The Considerations of Writing a Zero Draft

My literary agent — well, one of them, as the other's on mat leave — has assured me I do not need to be doing this yet, and, for context, I'm not a "just write your next!" kind of gal when advising writers how to stay sane while querying, on submission, dealing with debut novel headaches, etc,.

But I am an author who takes a good amount of simmer time before sitting down with a manuscript. Each book I've written, so far, has lived in my brain for years before making it to the page.

If that all sounds like gibberish to you: Consider yourself blessed. Run away. Avoid the tangled sphere of book publishing at all costs.

Anyway, now that everything about my book process is tangible, validated, and exists in the business beyond the sphere of me and my imagination—I've deeply considered how best I want to sit down to write my next book. I have inklings for when and how I'm most productive, how to harness the lightning strikes, when to rest or strengthen the muscle or the discipline of word count vs. artistry, etc,.

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Writers also (anecdotally) seem to fall into two camps: those who prefer the messiness and freedom of a first draft vs. those who relish the revisions. I absolutely fall into the latter camp, because I'm apparently ego-centric enough to despise being terrible at anything—and, although I'm an extremely clean writer, the looseness and incapability of a first draft feels bad the whole way through. I love when a book is much tighter, and when you're laying out anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 words, that's difficult to do. My books are made in meticulous edits and layers. I prefer the point when it's all layered.

I'm sure as I get older and wiser, I will be better at anticipating what will happen each time I sit down with a book. But, just like a relationship, each book is different and will fight you differently.

I was going to include tips, tricks, and resources that have helped me. More so the concrete plan I'm following to do this. But I decided instead to separate out my posts because this one was getting long.

So consider this part one of a peek into my drafting process: just reflecting on what will look the same or be different this time around. What my overarching goals are for this process, and how my view of "writing a book" at all has shifted.

Here's What I Know About My Next Book

My next book I plan to draft entirely is called Sun Guilt. I would call it New Adult, because it's right at the crossover line, and definitely feels bolder than Mountain Sounds—but frankly, new adult to readers (or at least in the titles I see) tends to imply sexual i.e. romance or romantasy, and writing graphically is not in my plans. So I guess I will cross the age classification line when I come to it in revisions. It's overtly college-set.

I basically call this book selkie mythology meets Euphoria or Someone Great. It's ambitiously going to be dual POV, but I'm a little scared to do that, so I could end up collapsing into just one character or picking a different viewpoint than I expect.

If this sounds fragmented, it's supposed to! I go mood board / look and feel / etc,. then narrow in, and layer over a stricter outline or parameters later. In writer terminology, I'm a pantser and a plotter depending on the stage. Do I need volume or essence?

• I know the main character's name, but none of the supporting characters, excepting one. They're all indicated by letters or placeholders for now.
• Small details, notebook jots, a lengthy note of senses
• The dynamic of the main character's friend group
• Various scene/settings on my wishlist
• The inciting incident
• One specific twist
• The climax, but not how to get there, and not what happens after
• Recently, a layered metaphor that will go over the entire thing, based on my curiosities about what we do to others when we deify them and harm them in the process (i.e. lots of angel, siren, etc,. mythology.)
• Basically, at what point does loving anyone become selfish? Which dovetails with some of my need to distinguish the person from the feeling.
• References like The Odyssey and The Tell-Tale Heart and The Penguin Book of Mermaids.

And basically, I need to come up with a plausible enough structure to get me from each point to another. So at this point, I'll consult traditional structures like Save the Cat or Story Genius, or sit down with enough character outlines to decide who's going to clash in ways that can "naturally" generate the next event or what needs to happen.

Which is also why active vs. passive construction matters, because if writing a passive character, you'll find yourself trying to throw in more "events" because they aren't naturally occurring by virtue of their actions and consequences. Everything someone does should box them in somewhat but ultimately be expansive to who they are; it's the philosophy of finitude and genuine choice.

To start out with the mood and atmosphere, I've been building out the Sun Guilt (originally nicknamed COVE) playlist since 2022. For Mountain Sounds (previously titled Black Bear), the same kind of heartbeat-type expansion and distillation and expansion again happened with its playlist. There was first this one.

Then I made a smaller, more distilled playlist (the one I share most often) before branching out into other characters and moods, but of course, the playlist has grown over the last year or two to now be just as large as the original.

In parallel, I have an expansive Pinterest board for Sun Guilt. Going to share some images here so you get the gist, but keep in mind that all images are credited on the board accordingly and belong to their original creators.

Credit to each individual image on Pinterest, consolidated here for preview.

This, not that.

We did this in advertising classes in college, but re: negative space, it's also interesting to decide what Sun Guilt will be based on what it isn't. In other words, how it's different already from Mountain Sounds. So in plotting and planning, I find myself comparing it a lot my Southern Gothic book.

