Lessons from My Latest Novel, 2024 Edition

Here we go again.

I started a novel in February of 2o23.

I finished that novel in May of 2024.

I’ve been on a sabbatical from teaching since the summer of 2021. I moved from North Carolina to Michigan to write novels.

During these past three or so years, I’ve written four novels.

In 2021, I was inspired by my newfound freedom to write, and so I wrote two novels in three months that fall: A Box Came for You (horror) and Locke Writes a Story to Save His Life (coming of age).

In 2022, I wrote Let’s Not Do Maybe Again (a midlife-crisis rom-com). That was a doozy, but it turned out great.

One funny thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve been writing novels with heroes in different stages of life: an eighth-grader in Locke, a twentysomething in Box, and a thirtysomething couple in Maybe. And then in Work Order, my latest novel, I wrote about a guy who’s 35 when the novel starts and 52 when it ends: another stage of life.

After I finished Maybe in in December of 2022, I did something I knew I shouldn’t do, but I did it anyway. You never know what garden the seed of your next novel will sprout from, so I had it in mind to type a short, funny, self-conscious novel from the POV of moi-self. In February of 2023, I wrote 10,000 words and promptly lost interest in moi-self.

But that effort was the seed of the next novel. I just didn’t know it. My process this time around was similar to what I’ve done in the past. I get excited and plow ahead into a new work. I tell myself it’s going to be short and fun, and that lowers the bar. I just start typing.

Then I reach the point where I’m in trouble. It happens at the start of Act 2. What do I do now? This time around—this is the spring of 2023—I got all ambitious, like, super-ambitious. I was going to write a multi-genre novel, like something by Raymond Chandler, Isaac Asimov, Nora Ephron, and Stephen King. The outline was awesome. I had a lot of fun fitting the puzzle pieces together.

And then I was stuck. I’d gone from a light novella to an epic saga, from tiptoeing into the house to kicking down the front door. I had a blueprint for an interlocking sequence of genres, switching off every chapter, from Detective to Romance to Monster to Superhero, and while it looked good as a color-coded spreadsheet, I had no idea how to transition between the genres in way that wasn’t exhaustingly absurd. Maybe someday I’ll figure it out. Meanwhile, that blueprint presented such a high bar to entry for me that I just couldn’t summon the will to continue.

Months passed. I made art. I scribbled and doodled, blogged and kept a journal, exercised and traveled—all the activities I typically engage in when I’m between novels (see my earlier entry “Lessons from My Latest Novel,” 4/18/23).

Early in the fall of 2023, I knew I had to throw away the first act (those first 10,000 words of self-conscious noodling) and toss the blueprint for hopscotching between multiple genres. Well, I threw away most of it. There was a seed in that initial 10,000 words (a scene of dogsledding in the U.P.), and there was a genre (Detective) that I liked in the blueprint.

In early October, I abandoned my first-person narration and tried third-person. I was excited. Then I wasn’t excited. Something felt wrong and unfun. I took notes and did some idle research. I read a ton of books. We were traveling, and there was also a lot of family drama going on, good and bad, little stuff and very big stuff.

On November 3, I wrote an entry in my journal: “I was up at nine and had an egg breakfast and played my word games and was suddenly struck with a need to write. I opened my iPad with the detachable keyboard and started rewriting the first chapter of my novel in first person in a knockoff neo-noir style. It was super fun, and I kept going. I just needed to have fun again, and so I’m off, I hope, and running.”

In early November, I wrote the first act, about 17,000 words. There was a serious family tragedy happening in November, and I stopped writing. I didn’t pick up again until December.

Because I’m on this sabbatical, I tell myself I have to write one book every year. It’s my self-imposed deadline. It has worked in the past, so I was fired up to make a miracle happen in December and somehow finish this novel.

I had my outline of four acts, with the major beats blocked out (thanks to what I’ve synthesized from Save The Cat, John Truby, The Nutshell Technique, Joseph Campbell, and the 100 books I read a year). I usually sketch 10 chapters per act for a total of 40 chapters, but this time around, I sketched out 20 chapters total, with 5 chapters per act. The 20-chapter outline was a holdover from my multi-genre concept, but the structure at heart (a heroic comedy in which the hero learns and succeeds) is the one I’m most comfortable with. I just lined up my +/- and -/+ scenes so double the beats would happen within a single chapter.

