels may or may not follow the same formula.

Any questions, suggestions, or tips? Feel free to leave them as a comment.

Thanks for reading,
The Wordsy Woman