Early mornings and I have been writing

a book that, for now, is only for me. 

I used to have rules for writing. I gave talks at libraries and schools about this. How to Break through Writer's Block. How to Beat Back Resistance. I shared tips and tricks. Set a word count goal or text an accountability partner. But really, all of the rules and tricks boil down to one.

Do the work.   

When you're writing, you're alone. There is no boss looking over your shoulder. No drill sergeant barking orders in your face. You’re the boss. You’re the drill sergeant. I was merciless with myself. 

I did my work. 

Sometimes I confessed to my students that most of the time I hated what I wrote. Something I never confessed: I hated myself. 

Writing and me, it turns out, had a terribly dysfunctional relationship. It was born out of trauma, so maybe I was expecting too much to think it could've turned into anything healthy or fun. 

As messed up as the relationship was though, I did manage to hold onto it for a very long time. I wrote and revised multiple books from that toxic headspace. The voice that says If you don't get your words today, you're a failure. Or, If you sleep in or take a day off, you're a loser.  

Friday, I slept in, and I did not work one bit on the book that I am writing only for me.  

In the afternoon, spur of the moment, my husband and I went to see a movie. We hadn't seen a movie since the pre-pandemic times, February 2020, when we saw the big epic drama about World War I 1917. We thought about seeing the movie Oppenheimer, which seemed like an appropriately weighty picture to end our three-and-half-years-long no-movie-in-a-theater streak. 

Instead, we saw Barbie. 

We both loved it. A few days later we are still talking about it. How silly it was and how achingly sad. How thought-provoking and how... pink. I had barbies when I was a little girl, and I loved playing with them. Maybe not for the reason other little girls do--the dressing them up, the combing of the hair--but because I could put them into stories. 

Playing with dolls was one of the ways I found to escape my terrifying chaotic little life. When I made up stories about them, the stories were for me. (Okay, I also loved dressing them up and combing their hair. It was fun!)   

I am not breaking up with writing, but I am amending the rules. The rules are there are no rules. No bosses and no drill sergeants. No barking voices. Just a quiet morning (or maybe it is afternoon or maybe it is evening or maybe I've slept in) 

but I am alone and having fun, writing a book that, for now, is only for me. 

Sleep Creep Leap

There’s an old saying about perennial flowers. (These are the plants that come back every year and usually with very little work involved for the gardener.) The saying is: 

The first year they sleep. The second year they creep. The third year they leap. 

I have found this to be true, and not only with my flowers. The book I have been working on, for example. It's a full blown first draft that my beginner writer self would've proudly pronounced finished. But I know better now.

What I know is that I have the seeds of a potential something. The roots. A few clusters of leaves. A small lovely bud here and there. But the story itself is not quite awake. This is a draft I wrote during the pandemic, and most of the time, it was a daily struggle.  

Difficult to sit down and open my file. Difficult to concentrate on a paragraph, never mind on a plot and subplots, characterization and conflict. Reaching the end of it took monumental effort. But I was like the guy in the novel The Plague. I kept writing. 

Do you know that story by Camus? A plague descends on the world. A city is locked down, the fearful inhabitants trapped together inside the walls. Each person reacts to the situation in their own way. The doctor treats the sick. The minister provides comfort. The mayor attempts to navigate the day-to-day practical needs of the people. 

There's a writer character who's the comic relief, popping up in the story every now and then to give an update on the book he's writing. The joke is that he never makes it past the first sentence.

Anyway, that was what I felt like, writing a book during a pandemic. I mean, what was even the point? 

Except that sitting down and writing each day seemed to be the point. And that guy in The Plague loved his one sentence. Every time he gave his update, he was excited about his progress and itching to delve back in.   

I put my draft away for a season. While it snoozed, I worked in my garden. The grubs had killed the grass and I tore up the dead patches and transplanted perennials. Another season of playing with the draft and nourishing the soil with compost. A third season of letting go, allowing what I planted to creep.  

Bear with me as I keep this metaphor going, but

today as I write, I'm sitting on my front porch, computer on my lap, looking out at the flowers in my front yard, spreading, bobbing, blooming. My story wakes up on my screen

and leaps. 

I still haven't finished painting the closet

but I have made serious progress on it. The scraping. The caulking. One coat of primer, and yesterday,

another coat. But then I got stuck for a few hours contemplating the ceiling. First, because I realized I didn't have any paint rollers, and painting ceilings, I've learned, is much easier with a roller (and much more professional-looking too). So, off I went to the hardware store to buy rollers, mid-job, and somewhat paint-spattered. 

Also, I had less than a quarter can of ceiling paint. Would that be enough? I paid for the rollers but passed on the paint, and let me tell you later, what a nail biter that turned out to be. But whew, it was enough. 

Ceiling done, and now all that's left are the actual walls, the part of "painting the closet" that most people imagine I'm talking about when I say I am painting the closet. 

Everything takes so much longer than I imagine at the start. 

The book I began writing three years ago, for example. A messy draft "finished," but it wriggled around all over the place, morphing into several possible books. The therapy I started last year, just a little tweak of the psyche, I thought, at the beginning, but it has morphed along too, spiraling in multiple directions, 

breaking me open in ways I never dreamed, and still, barely past the scraping and caulking phase, and nowhere near the finished product. I know I know, deconstructing the very core of your own self isn't like painting a closet. Or writing a book. 

I'd put that away for a while, (the book writing) and a few months ago, plunged back in, trying to trace the various potential storylines and finding what seemed to be two decent possibilities. A friend told me, Hey! Why not write both books? And I laughed and laughed, but then I seriously considered it. Why not? 

The brainstorming and revising, the caulking and priming, the tearing apart and forgiving—others, myself— 

maybe the point isn’t perfect completion, but gathering the tools, dipping the brush, moving past the beginning, and somewhere into the middle, 

where it’s good enough, for today. 

The book I'm writing is going off the rails

There's a lesson in here about Things Not Going in the Direction You Planned, and how That's Okay, because you're Trusting the Process, and in the end, you'll get a Messy Crappy First Draft, but even if it's messy and crappy, You'll Still Have Something To Work With. 

