Process

The unglamorous middle step between an idea and a finished book — how a jar of unused Mondays, or a map that shouldn't exist, actually gets built.

Stage one: the notebook

Everything starts in the running list kept on the notebook page — small wrongnesses, overheard sentences, images that won't quite resolve into meaning yet. Most entries go nowhere, which is fine; the notebook isn't a to-do list, it's compost. A story is usually two unrelated entries, sometimes months apart, that turn out to want the same character.

Stage two: the character before the concept

Once two fragments spark, the next step is finding whose story it actually is — not the premise, the person. The Cartographer of Small Hours sat as a notebook fragment for the better part of a year before Wren showed up and the maps-that-don't-exist-yet idea finally had someone it belonged to. Concepts without a person attached stay fragments forever, in my experience; they're interesting, but they're not yet stories.

Stage three: the discovery draft

The first draft is written fast and badly, on purpose, to find out what the story actually is rather than what I assumed it would be. This is where North of Ordinary picked up its second sibling's secret around page 140, and where The Man Who Kept His Mondays found the ending I hadn't planned. I try not to reread while drafting — only forward, the way I described in influences — because rereading too early tends to edit the discovery right out of the story before it's finished being discovered.

Stage four: revision, several times over

Once there's a full draft, the real work starts: reading dialogue aloud until it stops sounding written, cutting the sentences I'm proudest of first, and asking of every scene whether the story needs it or I just enjoyed writing it. This stage is where a short story and a novel diverge most — a story might go through four or five full revisions before it's a few thousand words; a novel goes through that many revisions on individual chapters, one at a time, roughly forever.

Stage five: knowing when to stop

The hardest craft skill, covered at more length in on writing, is finishing — recognizing that a story has become what it was always going to be, rather than continuing to sand it in search of a perfection it was never built to have. When a piece stops changing meaningfully between drafts, that's the signal, not a feeling of triumph so much as a quiet, slightly reluctant agreement to let go.