Resisting the Lure of the Shiny New Idea
By Barbara O'Neal | June 24, 2015 |
This past weekend, I had a business trip to St Louis, and something happened that almost never does when I’m traveling: I wrote in the shuttle on the way to the airport. It’s a fairly long slog, about 90 minutes, and often I have a whole bench to myself, but I’m not one of those writers who feels she must work at all times. Nor did I this time—I just…er…wanted to.
When I got to the airport, I had more time to kill and…wait for it….I wrote some more. On the way home, I actually opened my laptop in my crowded seat and wrote another thousand words, which means I wrote nearly five thousand over a weekend in which I wasn’t planning to write at all.[pullquote]Every book is a lot of hard work, and between that seductive moment of conception and the finished offering there is a wander through the desert.[/pullquote]
Anne Stuart used to exuberantly post on a loop we were on together, “it’s alive!” and I’ve always loved the visual. That moment when a book takes its first gasping breaths, and sits up and starts to breathe on its own without me propping it up in a thousand ways. This book has been difficult to get up and breathing. It has gone through a number of incarnations. I just couldn’t see where it needed to go, but the main character wouldn’t leave me alone. Frustrated, I shoved it on a back burner for a year and went off to write other things.
I don’t often do this. Everyone who has written for any length of time knows that the best part of a book is when it first comes to you, dressed in gossamer scarves, as shimmery and magical as fairy godmother. “Write my story,” she says in her sonorous voice. “I will not be any trouble at all, not like that—“ she casts her eyes toward the current book “well, you know. With me, your fingers will fly across the keyboard, and we’ll enchant everyone who reads us, and we shall rise to the top of the lists and sell everywhere in the world and —“
I am so hungry to believe her every time, aren’t you? This whispery, Marilyn Monroe voice in your ear is what makes newer writers abandon projects that are well underway, over and over chasing a will o’the wisp into the forest, leaving all you know—including that book with well over a hundred pages done–behind.
Only to discover that you are at the long, hard beginning of another book. One that is not going to be any easier than the last one or the one before that. Every book is a lot of hard work, and between that seductive moment of conception and the finished offering there is that wander through the desert. One of the most difficult stages is the time between the exciting first glimmers of the idea and characters, and the time it begins to get up and breathe on its own. The breathing usually takes place around page 100 or so, and I feel it is my job to get the book there, show up and do the heavy lifting of character development, follow the painfully slow process of world building, in this world, which is different from any other book world I’ve created.
So I don’t usually abandon a book before that moment of breathing, especially because there is a fairly rigorous audition process—I don’t make notes on ideas or characters; they have to be so persistent that I can’t escape them before I’ll even open a file.
But on this one, I just couldn’t seem to get the character right. I had two things—her name and her main conflict, but everything I tried seemed to be just wrong. I gave up for awhile.
This winter, she showed up again, with a sexy new title and a storyline that startled and surprised me. She brought a new character with her, her best friend, and something has happened to that friend, and, well—gosh, there was a lot of good stuff there. I was inflamed and excited. I wrote over 15K words and knew what I had was solid. I had to take a break to finish the final book in my Going the Distance series, and then came back to this one.
It was all still there, objectively. But the excitement of that first rush was gone and now I had to dig into the actual structure, into the slow, painstaking work of world building. I made a few mistakes and had to cut some scenes. I dropped one character in favor of another. The storyline needed to lighten up ever so slightly. I’ve been working for nearly a month, eeking out the minimum number of words per day or less, feeling the agony of sewing an arm to the torso, the feet to the legs, finding a head for the body.
And then I had that urge to write on the shuttle and in the airport and on the plane. I took a wrong turn in one section, but it’s fixable. I realized a major theme that I hadn’t seen coming and then I wrote a scene of a character under great stress—
The book gasped and sat up. A string of unrelated scenes all made sense. A character I hadn’t understood stepped forward to say what she was doing there. I wrote that last scene on the plane and the book was breathing fully on its own, and I was seriously irritated when the guy in front of me put his seat back and forced me to stop. (Would it kill the industry to just end that seat back adjustability on domestic flights? #endrant)
How do I know that it’s breathing? That’s the thing that I thought about as I resentfully closed my computer and put it away.