But I'm a big liar when I say these things. 

What I really want when I write a book is to know where it's going right from the start. Write my words each day and watch the story unfold exactly how I planned it. Make it to the end easily, and all that's left to do is a quick spellcheck before sending it off. 

It never happens this way so I don't know why I'm surprised.

I needed this one to work that way though. The words I write each day feel like the only thing I can control, so when they go off in some weirdo direction I didn't see coming, now what am I supposed to do? 

What I did was I went outside and cut the ivy that was climbing up the house and then I went into the backyard and yanked out weeds. It was a gorgeous day in Columbus Ohio and it was September 11, and I couldn't help thinking about twenty years ago and how gorgeous that day had been at the start of it, driving with my four-year-old daughter to her preschool at 8:45 in the morning, and how later, when I picked her up at noon, all of the moms were standing in an awkward circle, no one chatting with each other how we usually did. 

We swayed awkwardly and looked everywhere but into each other's faces. No phones then, or I'm sure we all would've been pressed to them. Not that it would've been good to have phones, but at least there would have been an excuse for the excruciating silence, the stark and terrifying together-but-aloneness feeling we all were feeling. 

What I was thinking while I weeded the garden was, what if I had reached for the hand of the mom next to me and then she had reached for the hand of the person next to her and we stood in our circle, holding hands, instead of swaying there so painfully alone?

Why did it take me twenty years to think of this idea? I went for a walk. 

And that's when it hit me that maybe my book is not as messed up as I thought. I mean, the world in it is relatively stable and still a place I'd like to visit. The people, the kind of people I like knowing. And when someone wonders if she should reach out and hold another person's hand, I truly believe, this time, she will. 

At night in the fog

Pre-Covid, when I used to teach writing classes, I liked to include inspiring quotes on my powerpoint slides. The burning question aspiring writers always have is How do I get my book published? But the second question (which, really really really should be the first, I know) is How do I write a book?

There is an actual answer to this question: 

You write it.

But I knew that sounded snippy and dismissive and I was trying to be inspiring. Hence, the quotes: 

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. ― E.L. Doctorow 

Just take it bird by bird. ― Anne Lamott 

The fog one is a nice metaphor because you can picture it when you're at that vague What the hell is going to happen next? stage of your novel, (which, honestly, may be the entire time you're writing it). There's the murkiness in front of the car, and how do you even know the road is still there?

But then, just when you feel like you might hurtle off a cliff, the road appears. Maybe you see a flash of a traffic sign or a tree rising out of the murkiness. Every so often, something bright. The lights from a passing car. The moon poking out behind the clouds. 

The bird quote is the one that usually gets a laugh from the audience. It's from Anne Lamott's extremely helpful writing craft book Bird by Bird, which she starts by telling the story of her younger brother who'd put off a school project until the last minute. The project was something overwhelming like, WRITE A DESCRIPTION OF EVERY BIRD IN THE WORLD. The night before the project was due, the little brother was crying at the kitchen table, his head bowed over his stack of blank pages.

The father came by and patted him on the shoulders and said, "Just take it bird by bird, buddy." 

This was the part in the presentation when I would say: The secret to writing a book is BIC. Put your Butt In the Chair. And I would tell them about the importance of daily word count goals or setting a timer.  And then I'd go into the actual mechanics. How to build a scene and how to add conflict and tension and tips on how to revise. 

But then they'd want to go back to what they really needed to know, which is how to find an agent and what's the secret to getting a movie deal. 

Maybe it's human nature to want to skip over the hard parts, the actual work, to speed through the dark and get home safely and find your award-winning, best-selling novel on the library and bookstore shelves. I know I am mixing metaphors mightily, but maybe we have to stop focusing so hard on the end. 

We are here, 

after all, right now, this moment, fires and viruses burning around us, hurricanes bearing down, the world some days, most days, seemingly spinning out of control. How do we write--how do we live--in the face of all of that? 

Robert Frost famously said, The only way out is through. 

But I wish I could ask him, What if there is no way out? What if there is only Through? And through and through and through. Then, where does that leave us? How do we sit with it, the day's words, an individual bird on a page or singing in the trees, hands gripping our steering wheels as we wait for the road to reveal itself. 

On painting and powerpoints and psychopaths

The painting was of the master bedroom, a room I should have worked on first, because of how dark the paint was on the walls, a navy blue that might look okay in some rooms but only if there's a lot of light, and there isn't; never mind the peeling paint, the cracks.

I want something white, bright, pristine. Still, it takes a weekend just to gear myself up to start, move the furniture out, dust, vacuum. I have a million other things to do. Two school presentations to plan, five writing classes. My writing partner has a book due and she needs a last-minute proofread of her out-in-October novel Five Total Strangers, and that takes precedence over everything.

This book is good, like falling under a spell.

A page turner, but I try to read it slowly to catch mistakes. There aren't many, only a handful of typos, a dropped word here and there. The story, which I already know from numerous brainstorms and discussions, still surprises me and sucks me in. A teen girl is desperate to make it home to her mom, but a snowstorm grounds her plane. Her seatmate offers a ride and our MC pushes aside her doubts (she doesn't really know this girl; the weather is bad, there will be three others in the rental car--strangers-- and everyone is kind of weird... ) The trip goes downhill from there, everything that could ever go wrong on a car trip,

plus, a psychopathic stalker. I love books like this. Meanwhile my own book is stalling,

right on the verge of the climax. In a Rom Com, that's the break-up, and even though everything in this story has been leading to this point, now that I'm here, I'm hesitating, churning, rethinking the scene. These characters that I’ve grown to love over the past few months are about to turn on each other.

Suddenly, it all seems silly, what I’m doing, writing a book instead of painting my bedroom, instead of working on my school presentations, instead of marching in the streets. I don't know why we-- any of us-- do the things we do.

Because... it's what we do?

I send a corrected copy back to my friend, slap a second coat of paint on the bedroom walls, finish up a school presentation, take a moment to double check my voter registration, dive back into my book and watch the pretend people I love break each other's hearts.

