Conventional Writing Advice Isn’t for Everyone

If I’d forced myself to follow the most common writing advice, I’d never have finished a novel. Here I am, ten books later, doing it my way.

When I was several years into my career as a novelist, I overheard a conversation at a café and had to bite my tongue to keep from butting in. One person was telling another, in a teaching tone that brooked no dissent: “You write a fast first draft, then you make it better. You just have to get that messy draft down first.” You’ve likely heard some version of this, in a post or a class, if not in a café. It’s common enough to pass for conventional wisdom, and I don’t doubt that it works for many writers — and nor do I discount that it might one day work for me. But it hasn’t yet. I’m ten books in and if that was truly the only way to write a book, I’d never have written any of them.

I’ve wanted to be a writer my entire life but I didn’t finish my first novel until I was 35. (Which sounded old the first time I said it, and no longer does, at all.) It didn’t come easily. I loved crafting prose, and I loved coming up with ideas, and those are two major pieces of the writing puzzle, but the rest — you know, that minor piece where you actually write a book? — was beyond me. Eventually my frustration with myself built up enough pressure to propel me through the confusion and discomfort, and I did it. I finished a novel. It took me two years, and when I typed “the end,” I actually burst into tears.

That book sold to a big-five publisher. I wrote another one. (Yay!) It wasn’t easier. (Boo!) It’s been fifteen years, and there are sometimes days of grace when I understand where the idea of the muse comes from, but they’re the exception, not the rule. It has never gotten “easy” to write a novel, but it helps immeasurably to know I’ve done it before, and to have accepted that my brain doesn’t go in for conventional wisdom.

Or efficiency.

Or peace of mind, apparently.

Fast first drafts, outlines, all those things that make writing sound manageable and civilized? They don’t work for me. I could waste time wishing they did (and oh, I have). Or I could focus on managing the brain I have as well as I can.

When I’m writing a book, for a really long time I don’t know what it’s going to be or how it’s going to get there and I know I don’t know it. The not-knowing is my constant companion and I hate it. I’m trying so hard to give substance to the imaginary but it all feels so mushy and vague and pale and insubstantial. It’s like trying to put invisible pants on ghosts and they won’t hold still. I just want to skip to where things are happening and my characters have voices, my puzzle pieces have started to magnetize together into an arrangement that make sense, a succession of magnificent brainwaves have hit and annihilated me with the unplanned secret truth of the book, and it’s so real I feel like I could step into it. That’s all I ask! Just let me skip the unpleasant not-having-done-it-yet part and get to the jaunty already-did-it part. I’ve even fantasized about having a time machine that enables me to travel ahead a year to take the finished manuscript from my future self and return to the past, thereby cutting out the part where I have to actually…write the book.

But that’s extreme. I don’t really want to skip the whole writing part. I do love a lot of it, and the flashes of revelation that begin to slowly replace the mushy phase are truly wonderful.

My stories don’t start with a plot and progress toward a conclusion. They start with a ragtag band of ideas scattered across treacherous countryside and staggering toward each other singing different songs. My challenge is to bring them together (and by “them” I don’t mean characters, but the set of elements I’ve gathered) in a way that feels rich, satisfying, surprising, cool, and “right.” In Strange the Dreamer, for example, my set of elements included: a young librarian, a lost city, the left-behind half-human children of murdered gods, moths, the muse of nightmares, a “godslayer,” an alchemist, a little girl who doesn’t age, a brutalized people trying to reconstruct their identity, and more. They were poured out on the table like puzzle pieces. I didn’t have the edges assembled. I mean, I knew they would fit; I could feel it. But it was mushy and vague, pale and insubstantial. I hadn’t got the invisible pants on my ghost yet.

So I started writing scenes, many iterations of them, on high alert for the emerging shape of the book as is became, little by little, less mushy, more solid; less vague, more specific; less pale, more colorful; less insubstantial, more…substantial.

Honestly, it’s a terrifying way to write book. I never know how — or even if — it’s all going to come together, and I ask myself a million times per book: Why? Why do you write books this way? Why don’t you just, like, start with a plot and progress toward a conclusion? Wouldn’t that be less stressful?