For me, it means things happen that surprise me. Characters reveal information I had no access to. The fragments begin to weave themselves into a whole, a whole that almost always looks quite a bit different from the original vision. From here, things will not be easy—writing a book is a lot of hard work and this one will be, too—but I can feel that it will be organically right now, that it is a thing that I’m serving, rather than forcing. I can, at this point, give myself up to the magic of writing. Show up, write, repeat. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s just easier.
But to get to this point, I had to force it for awhile. I had to show up and write clunky untrue scenes and wooden character gestures. If I’d flown away to a new shiny, I wouldn’t have been able to get here.
Have you felt the stages of a book like this? Do you fall prey to the siren voice of new ideas and abandon old ones too soon? How does your audition process work? How do you know when a book is going to work?
———————————————————————
[coffee]
Barbara O’Neal is the author of more than a dozen award-winning, bestselling novels, including the runaway bestseller, When We Believed in Mermaids, which has been published in more than 20 countries and spent many months on the Amazon Charts, as well as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Washington Post bestseller lists. Barbara lives on the beach in rugged Oregon with her husband, a British endurance athlete who vows he’ll never lose his accent and their zoo of cats and dogs. You can find more information on her newsletter and where to find her on social media at barbaraoneal.com.
Oddly, I just wrote a post for another blog on this same topic (I called them SNIs). I’ve abandoned several projects, succombing to the allure of the SNI. It is especially destructive when indie publishing.
Typically, an indie author will see zilch on sales for the first two or three books. We don’t know if a series is going to take off until book four or five. That’s a lot of writing and time. It also crushes the theory that indie authors don’t have to wait so long to find out if their books have a market. Everything in the fiction writing world takes time. And we are impatient by nature.
SNIs swarm about us, waiting for this impatience to reveal itself. They can smell it. Like flies on road-kill. It is our job to capture these little devils and put them in a jar for later investigation. I love my little Novel Idea app. It’s my SNI jar. I can write as much information as I need in the app to satisfy my SNI-lust, and then get back to work.
Half written books don’t sell well. Capture the SNIs and jar those suckers.
Thanks for the post!
Ron–
As one who’s read your comments at Writer Unboxed for some time, I can tell you, with confidence, that your writing has gotten much stronger. Stay the course!
Ron, it’s funny how ideas get ripe in the universe, all at once like avocados or mangos. You’ve been longing for this one thing all winter, and then there are so many you hardly know how to choose!
Oh my dear goodness, yes, yes, yes. It happens every single time–I start skipping down the yellow brick road with my new love, this shiny brand new best idea I’ve ever had in my life, nay best idea any writer since the invention of the printing press has ever had. And then…. there it is, a wall the size of the one on Game of Thrones, blocking the path. I look over at my shiny new book idea and see that he has food stains on his collar and his two front teeth are missing. How could I not have noticed this??
You’re right, Barbara, the very best thing to do is roll up your sleeves and keep writing. It gets hard, then it gets harder. But then, something magical happens;the big hairy blob I’ve been calling a manuscript begins to make sense! He’s changed his shirt and those missing teeth–turns out they were just poppy seeds. Okay, so he’s not the best idea in the whole wide world, maybe not even the best idea I’ve ever had. Heck, he may not even be the best idea I’ve had today. But he’s my idea, darn it all, and it may all work out after all.
This process happens time and again, so often I can almost predict when. Once you figure out it’s going to happen, and you know there is an end to the slog, and you will get there, it gets easier.
Laughing at your vivid images, Ute! Yes, the only thing to do is climb the wall. It is dangerous and cold, but worth it when you get to the top.
Barbara-
Oh, how I would like to have a whispery, Marilyn Monroe voice in my ear right now. Heck, a first date over coffee would be fine enough.
As you say, there’s a thrill in newness. I feel this when visiting other cities. I think, it would be so great to live here! I look at apartment buildings, check out the coffee bars, bakeries and wine stores, look at the live music listings.
Which, of course, is exactly what I do at home. And so I remind myself that there is joy not just in newness but in the hard work part of home, parenting, marriage, office, cooking dinner and all the rest.