Enter Colton. Or How a made-up renegade scientist dropped into my manuscript and broke through my writer's block

Last summer I was suffering from an acute case of writer's block.

It was a combination of being preoccupied by things Not Related to Writing (selling and buying a house, working a new job, having our college graduate daughter home for a few months) and things Writing-related. The writing-related part was that I'd finished revising a book after working on it for two years and realized that it still hadn't come together.

But just the thought of going back into the revision--  or starting something new felt paralyzing. 

My writing partner Natalie suggested that I try something completely different. A lot of my problem, she said, had to do with over-thinking and worrying about the stuff that was beyond my control (ie Publishing, or rather, in my case, Not publishing) and the end result was that writing was no longer bringing me joy.

Oh, she was right about that. Joy? haha. All I felt when I tried to sit down to write was dread. 

But Natalie, God love her, was not going to give up on me. She gave me an assignment. 

Each day for two weeks she wanted me to send her a pitch for a potential book. These could be any kind of book. Romances, thrillers, mysteries, whatever. The common denominator, however, was that these would be books I would never write. The point was to fool around, with no pressure. The more ridiculous the idea, the better.

I dutifully followed this advice, getting a little perfectionist-y about the first few pitches, but then relaxing and having a little fun with the assignment, despite myself, as the days went by. I was never going to write these books, I reasoned, so who cares. 

Example, Day Four, when I threw together this doozy:

The Seed Vault

When Maura snags an internship in London the summer before her senior year in college, she’s overjoyed. It’s a part-time position at a non-profit environmental agency that manages a seed vault, nothing too demanding or stressful, which should leave her plenty of time to explore and soak in European culture. 

But the moment she arrives in London, Maura finds herself caught up in an ever-growing climate-change-triggered nightmare. A record-breaking heatwave with temperatures soaring past an unheard of 115 degrees has turned Europe into a hell-scape. 

And then the rains start, at first welcomed as a relief from the heat, but then, feared as the entire continent begins to flood. 

It’s all hands on deck at the environmental agency, the staff frantic to protect the vault, one of the few places on earth that contains a sample of every seed, but with excessive flooding around the containment zone, the task seems impossible.

Enter Colton... 

He’s a renegade young scientist who’s been ostracized from the scientific community for his unorthodox views of climate and food production. Colton knows there is a way to save the seed bank, but it will involve blowing it up first. The others are skeptical, of course, but Maura finds Colton’s solution strangely compelling. That, and his piercing blue eyes. 

Together, Colton and Maura race against time to save the seeds… and the planet from destruction. 

Yeah. So the idea is ridiculous, of course, but it made me laugh. Suddenly, I really was having fun with writing-- even if I was only writing ideas for books I would never write. For a lot of these, I'd set up some crazy premise and then shake things up by Entering Colton, putting him into more absurd situations each day. 

But something interesting happened as I kept going with these pitches. A few of them didn't need Colton. A few of them were not completely silly.

And two were ideas that I could see myself actually developing. I wrote a potential first page for each one. 

And then I wrote a potential second page. 

Now, two months later I have written over 98 pages in each book, and no sign of slowing down yet. Thanks Colton! (And thank you, Natalie, for getting me back into my groove.)

There is a possum the size of my dog hiding in my garage

and I am having a hard time focusing on my writing.

I sit down to work and I think of him curled up? sprawled out? Sleeping? hiding in there somewhere. I know he is there because last night when my husband was taking out the garbage, he yelled, OH MY GOD THERE'S A POSSUM THE SIZE OF OUR DOG IN HERE!

Today is the coldest day of the year. Minus 3 degrees as I write this, with a wind chill of minus 24. I hardly blame the possum for sneaking in.

But back to my writing.

I write a sentence. I delete it. I write another. I sneak downstairs to look through the window into the garage. I don't know if I want to see the possum of if I don't want to see the possum. I go back upstairs to my office. I move a paragraph from one section of the chapter to another. I move it back. I google possums.

Thankfully, they are not known to be dangerous or destructive animals. Unless they are cornered. I go back into my book and remember something I wrote in an earlier chapter. I get stuck in that chapter for a while. Writing sentences and deleting them. Moving paragraphs around. I google how to get a possum out of the garage. I write a sentence.

I delete it.

Meanwhile three hours have gone by and I have made no real forward movement in the book itself.

The late poet Mary Oliver wrote about distractions in one of her essays:

"It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone. Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation. And what does it have to say? That you must phone the dentist, that you are out of mustard, that your uncle Stanley’s birthday is two weeks hence. You react, of course. Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the mist."

This is all well and good.

But Mary Oliver did not have a possum the size of a dog hiding in her garage.

How to Write a Natalie D. Richards Book (part two)

The book is called What You Hide, but for me it will always be called The Library Book. Because it takes place in a library; specifically, the library where Natalie works as an executive assistant, but SHHHHH, don't tell anyone. Let's pretend it's any small-town library.

But the library is only one piece of this puzzle.

There's a thing that the author Sid Fleischman said-- that just as it takes two sticks to build a fire, it takes two ideas to spark a story. The other idea for Natalie was a poor girl who runs away from home and starts hanging out at her town's library. 

Add a rich boy who's sentenced to community service at the same library. 

And because this is a Natalie D. Richards' book, there's going to be a creepy, thriller twist:

There's someone (something?) else hiding out in that library... 

Side note: Let me tell you it is a fascinating thing to watch a person create a book in real time-- 

from the brainstorming ideas part (ooh, what if the girl hides in the restroom when the library closes? What if the boy finds a dead body in the stacks?) 

to the first-draft/narrative-crafting part (okay, I'm thinking that the boy has a secret he's hiding too, but I can't figure out what it is yet...)

to the revision/plot-hole-filling stage (ugh! the timeline's totally off! How am I going to get everyone back inside the library for the climax??!!)

to the cover reveal:

A lot of this is worked through during daily phone calls (did I mention that Natalie and I are critique partners?) and she calls me every morning on her way to work at the library so we can discuss things like 

character motivation 

and homelessness 

and upper middle class towns 

and the opioid epidemic 

and privileged teenagers 

and spousal abuse 

and libraries as sanctuaries 

and psychopaths 

and techniques for climbing the outside of a building. 