And the answer is: Yes! It would be. And also: I try! In fact, I always think that’s what I’m doing, that “this time I’ve got it figured out.” I even make outlines! But our minds have the shape they have, and when we pour ideas into them there’s nothing they can do but fill that shape like jello poured into a mold, so the problem isn’t the jello? It’s the mold?

My brain is a complication engine, and my jello mold is byzantine, and when I pour stories in there it’s like turning them loose in an Escher print. And I want to be clear that this isn’t bad. It might mean I’m at an Escher stairway dead-end and weeping with frustration on Wednesday, but by Sunday I’ll have learned how to walk on the ceiling, and the view from up there is amazing.

Going in, starting a book or even a scene, I always have a plan of attack. I always think I have at the least one edge of the puzzle assembled. And then, a lot can happen. I might get a better idea, or I might bump up against an intuitive “nope,” just this certainty that it’s not “right.” Then I have to wander around calling “Olly olly incomfree!” and trying to coax my elements together so we can talk and develop a new plan.

And we do, and the book gets better, and the story moves forward — perhaps with some new imps in the entourage balancing the severed limbs of the old ideas on their heads.

A few years ago my husband and daughter and I were in Venice, and if you’ve been there you know: it’s really hard to find your way around. It’s kind of like IKEA. (Yep, I said that: Venice is like IKEA…) There’s a main route that connects the important sites and you’re fine as long as you stay on it. It seems like an ordinary path, but in fact it bends the physical plane so that if you step off it onto any side-path you will be delivered to some random part of the store or city and instantly become lost. (It’s the remnant of a powerful curse put on the Most Serene Republic by a Cypriot witch in the early fifteenth century, btw. Venice, that is. IKEA, I don’t know.)

So Jim and Clementine and I were in Venice trying to find a museum, and I had a paper map and my phone map, which should have enabled us to navigate straight there. I kept a close eye on the dot on my screen. I could see every step of our progress. And yet, within minutes we were spun around and a few blocks off our route, and we had to find the museum on instinct and luck, with the help of a curse-sniffing pigeon.

And that’s what writing is like for me much of the time: like being in Venice with a map in each hand but still somehow lost, all my careful plans scrapped, operating on instinct and luck, with a healthy dose of desperation. But…there are worse things in the world than being lost in Venice? Everywhere you look is something too wonderful to believe, and maybe the most direct route wasn’t the best after all? I mean, then we’d never have found that restaurant where all the gondoliers ate lunch (and that we could never, no matter how much we searched, find again), or been invited, by that tortoiseshell cat who spoke only Venetian, up the steps of a tower into another century to watch Saint Mark’s Basilica being built.

It’s the same with my stories, and, though I complain, deep down I know: The things I’m looking for are the things no map could guide me to, because they don’t yet exist when I begin. The journey itself creates them, and I’ve learned to trust that if I keep going my ragtag band of ideas will come together to form something way cooler than I could have dreamed up at the outset. For me, for better and worse, writing a novel is a collaboration with the unknown, and though the “worse” can get pretty dispiriting at times, the “better” makes it all worthwhile.

So that’s a glimpse of what writing is like for me. Chaotic, maddening, and ultimately thrilling. I’m not saying it should be like that for you or that it’s anything to strive for, just that we are all at the mercy of our jello molds. The same ideas poured into all our minds will take on very different shapes. Our best intentions will be refracted through our own unique prisms. We will always be us, and think the way we think, and make the way we make, and the job is to keep going, hone our intuition, have faith, be stubborn, and get there in our own way.

(I recommend curse-sniffing pigeons.)

XO

Laini Taylor is the New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author of the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy, the Strange the Dreamer duology, and other books. She’s been translated into more than thirty languages, shortlisted for the National Book Award, and won a Printz Honor. You can find more about writing, as well as a warm and active community of writers at all stages, at her Patreon and Discord, where she meets with members on Zoom every week.