I mean, how lucky am I? I live somewhere great, in a loft, with a beautiful wife and awesome kid, plenty of coffee options, bakeries and wine stores a short walk away, iPod playlists tailor made for my taste, indeed everything I want.
I have a good life and if it’s a bit of work sometimes, how wonderful to have that work to do. Writing is the same. So what if I have to rip up a blog post or chuck a scene and start over? That’s fun. And the next draft is always better and more satisfying–at least until I look at it again after a good night’s sleep.
I used to get excited about my ideas. Now I get excited about the process of writing them. The first date only lasts a few hours. The relationship lasts for years. How lucky am I?
I do exactly the same thing in new cities, Don. Admire the quirks and views and strange new customs and think, “I could live here, and I’d probably be SO HAPPY!” But as you say, I’m also happy in my garden and with my exceedingly fantastic views of Pikes Peak and with that little cat hunting in the grass and the man with the accent.
Oh, Barbara, this is all so true and so marvelously described. When I first started writing (what I thought was seriously at the time) I did this all the time. So much so that when I finally actually finished a first draft of something (six years after I decided I was actually going to do this) I sent out the kind of email you would to friends if you were announcing that you were getting married or having a baby!
Ideas come so often to me, that I’m nearly always putting them off (in little notebooks) for later. Some I’ve made into short stories to get them to stop bothering me for a while. Others I know I will come back to sometime. But I always fight the temptation to abandon one thing for another now because I know that nothing gets finished that way.
My favorite part of the writing process is revision. In order to get there, I need to finish a draft. And in order to do that, I can’t be distracted by lovely, shiny things. :)
I so understand the desire to send out “new baby” announcements when you finished your book. I want to do that every single time.
Barbara:
This was exactly what I needed to hear today.
Putting the notes about exciting new idea in the pending file and walking back to the mss that’s making me crazy.
Pamela.
Barbara–
At my “stage of life” (one of the many euphemisms for being old), my Shiny New Ideas tend to arrive pre-washed, like blue jeans. They have a certain faded, lived-in aspect that makes them less seductive, but I still know what you mean. Only once in my years as a writer have I been seized by a new idea that derailed what I was doing. In fact, this new idea saved me from a bad one. In the anthropomorphic terms we writers always use, it “came on to me” with such magnetism that I dropped what I was struggling with, and ran after. Two weeks later, I had drafted a short novel, start to finish. In the following rewrite process, I found little that needed changing.
Go figure. A gift from the ever-capricious, coquettish muse. I know hard-headed outliners roll their eyes at this sort of pantser nonsense, but gift it was.
Oh I do not roll my eyes, Barry–that kind of thing is what I’d call a gift book, and they do show up now and then. I’ve had three or four over my long career, and each time, they’ve arrived just as you said, whole and really fast to write. I make exceptions for books like this.
Barbara – Your journey to a finished novel(s) gives me hope. And I’m pasting Erin’s words on my screen: “… always fight the temptation to abandon one thing for another because nothing gets finished that way.”
I’m afraid I do this all the time. I never thought of it before, but if I were a chef instead of a writer, I’d have a kitchen filled with half-baked meals and a lot of hungry angry people waiting to eat.
Thank you, Barbara (and Erin), for helping me to realize “new idea syndrome” is not only common (and maybe necessary) but also treatable.
Love the chef metaphor, Vincent. It’s true, and you’d also have a lot of knowledge about collecting ingredients and reading recipes and getting things started, but none at all about finishing and serving your dishes.
When I first began writing, finishing was hard for me. I’d do well until the end and then couldn’t figure out how to wrap things up, make the point, create that satisfying ending that I knew I needed. It took writing a lot of bad endings to learn how to write better ones.
Hang in there–you can finish.
Barbara, I became a fan of yours when you presented at my Indiana chapter of RWA several years ago. Although I appreciate your reminder not to chase shiny new ideas, I especially enjoyed your description of creating the story you are working on. Last night I made a new, unexpected connection in my story. It’s nice to know I’m not alone in having a non-linear approach to story!
I remember, Cathy. And when I was telling Don about my penchant for cheating on my city with other towns, Indy was one of the places I really liked a lot and never expected it. (Omaha charmed me, too, much to my surprise. Who knew it was all hilly and rolling?)