Main character is blunter than Tatum, for example. So the details she notices in her voice will be saturated in a less romantic—but still colorful—way. She's angrier. I think Tatum's significantly more in her head, so the narration will be less interior. And of course, if I go with the dual POV like I expect, you'll see more of a shift in prose that conveys a starkly different voice and demeanor. Because who you are is what you notice.

The atmosphere and setting is more hedonistic and less nostalgic. For that reason, it's also older in feel, more individualistic, and more specific to modernity. In Mountain Sounds, there's a desire to stop time entirely that seems to collapse themes of aging, legacy, inheritance, etc,. In Sun Guilt, time might as well not exist, which causes its own problems. There will be more references (although I try to avoid this in my writing at all, because I think it can age a story.)

Mountain Sounds is orange and black and golden and warmer greens, whereas Sun Guilt is blues and blacks and green. More Polaroid than standard film. Flash on.

Prime example: at one point, the main character will see her friends' phones light up and have the sinking realization that they have a group message—the real one—without her. End of an era, as the kids say.

The emotional ache behind Sun Guilt is more about reconciling attachment to people, whereas Mountain Sounds is more about reconciling attachment to place, and that's significant. So Mountain Sounds is good love you don't know how to trust, whereas Sun Guilt is more bad love that won't let you go. The threat of engulfment, or dilution, rather than disappearance.

And of course, my dear love, the driver of the book: the dark and stormy sea!!! The ocean!!! How great and terrible!!!

My Prediction of My Zero Draft

in the beginning

I refer to my writing process as distillation, and that's accurate, no matter what the details or processes end up looking like. I have to mentally brace myself to go wide first.

The difficulty of being an author is that you have to write a lot that boils down to very little. And I'm long-winded in the first place. So stamina-wise, this is a complete guess, but I probably have to write about 200,000 words that could distill into a 60,000 word manuscript and treat each with the same dignity and importance as if it will end up in the final draft—or else my brain won't make the connections or metaphors or layers that make it complete. I have to go into it assuming that each word will be a final one, not that I just have to produce a ton of junk to eventually strike gold.

Atmosphere guides me.

I'm a sense of place person, obviously. I have the mood of Sun Guilt mapped out, and each iteration will sharpen and clarify the atmosphere. Even now, that's the main compliment I get on Mountain Sounds.

Psychologically, I crave the escapism of a fantastic setting. I love places so vivid and immersive that they're practically sentient. Plus, my writing is deeply sensory and aims for the cinematic—which I hope makes my properties more appealing in the film/TV development space.

Before landing in lifestyle journalism, I'd planned to do art direction. My career intention after college was to do creative direction in the hospitality industry, like for hotel marketing agencies. And I regularly talk about how studying studio art and its workflows improved my writing like nothing else (which I will get to shortly.) So the way I map out a book before I actually translate it into words is all about the ecosystem of a narrative and how it engages each of the senses.

How I put together plot, of course.

I know the central tension (selkie trying to find her skin), and how it slots within a more familiar dynamic (the splintered ex-type mourning of Someone Great), which is why I use it as a mental comp.

I noticed this in Mountain Sounds, but the more contradictory structures I can layer into a given book, the easier it is for me to write—even though I'll get bogged down in ironing out the details and the plot holes as it gets more and more complex.

But to me, the best stories are self-generating, being that there's an inherent conflict in worldview that makes giving characters what they want impossible.

An example of this from Mountain Sounds in an alternative version of its elevator pitch:

A childhood summer camp is the only permanent place a scrappy foster kid has ever known, but it was only ever meant to be temporary.

And the story engine comes from her attempts to make the impossible possible—to lengthen or preserve a (by-definition) transient state.

In Sun Guilt, I think the selkie girl trying to get her skin back from an ex who won't let her go mirrors a lot of the messiness of a contemporary breakup from someone who tries to hold onto you so hard they end up hurting you instead in a very warped view of love. And, for context on how it layers with other stories/media that will ultimately determine its structure, I'm also thinking about cues from siren mythology, fraternity culture, the loneliness of big groups, and a previous short story I wrote called Atlasness. Weight of the world on your shoulders, honey.

So that dynamic, especially in a claustrophobic college town, makes it compelling to me. There's a speculative element veiling the psychological tension in metaphor, basically, and extraction gets difficult.

I've also heard great writing advice that you should make what a character wants and what they need fundamentally opposed.

And then thematically, I want to express the universal within the specific, and all my favorite writers do this enormously well by utilizing what I call "precise human details." In general, usually when I think someone isn't as great of a writer as they could be, it's because their details are too broad.

Scene scaffolding is the hardest for me.

