Happy Tuesday booklovers. Hope you are surviving this turbulant weather. Today I am the second stop on the blog tour for the Wilder Girls. Rory has kindly shared her writing process as part of my stop today, so one for all you budding writers out there.
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Whenever I get to talk about my writing process, I’m always a little bit torn between two answers. The first is the Instagram version, wherein everything is organized and beautiful and easily photographed. My Instagram self works at her desk, alone and in silence. She makes her own coffee when she wakes up with the sunrise and wears beautiful sweaters as she stands at the window thinking beautiful thoughts.
The second answer is the real version, wherein everything is chaos. My real self cannot work at home, lest she immediately fall asleep or start playing a video game. She stays up excruciatingly late, wakes up just before noon, and wears the same sweater four days in a row as she lies on her couch thinking about The Bachelor.
Once I can be pried off my couch, I rely on two things to help me get a book done - Pinterest, and a particular coffee shop near my house where they know me well enough to not be startled by the agonized facial expressions I make when I’m writing.
To start a project, I need to have a visual sense of the book, which is where Pinterest comes in. The algorithm has learned my tastes so precisely that my home page is always full of ominous trees, modern architecture and threatening sentences handwritten over pictures of abandoned small towns. Once I’ve put together a board that suits the project, I put a single song off my Spotify on repeat and camp out at my local coffee shop to start writing a first draft.
Working in the same shop over and over keeps me in the same headspace, which helps me keep the mess that is my first draft consistent. I pick a different table for each project: for Wilder Girls edits, I sat in the middle of the shop, and for my second book, Burn Our Bodies Down, I sat in the very, very back, near the fire exit just in case the draft went so poorly that I needed to flee. These are the sort of habits and routines that help me trick my brain into focusing, which is not something it does very well without help.
And that’s really the best advice I can give for anyone working on their own writing - learn what your brain hates, and then trick it into doing it anyway. Maybe someday I’ll be able to be my Instagram self, but until then, I’ll be in the coffee shop, switching tables every few months and daydreaming about new sweaters.
A big thank you to Rory for stopping by! I cannot wait to read the Wilder Girls. Order your copy below:
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