Glad you found that connection.
Hi, Barbara:
Like Don, I’d give anything to have Marilyn Monroe whispering in my ear.
My ideas more resemble Heathcliff plotting an elaborate revenge for my faithlessness.
I love the account of when the book begins to breathe: When it surprises you. To understand that being surprised requires weeks even months of work is a gift, a great reminder that precious metals and gems don’t just lie around. They have to be mined.
My favorite math professor used to quote William James on this point: “One learns how to swim in the winter, and how to ski in the summer.” Meaning it takes a lot of hard, seemingly unproductive work on a truly meaningful problem to get the unconscious working in your favor, and delivering up those surprising revelations and connections your conscious mind never saw.
That said, I think it’s wise to keep a journal of those bright shiny distractions trying to veer you off-course — they may indeed point you toward your next excavation project. To follow up on Don’s analogy: It’s okay to flirt. Just don’t get seduced.
Wonderful post. Thanks so much.
I love your old professor’s take on this, David, that you learn to ski in summer and swim in winter. I’m going to remember that. It’s timely as I am working on improving my swimming–that will make it stick.
We all love Marilyn. Though Heathcliff, too, has his charms.
I’m saving this too: “… always fight the temptation to abandon one thing for another because nothing gets finished that way.”
And how could I abandon something I do truly love, though it’s fought me and troubled me and had me up at night. And sometimes I don’t trust it and sometimes I think it’s wonderful. But I will be steadfast. Maybe it is just like loving someone and believing in them–like one’s children, I guess. There will be time for the bright and shiny–but be steadfast first.
All these infidelity metaphors! But it’s so true. It’s hard to stay the path sometimes, but satisfying when you do.
I always say that I never understood adultery until I started writing. Oh yes! Can I identify with this post. I love what you wrote,
“I will not be any trouble at all, not like that—“ she casts her eyes toward the current book “well, you know…
And I used to believe that sonorous voice! Especially when my current book was making me crazy! But, like staying faithful to my husband because of and in spite of, I’ve learned to give my attention to this book. These characters. This story. They deserve my best. And when I do, the enthusiasm does come.
Thanks for such a great post.
They do try to seduce us, and very persuasively. Glad you’ve learned to stick with one at a time. ;)
Barbara, I’ve yet to experience the breathy siren purring a
“Write my story,” she says in her sonorous voice. “I will not be any trouble at all, not like that—“ she casts her eyes toward the current book “well, you know …”
but I was captivated by your description of her charms.
And I fall in line with David C. on the catalyst of when a work gasps and sits up and surprises you—after you’d done the carpentry of building its chair. Good stuff here.
Oh, carpentry! Of course that’s what it is, right? I am not terribly handy so this would not have occurred to me, but I love it. We are creating a framework for the story, giving it support until it is sturdy enough to stand alone.
I think maybe I want to keep a notebook, too, after some of this discussion today.
I say go for it! When the idea strikes, why hold back? It could blossom into an extraordinary tale. If it ultimately falters, then so be it. Inspiration is like any spontaneous cognitive function: it doesn’t necessarily hit when you’ve completed the rest of your chores. I keep a list of story ideas on my computer. I simply jot down as much as I can (usually on paper), when the thought arises; conjure up a title and then maybe let it go for the moment. We writers are a curious lot, in that our minds don’t always operate in neatly congruent processes. That’s too mundane and restrictive. But I’m preaching to the choir, right?
Thank you Barbara, it’s so refreshing to hear that such an adored and accomplished writer is distracted from your story and has hard starts.
My current book kidnapped me after I realized a section in my first novel needed a major rewrite. Book 2 whispered in my ear and from page one, it was keys rattling ninety to nothing. Even so, it took many, many days of typing in the chair, and other days where pages were sparse, and attention span short, but I’m currently putting the finishing touches on this book.
I’m still not sure whether I’ll go back and finish the fix on book one or if a new story will drag me away captured for a another year.
Oh, yes. I did felt that. Sometimes it seems that new idea is something more then just a thought, it feels like someone has snuck into your head and now is whispering to you. That sounds weird,I know.