I generally start with moments and details and the broad sense of plot. I know touchpoints I want to write out, but not how to structure them. But deciding how best to organize the story into specific units is the hardest part for me, and has been (historically) in my revision process.

Because there are, of course, a thousand ways to achieve the same end. Once I get to the line level, I'm golden, but the stretch between moment and scene proportion is where I make my toughest decisions.

That’s also where I anticipate the book’s structure will unravel most after finishing the zero draft of Sun Guilt, and it will most feel like I'm starting over and the work was for naught. I'll write a specific plot beat in one place, wherein five other things must happen, and then decide it needs to happen in a completely different circumstance in order to be most effective.

Also, I tend to write events as disparate items, and then realize in later drafts that I should layer together multiple things unfolding at the same time. So I basically have to write each layer thinly or separately—although it feels just as difficult—but know that I could be writing six only for it to become one scene consolidated at the end. (In that sense, I think about layering in my printmaking class.)

Decision fatigue is what gets you here. Thought organization. It's the hardest part of writing, and notably what people are shortcutting themselves on most by avoiding drafting anything at all. You are attempting to capture an infinite sense in finite words, and the art, beauty, difficulty, etc,. is in trying to capture the translation. Something will get lost, but I also think it's important to decide what you want the negative space or the gaps to do too. (All my favorite writers work with the gaps.)

I've said time and time again that the most important consideration in being a writer professionally—beyond clarity, hunger, observational skill, and the desire to develop a voice showing your particular flavor of salience—is stamina. You can fail again and again. But you have to be willing to do it again and again until you get it right. I'm the most stubborn person I know (excepting maybe my dad) and I can suffer through a lot of the pain of endurance. You pretty much just have to decide if you're willing to give up, ever, and the answer has to be no. Once you cling to that truth—that of failure literally not being an option—you can do it. People just don't like repetition.

The zero draft is incredibly fun because you get to just go wild, but it can be mentally hard in the sense that the words don't feel good or necessarily right all together. Nothing feels cohesive. You know maybe 75% of the work will disappear into the ether. But it's an underdrawing you have to do.

(I do edit and clean as I go, so I'd say my first drafts will probably be relatively clean going forward. But I'm not naive enough to think they'll be anything close to final form—or to meeting my personal standard of excellence.)

Considerations & Questions That I Have Before Drafting

• What, ultimately, will define my voice beyond the scope of the Mountain Sounds ecosystem?
• How long will it take? Will I avoid a lot of the problems I experienced in later revisions of Mountain Sounds because I'll (hopefully) keep my elapsed time a whole lot shorter? (Towards the end, I struggled to keep "fresh eyes.")
• Are there strategies I used for Mountain Sounds that I can immediately implement to make Sun Guilt easier?
• Will I want to ask questions to my agents while writing? Will I tailor anything to the (closer) means of a sale based on what I know about the business side, expectations of me, etc,.?
• What will feel different about immediately delivering a draft to industry professionals (like my agents) versus spending several years with it alone? How will I draft differently with that in mind? At what point will I feel like it's ready for them to look?
• How will I write differently to an audience I've now defined? Especially since this one will be a genre shift. In some ways, its classification is more straightforward. But that comes with its own set of obstacles.

Anyway, What's Next?

That's all to say that I'm excited but curious about how this next draft—and next book—are going to go. Some people will say you should always be working on your next book, and I disagree. I do have other aspects of my life to tap into, flesh out, etc,. and I think freshness — both in a burnout sense and a sensory variation one—is crucial to writing well and vividly.

To write about something, I should at least have a wealth of experience, both good and bad, to pull from. So locking myself away with a Google Doc at all times isn't healthy for my work or my individuality.

But I do want to draft Sun Guilt—and at least make some decent headway—this summer. Doing this because I want to:

• Prove to myself I can finish another book to my standard without falling into the same time-elapsed traps as my last.
• Solidify my workflow and which strategies work for various problems.
• Understand what it looks like to work on a new book with literary agents already onboard.
• Give myself a satisfying project outline, especially if I know it might take me more time than others to reach my own editorial standard. Bake in the more of a runway for myself.
• Plus, finishing writing a book is such a win.

Obviously, data's imperfect, but it's estimated that approximately 97% of people who start a book never finish it. (Anecdotally, I can vouch; I've had so many people hear about my blog over the years and beeline to tell me that they've started writing a book and that I should review it when they're done. Unfortunately, I'm used to hearing them bail, which is why I just never told anyone I wrote a book until years after I did it. But, of course, whatever works for you! Transparency or non!)

All that's to say that typing THE END does feel pretty damn good, and anyone who does it should feel the weight of that achievement.

The first time I did it, in high school, I'd accidentally pulled an all-nighter so went to Bayshore—our town's waterside promenade—to watch the sunrise, so electrified. I'd like to have that again.