I sketch on large sheets of paper lately, like 11’ x 17’, and so for this novel, I sketched outlines-in-progress on a dozen sheets, with character arcs and geographical locations and so on. When I plot my outlines, I find connections between scenes that I wouldn’t otherwise see. I find actions my characters can take (surprising choices, revelations, betrayals) that work well at a certain point in the story. So when I make a discovery during the mapping process, I start over with a new sheet of 11’ x 17’ and get my colored pens and write my new ideas into a grid of four columns and five rows (= 20 chapters in four acts).

I wrote until December 29 before I realized I wasn’t going to make it. I wasn’t going to make my self-imposed, if arbitrary, deadline of finishing a novel in 2023.

I did manage to write about 53,000 words total, which took me through Chapter 16. I felt in my bones, however, that my imagination was dry as a desert. I’d used up what I had for the story. If I were going to do justice to the final act, to the multi-chapter finale and series of showdowns, with twists, complications, revelations, reversals, callbacks, and resolutions—all that good stuff the story was leading up to—then I had to give myself time to recover, rest, and refuel.

I wrote the next chapter in January, but that was all I could muster. And I didn’t even make it as far as I’d blocked out. I had many beats to go that I’d outlined for this chapter, but the chapter was long enough. I was moving at a leisurely pace. I wasn’t going to cram in the other beats.

Besides, I didn’t know what was coming next. I hadn’t imagined it. The finale was theoretical, a few abstract notes here and there of in general what had to happen, but the on-the-ground reality of the finale was a blank.

And so then I did other stuff. I traveled. I made art. I joined a gym. I read sixty books. I did some idle research now and then about the technology I was exploring in the novel, which was nanobiotechnology.

Four months passed before I was ready.

By May, finally, my imagination was a jungle again. I’d been imagining scenes and showdowns for weeks. It takes me a while to imagine the world of the story before I can see it and move within it, and of course, that’s not enough. It’s not enough to create the spaces in which your characters move: the cities, buildings, and rooms. You have to dramatize their movement. You have to come up with scenes that make dramatic sense for the story. And then I try to make those scenes as awesome (and meaningful) as possible.

I want to reward not just the reader for having read through 200 pages to get to the finale. I want to reward myself, for having written them. I want a good ending.

By the middle of May, I was overflowing with scenes. I had to write to get these scenes out of my head. It was the feeling I was waiting for. I wrote a massive 10,000-word chapter. Hoo-wee. And then the dominoes of the final chapters fell.

I finished the final chapter on May 21, 2024.

And so the main lesson, again, is that it never goes exactly the same way twice. I still can’t believe I wrote two novels in three months in 2021. I struggled mightily in 2022 on one long novel, but I made it. And then in 2023, I didn’t make it. I didn’t finish my novel in time. It was a bumpy, difficult, dramatic, tragic year, and I did my best to live up to my own standards.

But when I didn’t meet them, I gave myself a break, backed off, and wallowed in the world of my life until I was ready to re-enter the world of my novel and do the story justice.

I think that was a smart thing I did. I followed my feelings and/or let them drag me into what I needed, even if I didn’t, at first, want to go in that direction. I think if I’d pushed through, I would’ve written a thin, weak ending that I would’ve spent all year rewriting. As it was, I waited four months, spent that time recharging my imagination, and wrote a final act that accomplished everything I wanted it to do.

The other lessons I relearn with every novel are these.

Dive in when you feel like it. Write when the words are flowing. Don’t force it when you feel icky about what you’ve done. Let it sit, and don’t be afraid to quit. Walk away. Read. Make art. Keep a journal. Travel. Help others. Revisit the world of your story when you feel like it, say, when you’re walking or driving or trying to sleep. Try another approach. Map things out, on paper, over and over again, remembering to be open to seeing new connections and new possibilities. Wait until it feels good.

For some reason, that neo-noir style of writing lured me back in like a Siren call. The first sentence of the novel is the first sentence in that style that I wrote, when I was fired up on the morning of November 3, the sentence that tempted me back into the world of my novel:

“The job was simple until Finelli shot the fat man.”

Ridiculous and fun, sweepingly cavalier, rhythmic, and alliterative: I don’t know exactly how I wrote this, but I know I’d spent months ruminating and waiting for it. So I wrote it with devilish glee, like I was about to get away with something, and took the style for a ride.

I’ll be rereading and editing, as always, and inviting some readers to give Work Order a whirl. And I’ll be taking a break to do other things, until my imagination is a jungle again, teeming with new heroes waiting to emerge into the light.

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