Enjoying the Writing Process

In February 2023, I paused the weekly postings of my podcast “Chapter by Chapter” because I ran out of runway. Frankly, I was stuck and not enjoying the writing process.

The original plan was to write/edit/publish the third book of The Pearl Saga in the background while I continued to release episodes. However, numerous setbacks faced me. Despite these challenges, I persevered. Eventually, I found myself with no more chapters to discuss. This made me pause and regroup, determined to return to the podcast when I had something to share.

Initially, I thought of reading chapters of other books I enjoyed, but copyright is accurate, and I didn’t want to read only public domain work.  There was the thought of releasing Casey Jackson in the Southacre series chapter by chapter. Still, I didn’t feel good about that since there are many derivative aspects to it and another series by a different author (more on that later).  So, I had to admit I was at a stopping place, and I needed to reassess.

When I wrote Showdown in the Yukon, I was working out a specific problem with my storytelling: I didn’t know how to finish. At the time, I was a “pantser.” This is to say, I wrote “by the seat of my pants,” without a net or a map. And the stories were usually no better than disjointed ramblings.  If I couldn’t start and finish a draft in one sitting, the chances of a coherent story went down considerably!

It was frustrating because I wanted to finish this story of Monterey Jack and the Pearl that I’d started and restarted a gazillion times.  So, I took a udamy.com course on storytelling, and the recommendation was to take an existing plot from a book, movie, or TV show that I thought “worked” and then retool the bones of that plot to tell the story I wanted.  After all, there aren’t that many basic storylines. And those writers probably “stole” their plot from someone they admired.  Fine, I thought. So, off I went. And for the first time in a long time, I was enjoying the writing process.

A Clunky Writing Process

There’s a scene in Showdown where Monterey first discovers the pearl, a straight lift from when Bilbo Baggins finds the ring in The Hobbit.  It was a crucial moment for me in setting up the whole series, and what I loved most about Tolkien’s scene is that the ring is almost a meaningless toy to Biblo, but when one gets into Frodo’s story, one sees that the ring is so much more.  I wanted to use this sleight-of-hand trick with the pearl throughout the series, so I wrote the scene and grimaced the whole time, knowing my friends would spot my fraud instantly.  Some did (and I apologized), others never told me.

But because of that scene and the advice from the Udamy course, I plotted all of Showdown in the Yukon off of The Hobbit. I even had one friend tell me his dad thought the whole book felt very “Tolkien.” Again, I grimaced. But the book was finally done. I learned a lot about how to finish a story! 

Enjoying the Writing Process at the Next Stage

Still taking the same writing advice but wanting to build muscle in my own writing, I took the next step. I based three-fourths of Shell Game on The Maltese Falcon and a fourth on the adventure movie Tintin. I thought that by mixing two plots, there would be less grimacing.

It went well enough. However, Sam Spade and Evan Gold are in very different places.  One is a hard-boiled detective in pre-Depression San Francisco, and the other is a soft-boiled detective in pre-Kennedy assassination Kansas.  One was a love-em-and-leave-em sort, and the other was married and trying to keep the relationship together. 

When the first draft was done, and I read it to my wife, she was bothered by Evan’s moral blurriness.  I blew off her feelings as “she doesn’t read these kinds of books.  It’ll be fine.  It worked for Dashiell Hammett; it’ll work for me.  Then I got other feedback from friends who said they hated Evan for reasons similar to my wife’s.  So, it was back to the drawing board. This setback pushed the release of Shell Game back by a year.  It wasn’t a total rewrite from scratch but felt like it.  

I chose Falcon as a spine because the falcon statue turned out to be a fake, a detail I wanted to keep (I didn’t). I chose Tintin because it is a story with an object of desire that keeps growing in complexity throughout the story.  So, I wanted to keep those aspects, but I needed to change Evan’s character quite a bit.

Long Story Longer

Once Shell Game was finished and released, I realized I was at the proverbial bridge that needed to be crossed.  Enjoying the writing process was waning further as I needed to shed my “shoot from the hip” mentality and deal with the corner I’d painted myself into. I’d kicked specific details from Showdown down the road to Shell Game and kicked them further into Book Three. 

Two blaring questions stood out in my mind:

• Is the pearl/Lillian symbolic of something else or a distinct character?   
• Or, since I am a Christian author/pastor, shouldn’t there be something in the series that points to something about Jesus?  (Isn’t every Christian “fantasy” author supposed to do their version of Narnia and thinly veil Christian themes in a new fictional world?)

While all of this built to a head, I was getting tired and frustrated that I couldn’t write at the speed I’d anticipated.  The kids were getting older, my job was getting more complex, and the ideas weren’t coming as quickly.  Then I read a verse in Ecclesiastes that states,

“So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. Who can bring him to see what will be after him?” 

Ecclesiastes 3:22

By this verse, the Lord showed me that the joy is not in finishing the book but in the work of making the book.  The pleasure is not seeing it on Amazon but learning how to tell a story.

So, for the last, I don’t even know at this point, months, I’ve been working on “enjoying the writing process.”  Here is the problem: I don’t like the process. I like arrival. I like the end. But not wanting to take the Bible lightly, I’ve been chipping away slowly. As of this writing, I just rounded the base into the outlines of Act Three of the third story.

Enjoying the Writing Process With Me

I would like to bring you into my writing process.  Some of what I enjoyed about Chapter by Chapter was how the material was made after the chapter was read.  This will be like that but more in real-time for those who want to go on the journey with me.

In another section of the blog, I’ll post where things are with the plots and other materials I’m working with.  You’ll get to read the ugly first drafts and let me know what’s working (or not).

There are many other stories I want to tell, but I need to work through this process first. I need to finish what I started, and I need to grow in craftsmanship more than in cranking out more noise.

I invite you further into my world enjoying the writing process together.