And now after more than a year, the book is out and on the bookstore shelves and IN THE LIBRARY!

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Want to know more about the lovely Natalie D. Richards and her books?

Website: nataliedrichards.com

Follow her on Facebook Author Natalie D. Richards

On Twitter: @NatdRichards 

On Instagram (where she shares fun pics of her enormous dogs)
Books:
Barnes & Noble
Amazon
Cover to Cover-- For signed copies (and to support an awesome local bookstore)

I wrote a book about Elvis once

It was the second book I tried to write.

I wrote it how I used to write short stories when I was in college. Take something true and twist it. In this case the true thing was my father died and I spent a lot of my childhood and teen years trying to understand why. I was seven when he died and he was thirty-four. He was sick my mother told me, and for some reason, I heard the words Heart Attack.

How Elvis came into it was a weird coincidence. He died on the same date three years later. This was big news even in Connecticut where I grew up. The cause of death was said to be heart failure.

I didn't find out the truth until I was older, that Elvis died of a drug overdose in his bathroom and my father died of an overdose in our living room. I don't know about Elvis, but my father's death was deliberate. That was the thing I was trying to understand. I was mad at him for a long time. And then I was sad. After a while it was a confusing mix of both. I didn't like telling people. I didn't like watching them struggle to come up with an I'm sorry.

Anyway, I wasn't grieving for my father. I didn't know him. If I was grieving, I was grieving for the loss of a father in my life. I had a stepfather, but that's another story. I just wanted to move on from it, but then the date would come around again and there'd be stuff on the news about Elvis dying and I'd end up thinking about my father and wondering why all over again.

This got more annoying when I lived in Memphis. Every year in that city there's a big lead-up to the day. A whole week called Elvis Week, culminating in a candlelight vigil at Graceland where mourners light candles and file past Elvis's grave. The people in Memphis jokingly call the week Death Week.

Somewhere along the way I started thinking there was a potential book in all of this. A girl whose father died the same day as Elvis, set against the backdrop of Death Week. Of course the climax would take place at the candlelight vigil.

The book morphed into something more than I'd envisioned when I started it, as books tend to do. Turns out the dead father had been an Elvis impersonator. No one could explain why he killed himself and the girl spends a lot of time dragging her best friend around to talk to her father's family and friends (conveniently at Elvis Week locations around the city) and with each conversation she comes away with new, conflicting information about why he did it.

It's a big quest for the Truth, but with a sad twist, because with the girl's obsession of figuring out her father death, she misses all of the signals her struggling best friend is sending. The night of the vigil, the friend attempts suicide.

It seemed like a very big important book at the time I was writing it, and I was pretty much consumed with it for three or four years, writing multiple drafts, doing research about Elvis, including attending a candlelight vigil (an interesting experience to say the least), but it all ultimately came to nothing. In the sense that the book was never published.

Sometimes I wonder what the point is of a project like this.

But I already know the answer. It was this book that taught me how to write a book. My first experience with editorial feedback and rejection. My first disappointment at putting a book away and knowing it would stay tucked away, forever unread.

But also my first glimpse of how the creative process works. How you can take pieces of your life,  the dark things you don't understand, the questions that can't really be answered, all of the emotions at the core-- that confusion and anger and grief-- and push through until something new comes out on the other end.

A story.

Nearing the end of a book

makes you believe in magic

how everything falls into place, all of those seemingly unrelated plot strands that meandered off in different directions, now twisting together, tightening, building toward the climax

somehow making sense.

The months of writing-- day after day after day--  the slow starts and gray mornings, the blank computer screen, the blinking cursor, the pathetic daily word counts, the sentences written and the sentences deleted,

now everything gathering speed, words spilling out almost faster than you can catch them, flashes of dialogue in the shower, an answer to a plot hole as you round the corner on a walk with the dog, and how perfectly serendipitous it is when you remember

that time when you were twelve, and you and your best friend made up a silly song and it had multiple verses and a chorus and hand motions and an accompanying dance, and you haven't thought of that song or that friend in years, but it turns out that how you felt that day when you sang it with her

is exactly the feeling you are trying to capture in the scene you are writing now.

And how weirdly serendipitous it is, when you switch on the radio and there's an old interview with Mr. Rogers playing (yes, Mr. Rogers of all people, who isn't even alive anymore) but here he is talking about childhood worries, and something he says makes you say Aha!

because basically it sums up your entire book, and now you remember why you wanted to write the book in the first place, something you forgot over the last six months when you were deep in the weeds of the thing and didn't know if you'd ever find your way out,

but you should've known you would, because you always do, when you're nearing the end of a book, wherever the book may go later, sold or unsold, read or unread,

you always do,

and that is why nearing the end of a book is magic.

Writing Wizards

They are better writers than I was at their age. They come into class with entire worlds in their heads, casts of characters, sequels.

Some of them already know about story arcs, three-act structure, internal vs external conflicts. Did I tell you they are in middle school? I'm not sure what I can teach them. I stand at the head of the room, looking out at the expectant faces and fiddling with my powerpoint, wondering if I'll have to adjust this lesson.

Write Your Book!

The exclamation point makes it seem more exciting than the reality.

The reality is it's just you and the page, day after day, one word following another, nevermind the deleting, the two steps backwards for every one small step forward, the slow slog weeks that seem to add up to nothing,

and most disheartening, the finished pieces that may float forever in virtual file folders on your old computer.

But I won't tell them any of this. I'm supposed to inspire them! Share my secrets! Impart wisdom!

The funny thing is that I do feel somewhat inspiring and wise as the class goes on. I show them pictures of writer work spaces, snapshots of author writing processes. The post-it notes and index cards and scrawled papers tacked above laptops. I tell them how William Faulkner wrote out the outline of one of his novels on his bedroom wall. I mean, how else do you keep all of the movable parts of a book straight?

