which means I often run into dead ends. I pursue possibilities that peter out. I devise and abandon whole story lines because they turn out to be unusable.
To steady myself, I keep a series of journals for every novel I write. That’s where I allow myself to whine, wring my hands, fret, scheme, experiment, and occasionally pat myself on the back. Writing is tense and stressful work. My theory is that if I don’t own my dark side—my frustration, my fears, and the bumbling about I seem destined to do on any given day—my negative emotions will sabotage my ability to write.
My working journals serve several purposes. They give mea record of my process, a day-by-day account of the problems I see as a book takes shape. When I come up against writer’s block, I go back and read the journals from the early stages of the writing. As odd as this sounds, more than once I’ve solved a problem and tagged the solution long before I began the actual writing.
Another joy of keeping journals is that on days when I’m feeling especially frustrated and despairing, I can read through the journals from an earlier book and realize that I felt just as baffled and frightened when I was writing that one. Knowing that I’ve survived all my bumbling and fumbling in the past helps me survive it in the present. And sometimes, the odd and unrelated ideas that occur to me while I’m writing one book spark an idea for the next book in the series. I don’t know if other writers operate this way, but it’s worked for me.
When I reread the journals, I can see I’m telling myself the story in endless loops, repeating myself until I can see the whole of a narrative. So the journals are incredibly boring. I don’t try to be literate or lofty, and I ignore the fact that one day someone else might read every tedious page. The purpose of the journals isn’t to impress myself or anyone else; it’s to verbalize my challenges as I meet them and to weigh all my options. Writing in the journals is a warm-up, the repository for my research, dialogue fragments, and character sketches. There have been times when I’ve lifted entire paragraphs from a journal and stitched them into the scene I’m writing, which always feels like a gift.
The six working journals for
V Is for Vengeance
totaled 967 single-spaced pages. The finished manuscript was 662 double-spaced pages. This might appear to represent a whole lot of wasted effort. But in truth, every wrong turn eventually led tothe right one. In the end, I wouldn’t have given up a single moment of the process.
Eudora Welty once said, “Every book teaches you the lessons necessary to write that book.” To which I add, “The problem is that the lessons learned from writing one book seldom apply to the next.”
Father knew best
I was raised in a household where reading and the love of good literature were an essential part of our daily lives. My father, C. W. Grafton, was a municipal bond attorney. He wrote mysteries in his spare time, if lawyers can be said to have spare time. He’d put in a full day’s work as a lawyer, come home for supper, and then go back to his office to write.
After years of doing this, he managed to publish two novels of what he intended to be an eight-book series,
The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope
and
The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher.
He borrowed the titles from an English nursery rhyme about an old lady trying to get a pig over a stile. (These days, there’s probably not a kid in this world who knows what a “stile” is, unless it’s mentioned in the same sentence with Juicy Couture.)
When my father realized he couldn’t make a living wage from his writing, he was forced to set aside his series in order to support his wife and two daughters. His intention was to go back to writing when he retired, but he died before he was able to do that.
As I was growing up, my father talked often and lovingly about the process of writing. Those lessons sifted down into my
To steady myself, I keep a series of journals for every novel I write. That’s where I allow myself to whine, wring my hands, fret, scheme, experiment, and occasionally pat myself on the back. Writing is tense and stressful work. My theory is that if I don’t own my dark side—my frustration, my fears, and the bumbling about I seem destined to do on any given day—my negative emotions will sabotage my ability to write.
My working journals serve several purposes. They give mea record of my process, a day-by-day account of the problems I see as a book takes shape. When I come up against writer’s block, I go back and read the journals from the early stages of the writing. As odd as this sounds, more than once I’ve solved a problem and tagged the solution long before I began the actual writing.
Another joy of keeping journals is that on days when I’m feeling especially frustrated and despairing, I can read through the journals from an earlier book and realize that I felt just as baffled and frightened when I was writing that one. Knowing that I’ve survived all my bumbling and fumbling in the past helps me survive it in the present. And sometimes, the odd and unrelated ideas that occur to me while I’m writing one book spark an idea for the next book in the series. I don’t know if other writers operate this way, but it’s worked for me.
When I reread the journals, I can see I’m telling myself the story in endless loops, repeating myself until I can see the whole of a narrative. So the journals are incredibly boring. I don’t try to be literate or lofty, and I ignore the fact that one day someone else might read every tedious page. The purpose of the journals isn’t to impress myself or anyone else; it’s to verbalize my challenges as I meet them and to weigh all my options. Writing in the journals is a warm-up, the repository for my research, dialogue fragments, and character sketches. There have been times when I’ve lifted entire paragraphs from a journal and stitched them into the scene I’m writing, which always feels like a gift.
The six working journals for
V Is for Vengeance
totaled 967 single-spaced pages. The finished manuscript was 662 double-spaced pages. This might appear to represent a whole lot of wasted effort. But in truth, every wrong turn eventually led tothe right one. In the end, I wouldn’t have given up a single moment of the process.
Eudora Welty once said, “Every book teaches you the lessons necessary to write that book.” To which I add, “The problem is that the lessons learned from writing one book seldom apply to the next.”
Father knew best
I was raised in a household where reading and the love of good literature were an essential part of our daily lives. My father, C. W. Grafton, was a municipal bond attorney. He wrote mysteries in his spare time, if lawyers can be said to have spare time. He’d put in a full day’s work as a lawyer, come home for supper, and then go back to his office to write.
After years of doing this, he managed to publish two novels of what he intended to be an eight-book series,
The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope
and
The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher.
He borrowed the titles from an English nursery rhyme about an old lady trying to get a pig over a stile. (These days, there’s probably not a kid in this world who knows what a “stile” is, unless it’s mentioned in the same sentence with Juicy Couture.)
When my father realized he couldn’t make a living wage from his writing, he was forced to set aside his series in order to support his wife and two daughters. His intention was to go back to writing when he retired, but he died before he was able to do that.
As I was growing up, my father talked often and lovingly about the process of writing. Those lessons sifted down into my
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