What I want them to know, what I wish I'd known, is that there is no one way to Do this. And if a particular method worked for you before and doesn't seem to work anymore, it's okay to try something else.

Look at me. Over the years, I've set word count goals. Scene goals. Time goals. I've written straight through fast, sprinting through a draft without revising, and later sifting through that mess, pulling out the few decent pieces and starting all over again from page one.

I've revised as I wrote, battling each sentence into perfect submission before allowing myself to move on, and later deleting pages and pages of pristine prose.

I once wrote an entire book in pencil. I've outlined beforehand and outlined after-hand.

This year the book I'm writing is happening in 120 minute-per day increments. For some reason I've been lighting a candle before beginning. Now, the strike of the match means it's time to write. I burned through a cranberry-scented candle before Christmas and moved on to other flavors-- rose, cinnamon, vanilla, throwing the discarded matches into the empty containers.

As the class goes on many of the students admit that they have never finished writing a book. They work out their stories in their heads. They type out big chunks and then lose interest as newer, shinier ideas take hold.

What's the secret, they want to know.

And I wish I could explain it. There is no secret. Just, a few minutes a day. One word tapped out after another. A match burning and tossed into a spent container.

How to Make a Natalie D. Richards Book... (a story in four parts, as told by her critique partner. me.)

Part One opens at a haunted house. It's Natalie's brilliant idea to take a writing retreat in the most haunted town in Ohio--

a quaint, artsy town on the Ohio River, with darling shops and restaurants, an old railroad bridge spanning the river that we walk across several times. The loveliest of cottages to rent (which also happens to be haunted!) Oh, and on the other side of the street from the lovely cottage, a creepy barn with skulls peering out of the windows.

We are too freaked out by the events of the weekend to think much about doing more than praising the heavens that we survived it, but several weeks later, Natalie tells me that she has an idea for a new book...

well, two ideas actually:

Idea number one is that freaky bridge we walked across multiple times, the metal beams and the precarious-looking slats beneath our feet. The clusters of locks, each one etched with the initials of long ago romances.

Idea number two is a broken boy. "His name is Theo," Natalie tells me. "And I'm trying to push him away,

because I know he's not a parent-approved hero. He has ADHD and Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Honestly, he's a bit of a mess. But he's breaking my heart, Jody," she says, "and I can't stop thinking about him. About the way people see him and talk about him, and never see the rest of who he is.

Maybe it's messier or more difficult, but kids like Theo feel all the things other teens feel. They have hopes and dreams. They fall in love. I want to write him," she says, "because I can't not write him. I know his story deserves to be told."

So, I say what any good critique partner would say: Go write it!!

Which leads us to

Part Two.

Here is a fun thing Natalie and I do every single weekday morning:

She calls me on her drive in to work and after giving me an update on the horrific traffic and her daily fun swing through the Starbucks drive-thru so she can get a peppermint mocha, we talk shop. I tell her what's going on in my WIP and she tells me what's going on in hers. (Okay, we also talk about our kids, our husbands, our dogs, and the latest crap news we've woken up to and how we are supposed to write books in this world, but then inevitably we move our conversation back to writing because it is what we do.)

The book she's writing is called "The Haunted Bridge Book."

And it is stressing Natalie out. She's got the boy, Theo, in all his broken-ness, and messed-up-ness figured out, but she's struggling with the girl. Her name is Paige and she's got a secret crush on Theo but Theo's done something terrible to her. Not sure what yet.

And then, omg, Natalie knows what Theo did. And it's horrible. Will it work? Can she write this book? My guess: yes. Because Natalie, I've come to learn very quickly, is a master at writing books.

Not that they spill out easily for her. We spend the next few months in daily discussion about Theo and Paige. There's lots of anxiety involved, in the writing of it for Natalie and in the character of Paige, who, interestingly enough, is consumed by anxiety, about food, about germs, about her parents and their expectations for her, and especially about Theo and what he did to her...

We work through plot holes and structural problems. Character motivation. Roadblocks. What happens next? What the heck IS this book, anyway?

A moment of insight for Natalie when she realizes she is not writing a thriller, but a supernatural horror-- and supernatural horror, by definition, cannot be logically explained.

After roughly four months Natalie finishes the first draft, and--

Part Three--

she sends the file to me to read.

I LOVE being one of Natalie's first readers. I am a fan of her books and even though I have talked with her through the play-by-play, behind the scenes, piecing together of the manuscript, it's always cool to sit down and open her file for the first time.

I write comments as I read. Mark passages that are strong, and flag places where I am tripped up. There's a moment about two thirds of the way through, where I feel like we've mind-melded. I'm in her head and she's in mine. I see the book on the page as she's written it and I know the story that she's trying to tell. I sense where it's falling slightly short and I can pinpoint where she's hit it exactly right.

We have more phone conversations. We send flurries of emails back and forth.

She goes back in for round two. Round three.

Round four after she's gotten her letter back from her editor. And after she's gotten her copyedits. And after she sees her final proof.

Time passes, and the book is out of her hands, the publisher and book designer and cover artist and marketing people doing what they do. Natalie's writing another book. We talk on the phone. We puzzle through plot holes. We analyze possible character motivation.

Today, she's working through a traumatic kiss scene. The traffic into the city is bad. Our kids are worried about the state of the world. Forget the Peppermint Mocha. She is going all in on the new Maple Syrup Pecan Latte at Starbucks.

Today is also Part Four. 

Her book We All Fall Down is officially out in the world. In bookstores. In libraries. On Amazon. I still call it "The Haunted Bridge Book."

The cover is gorgeous, don't you think?

But here is what I picture:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lifelong Ohioan, Natalie D. Richards, spent many years applying her writing skills to stunningly boring business documents. Fortunately, she realized she’s much better at making things up, and has been writing for teens ever since.

A champion of aspiring authors, Richards is a frequent
speaker at schools, libraries, and writing groups. She lives in Ohio with a Yeti, a Wookie (her dogs) and her wonderful husband and children.

Where to find Natalie:

Website: Nataliedrichards.com
Facebook author page:
Twitter: @Natdrichards
Instagram

Buy her books here:
Barnes and Noble
Amazon

And here's a teaser for We All Fall Down...


A new romantic thriller―with a dash of horror―from the author of One Was Lost and Six Months Later

Theo's always been impulsive. But telling Paige how he feels? He's obsessed over that decision. And it's time. Tonight. At the party on the riverbank, under the old walking bridge, site of so many tales of love and death.

Paige has had a crush on Theo since they first met, but she knows her feelings are one-sided. She's trying to move on, to flirt. A party at the river is just what she needs. Except a fight breaks out, and when Paige tries to intervene―Theo's fist lands in her face.

All Theo and Paige want to do is forget that fateful night. But strange events keep drawing them back to the bridge. Someone, something is determined to make them remember...and pay for what they each did.

How I Wrote When I Was Twelve

I didn't think about publication or readers. I had never been rejected; although, I did get the occasional Meh response from a teacher on a writing assignment.

But the Meh responses didn't bug me.

I wrote when I had a funny idea or sad one, when I had something important I wanted to remember, when I'd read a good book and wished I could keep the story and the characters going.

I didn't worry about what type of writing I did. I wrote short stories and novels. I wrote a play. A comic strip. Essays and poems. I even wrote songs. And taped myself singing them.

I kept a journal. I typed on a typewriter. I hand-wrote in notebooks or on loose-leaf paper. I illustrated my stories. I drew my own book covers. I didn't care that I wasn't good at drawing.

Most of the stories I never finished. A few of the stories, I revised. Over and over. But it never felt like work.

If I didn't feel like writing one day, or for a week, or for a month, I just... didn't. And when I pulled out my typewriter to write another story, I didn't wonder if I'd lost my ability.

When I was twelve, I wrote for myself.

And it was my favorite thing to do in the world.

I don't have writer's block I don't have writer's block I don't have writer's block I don't have

writer's block.

I write these words in tiny script so as not to give them more power.

writer's block

I know what I am supposed to do:

Write.

Put my butt in the chair each day, regardless of whether or not I am feeling inspired, and write. Let the story go where it wants to go without forcing it. Set down some words. Any words. Don't put pressure on myself to make it perfect. It's about quantity not quality, or so says Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way.

And I want to believe Julia. (I do!) But still, no matter how hard I fight it, sometimes my critical inner editor, my demanding annoying former English teacher/perfectionist self takes over and I am floundering once again in Writer's Block land

Writers' guides are filled with helpful advice on how to tackle writer's block. 

Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic speaks soothingly to writers, cooing in our ears to be gentle with ourselves. Frustration is part of the process, she whispers. Creativity is wonderfully difficult and you're doing the best you can. There, there, sweetie.

Steven Pressfield in War of Art takes the opposite approach, shouting like a drill sergeant at us to fight Resistance with everything we've got. Quit whining about how tough it is, soldier! Park your lazy ass at your desk and get to work, damn it!

Daily, sometimes hourly, I pinball between the two opposite poles of Liz and Steve. I show up at my desk with the best of intentions. Set a word count goal. Set a timer. Pound out my words with a sledge hammer. Punish myself when I slow down. That's it! No more bathroom breaks until you hit 1000 words, you amateur!

I sprawl out on my bed and doodle with colored pencils in a notebook. Who needs a word count? Why stress myself out with a timer? I know, I'll do a character sketch! No, I'll build a stage set of this pesky scene out of papermache! Forget that. Let's pause to sing Kumbaya.

And then it's back to my desk and a new word count goal, a frenzy of tapping on my keyboard.

I don't have writer's block. I don't have writer's block. I don't have writer's block. I don't have writer's block. I don't have writer's block. I don't have writer's block. I don't have-- 

7 Days, 17,000 Words and no sign of a story yet...

It's been a while since I've done it, signed up for NaNoWriMo (for non-NaNo-ers, NaNoWriMo is short of National Novel Writing Month.  Every year hundreds of thousands of would-be novelists pledge to write a 50,000 novel during the month of November.) I wrote my first published book Thin Space during a previous NaNoWriMo and I am a big fan of the challenge. 

There's something inspiring about tapping out a story while hundreds of thousands of other writers are tapping out their stories, laboring in coffee shops or stealing words during lunch hours, waking at the crack of dawn to scrawl out a chapter by hand or typing bleary-eyed on their laptops well into the night. 

I'm also pretty realistic about what a writer can actually accomplish during a thirty-day period. A polished book ready for submission by December 1st?

Um, no. Not even close. 

But if you'd like to end up with a messy, meander-y drafty first draft, something that's ready to be broken into pieces and reworked over the next many months...

NaNo might be the gig for you.

End of October this year, I did a bit of pre-planning, opening up a calendar and calculating my target word count. (note: If you write every day for thirty days, you'll have to write 1667 words per day to end up with the desired 50,000.) I know going into it I won't be able to write for all 30 days. Thanksgiving's coming up (must say here that the NaNo creators really dropped the ball when they chose November, but I digress) Take away Thanksgiving and the days surrounding it, and I'll be lucky to write 21 days.

My target word count: a hefty 2381 words per day.

Bring it!

Day One. I am up early, raring to go. No social media until I get my words down for the day. No talking on the phone. No cleaning. No nothing except writing. I know my tendency to procrastinate and I am not going to fall into that trap-- not on Day One, damn it!

I have a rough idea of what I'm writing. Several potentially interesting characters. A setting. One very bizarre plot point.

Do I have an actual story arc?

Nope.

I write 2721 words and I'm finished by 11:30. Boo yah.

Day Two. Up and at'em. Still have no idea where this thing is going, but I am trusting the process, jumping off the cliff without a net, driving my car into the fog at night, dunking my head into the dark pool--

by which I mean I have no idea what the hell I am writing.

Noon, I hit 2592 words.

Day Three. Why am I writing this story again? I can't remember.

2700 uninspiring words.

Day Four. This is hard. HAAAAAAARRRRRRRRD. Plus it's Friday. It's nice outside. My daughter's home from her semester abroad and wants to go to a movie with me. I want to go to a movie with her. This story I'm writing is stupid anyway.

Somehow I pull 2751 words out of the recesses of my brain lobes by 1:00 and we're off to a movie. Go, Me!

Day-- What day is it? Five? Yes. Day Five. Saturday. I'm signed up to canvas for the upcoming election. Do I really want to write today? answer: no.

Should I write?

answer: eh, ok

I knock the heck out of 31 doors in my town, head home and scrounge out 2665 words. Take that, Donald Trump.

Day Six. I'm signed up to canvas again and it's going to take most of the day. On the plus side, it's Fall Back, so I get an extra hour. On the minus side, I use the extra hour to fret on social media about the election.

I squeak out 1649 words. None of them are good ones.

Day Seven: It occurs to me that I have reached 15,000+ words and I still don't know what my story is about. For the past week I've churned, labored over, played with, banged out, lovingly pondered and still,

I don't know what I am writing. I don't know where it's going. I don't know why I'm bothering.

This is the point where most people throw in the towel. But weirdly, I have never been one of those people. It takes me nearly all day but thirty minutes ago, I ended my writing session up 2656 words.

There's a story in here somewhere--

maybe what it is will hit me... tomorrow.

Sparks and Sticks and Who the Heck Knows Where Ideas Come From or How to Write a Book Anyway

A teacher friend asked me to speak to her creative writing class on how to begin a story.

Which got me thinking about how, exactly, I begin a story.

I can talk about craft, the writer's "toolbox" as Stephen King calls it. Throw out words like Hook and Inciting Incident. Stress the importance of the opening paragraphs, the creation of characters and conflict and setting. Dialogue and sensory details. Oh, I guess we should talk about Theme. Bluh.

But I suspect the students in the creative writing class have heard all of that before. They've read stories and deconstructed stories. Written book reports and analyzed symbols. Taken tests on What's the Main Idea? and List the supporting details.

All of this stuff is helpful to know -- when it comes to understanding how a story works (or doesn't), but I'm not sure how helpful it is for the writer facing a blank computer screen or gripping a pen against a notebook page.

How do you begin a story?

Where does an idea for a story come from? And once you have that idea, how do you go about developing it?

The answer, I am reluctant to admit to the creative writing students, is: I don't know.

The author Sid Fleischman has what he calls the Two Sticks Theory. Just as it takes two sticks to make a fire, it takes two ideas to spark a story.

The theory rings true to me. I can go back through stories and books I've written and trace the genesis of them back to two ideas-- or more. But that's clearer when I've already written in the story.

Before I begin, I just have vague strands and snippets floating around in my head. A barefoot boy. A Celtic belief in thin places. A girl moving to a new town. A ghost hovering over a bed. The crappy gray weather that is November in Columbus Ohio.

How do those strands and snippets wind themselves into a coherent story?

I'm back to I don't know.

There's the BIC philosophy of writing a book...

Where you, um, put your Butt In the Chair and write the book. For more info on how to manage this feat, check out the reams of manuals written on discipline and motivation, how to break through writer's block, how to beat back resistance and bang out your novel.

If those books sound too militant and hard core to you, check out the woo-woo-y books on inspiring your inner artist and nurturing your creative self and finding joy in your process and meditating (or walking or showering) your way through plot holes.

Ask any writer for a word of advice and you'll hear stuff like:

Write every day
Don't write every day
Write a shitty first draft and worry about revision later
What? Are you nuts? Outline that sucker first and then write!
Wake up early
Stay up late
Hand write
Type

And I am back to I Don't Know.

Maybe in the end it comes down to finding the thing that works for you and doing it until it doesn't work anymore and then trying something else. You write because you have a story to tell and it gets rejected and you quit

or you keep writing and you get better. Your stories are published and they do well or they sink like stones and disappear, but you keep writing because what else are you going to do

and in a few weeks you'll start a new story and you have your vague strands and snippets bobbing around in your head and you're not sure what to do with them yet, but whatever, you'll figure it out.

First, though, you've got to change out of your pajamas! You're visiting a creative writing classroom in like, an hour, and you need to plan what you are going to say.

In the Weeds

Confession:

Sometimes I am a liar when it comes to talking the Joy of Revision with my writing students. 

You can do it, I say. You can write a book. Write a messy first draft. Figure out what you have and what you need. Revise. Rinse. Repeat. 

I show them one of my drafts as an example. An array of colorful post-its. 

Look! It's not so difficult! Sometimes it's even fun! And my students nod along, inspired, I think, to try it for themselves. 

I do the same kind of thing when I talk about my garden. I post glorious close-ups of my veggies on social media. Lovely cauliflowers and darling pea pods and gorgeous purple cabbage.

It's not so hard to grow a garden, I tell my friends with less greener thumbs. Scatter a few seeds here and there. Water. Weed.  Repeat.

Okay. I don't completely lie. I admit to throwing out entire chapters, to fighting resistance each morning and girding myself to settle down to my day's writing 

to battling slugs 

But I tend to do this in a funny way. Glossing over the sweaty details. Joking about the actual WORK involved, the TIME

The worm that ate the hell out of the cabbage growing right next to the lovely cabbage picture above. 

The days I sit in front of my computer writing and rewriting the same paragraph a hundred times and then scrapping the entire thing. 

The caterpillars on my kale

The mornings I rant and whine and moan to my critique partner, 

the self-doubting--and sometimes, self-loathing

The creepy purply mold on my cauliflower

The times when I've finished up a revision of a revision and think what I have is the best piece of writing I've ever done and I send it off into the world and it sinks like a stone, unread--  or worse, read and passed on

and I wonder how I will ever find the energy or courage or discipline to start writing another story

The pathetic patch of cilantro after a heavy rainstorm

But, somehow, I do begin another story

Because it is what I do

It's what I do. 

Kill Your Carrots

Today I went into my garden and murdered a bunch of vegetables.

Tore the perky kale out by the roots. Sliced the lovely swiss chard. Ripped apart the darling purple cabbages. And I don't even want to tell you how gruesome things got in the carrot patch.

I hate this part of gardening.

Thinning, the professionals call it, which sounds so innocuous and easy. For those of you who are non-gardeners, thinning basically means pulling out seedlings so there is more space between plants. When I first started gardening I couldn't bring myself to do it.

So what if all of the radishes grew so closely together that they never actually, um...

grew radishes?

Over the years I've tried to get a handle on my thinning aversion by experimenting with different solutions:

1. I planted seeds far apart to begin with.  (Easier said than done... some of these seeds are teeny tiny! Some never grow in the first place and there's wasted space where a plant could've been.)

2. I replanted the "thinned" seedlings in different spots around the garden. (This requires lots of work-- to dig up a seedling, roots and all, and get it going again somewhere else. And honestly, how many vegetables do I really need anyway? Example: the garden two summers ago where I had 55 basil plants.)

3. I left everything as is, without thinning. (see above: radish plants that never grow radishes because they are bunched up too closely to each other.)

In the end I came around to thinning and that is why I was outside in my garden today killing my carrots.

Pre-thinning:

Thinned: 

And much better. (sigh)

Also, a million times easier than what I've been doing inside my home:

Over the past few weeks I've been finishing up work on the second draft of a novel. I started the revision back in September and I was confident, then, that I could whip the thing into shape by Thanksgiving. I mean, Christmas. I mean, February. I mean, Spring Break.

I mean, two weeks from now.

One of the things that has tripped me up was holding onto my first draft.

As often happens with second drafts, this book has morphed into something different from what I originally thought it was. (better, I hope!) The story tightens up. The characters come into focus. The plot crystallizes and smaller sub plots fall away. Things I thought were important in the first draft don't make sense any more. Strands. Minor characters. Dialogue I love--funny bits, heartbreaking interchanges between people I've grown to believe are real.

Entire scenes. The first fifty pages. The last. The title.

All of it-- this stuff that once worked but no longer does-- has got to go.

Oh! I do NOT want to do this!

I fight to hold onto it every step of the way. Maybe I can shoehorn in this perfectly crafted sentence Here? Maybe there's a place for this scene--at least half of it-- the one I enjoyed writing so much the first time around?

And inevitably, after much hopeful fiddling, I give up, resigned. And Snip.  

Poof.

Gone.

Now I don't even miss it. Now I can't even remember what was so great about that bit in the first place.

"In writing, you must kill your darlings," William Faulkner once said.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever, Bill. I know.

Day by Day, good Day

Nearly five years ago I'd hit something of a low point in my writing life. My manuscript Thin Space had been floating around the publishing world for a year and a half. "Floating," for the record, in publishing terms, is actually a nice way of saying "Sitting unread in multiple editors' inboxes."

Then my agent quit the business. 

During that floating time, I'd written a sequel to Thin Space. Also, two other novels, companion books of sorts, set in the same dark weirdo mythological world. I started a third that winter.

The book was about a boy who wanted SO MUCH to have the powers and talent and special gift that his family members and friends had. But, alas, it wasn't happening for him. Still, he refused to quit. Consumed by the quest to transform himself, he set about trying to MAKE THIS THING HAPPEN by logically approaching the problem-- devising a plan  and checking off items on his checklist. Practicing. Exercising. Stubbornly refusing to stop despite every setback. 

He was a trooper that little guy.  

The parallel to my own situation was pretty clear to me and somewhere over the months of writing I could see that the book had morphed from 

Boy Makes Dream Come True Out of Sheer Willpower 

into 

Writer Comes to Terms with a Failed Dream. 

By the time summer rolled around (and my agent quit) I was torturing the poor boy. But for whatever reason, every day, despite the growing futility of the endeavor, I parked my butt in the chair and wrote the latest installment of this idiot kid as he pursued the dream we both could see was never going to come true.

30,000 words. 40,000 words. I was writing the Five Stages of Death and Dying. Accept it, I wanted to tell the boy. Get a grip. Move the F on. 

50,000 words. 60,000. I kept writing. What else was I going to do with my time? 

70,000 words. 80,000. 90,000... The plot, if there had ever been one, had long since fallen apart. The story was meandery and repetitive and pointless. I kept writing it. 

I think it was the end of August when it hit me. Something was happening to this kid. All of his work and crazy determination had gotten him somewhere. Strangely, it was not the place that he'd been striving toward. 

He was no longer afraid. No longer consumed by his quest. He was not the same boy he'd been at the beginning. Somewhere along the way, he had been transformed after all.

I finished the book and never looked at it again. 

A few weeks later my second agent told me that there was serious interest in Thin Space and if I could hold on for a bit longer, I might have a book deal. (spoiler alert: it took 6 more months before that happened). In the mean time, while I was almost manic with anxiety and frustration and worry, I did the only thing I knew how to do. 

I wrote another book. 

Last week I went to the Columbus Museum of Art. On a wall in one of the galleries there was a row of pictures, what looked like the same empty glass. The artist is a German man named Peter Dreher. Apparently, those paintings are the representatives of over 5,000 that Dreher calls his magnum opus, Tag um Tag guter Tag (Day by Day good Day). 

Every day since 1974 Dreher has painted the same empty water glass. Basically, it's the guy's practice. Wake up, paint a painting of the same glass. He's done it at least 2,500 times during the day. He's also created 2,500 paintings of the same glass at night-- because hey, why the hell not? 

In case you're wondering, he does other things besides paint the same glass. 

Over the next few weeks I am finishing up a revision of my tenth book. I haven't sold my two weirdo mythological world books. Or the sequel to Thin Space. I still have never opened the 100,000-word first draft of the Boy Who Refused to Quit story. 

Oh, I also no longer have an agent. 

When I finish my revision I will query it, which may or may not snag an agent's attention. If I do snag an agent's attention, he or she may or may not be able to snag the attention of an editor. 

So, all of that is up in the air. 

But here is what is NOT up in the air: 

as this tenth book floats around in the publishing world, I know with absolute certainty what I will be doing. 

I will be writing. 

each day

every day 

good day