Scraps of Zero Draft Thoughts

I wrote a big game in early June or July about how I was going to crank out a zero draft of my next book (which I fondly refer to as selkie mythology meets Euphoria or Someone Great) but spent a lot of July reading instead. Which is fair.

I think any book I work on at a given time is going to have a specific fingerprint of the time I spent working on it; each manuscript is a time capsule in that way.

The hardest part of any creative career that you only get after lots of time and experience in your particular pursuit seems to be knowing when to balance strict discipline versus following your rhythms without worrying that veering into one or the other will sacrifice your momentum or burn you out in the wrong ways.

You are walking a tightrope, and I still mess it up sometimes.

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There are some truths I know about my writing process so far:

• I require simmer time.
• I'm smartest first thing in the morning and get dumber throughout the day.
• A scene comes to me visually first.
• I write best on a line-level, so line edits are where a book becomes a book.
• Because of that, first draft will feel messy and bad.

A lot of people, myself included, will say they want to write a book then wimp out (respectfully) around actually doing it because it doesn't feel good at first to be producing something that's so rough.

I think about this Ira Glass concept frequently, and not solely on a career level. It also applies on a micro-level to any creative project or pursuit. At some point, you hit the gap and the wall where the only thing you can do is put in more work and not trust the feedback of your feeling or intuition.

It's not as simple as "just start," more so—to figure out what gives you the sense of forward movement versus stagnation, and to constantly trick yourself into methods that provoke that sense of progress. Also, you have to be cool with your ego taking a backseat while you're entrenched in a deeply solitary pursuit of trying to match what you know you can do. Because you have to do it alone, but you're also not going to have the immediate feedback of being particularly skilled or capable at it either. Sometimes discipline means enduring your own mediocrity at something. I don't think it's actually hard to do hard things; I just think it's hard to muscle past your own pride when you're bad at them at first, or don't know what you're doing.

When you're in the gap, knowing when to produce/produce/produce versus to pull back and recalibrate is important, because your gut can start to trick you here because it's panicked at wasting time or being bad at something. As humans, even if we're vaguely unhappy or think we're good at making ourselves uncomfortable, we default towards our "normal" and the status quo which is why we'll even avoid what we most want to do because it's most important to us and the stakes feel so high. I'm aware of this tendency within myself across the board because I have high standards for myself.

Writing a book is cited as something like one of the top five bucket list items that people have, but less than 1% of people actually do it. And then, within publishing, the odds of getting a literary agent have been cited as roughly 1 in 600—and then out of that, about 50% (I think?) of pitched books die "on submission" or before getting a publisher. So the need to be excellent and to push through can be terrifying enough to keep you from actually doing it. For as long as it exists in your head, you don't have to worry about it actually being read and received or on the page, but that ultimately traps you in a state of longing rather than satisfaction.

This Oliver Burkeman concept also applies to book writing and the stamina required to do it.

“James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?” The question circumvents the urge to make decisions in the service of alleviating anxiety and instead helps you make contact with your deeper intentions for your time. If you’re trying to decide whether to leave a given job or relationship, say, or to redouble your commitment to it, asking what would make you happiest is likely to lure you toward the most comfortable option, or else leave you paralyzed by indecision. But you usually know, intuitively, whether remaining in a relationship or job would present the kind of challenges that will help you grow as a person (enlargement) or the kind that will cause your soul to shrivel with every passing week (diminishment). Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.”

I suppose I believe that writing a book, no matter what the end result is, will enlarge me no matter what and so it's worth pursuing. At the end of a day working on a book, I often feel better and like I'm doing what is most important to me. That being said, I often find myself not working on my book because it's not at the same point I see Mountain Sounds being at—being actually good and like something I could be proud of. So I have to work through the gap thanklessly until I'm at the point where the result becomes more of a reward than the process of creation itself.

How it's gone so far

I've written about 3,500 words and mapped out the first five chapters to a tee. That doesn't sound like a lot (it isn't) but within the last few days, I've hit the point where first thing in the morning, I roll over, make a coffee, and nail down a thousand words that are actually accurate. Not good ones, but they're there.

I've figured out again that I will overwrite and then scale down. So while I've written 3,500 words, I haven't hit the end of the first chapter, which will ultimately distill down into about 1,500 words instead + a 900 word prologue. So at least 1,000 words will go to "waste," with good lines reappearing elsewhere in the manuscript. At the end of my working doc, I have a section called Good Lines where I paste something I want to write elsewhere, and I also have a long-running phone note with human details.

I do finally feel at the line of conception at which I can say "I am writing my next book" versus "I know what I'm writing next."

The zero draft is an underdrawing, so I'd say the prose that's making it to the page is very internal, telling-not-showing, and a lot of writing I'd call sloppy in a final draft. That's not intentional; it's because I'll transition the language into being visual or sharp or showing later on. When it first leaves my head, without being cushioned by other sentences that are showing, it just doesn't have the support or rhythms to turn into anything polished, which doesn't make me feel like a great writer. (Not sure if that makes sense, but it's the best I can describe it for now.)

The prose, like this blog post, has been horribly stream-of-consciousness. I like that in a book like Magnolia Parks, and Sun Guilt will have a little bit of that because the main character here is blurrier than the hyper-togetherness of my debut novel protagonist Tatum, but I'll want it to read crisply and in a balanced way at the end.

That being said, I have a ton of other material related to Sun Guilt but not the literal bones of the manuscript, which is ultimately what matters. I know that it's part of my process to tinker and map out and go full-on butcher paper against the wall at some point, but first I need enough literal language written to play with.

So the stage of finally drafting is the most satisfying for sure, because unlike the rest of the cerebral daydreaming, you look up after adding 10 pages to a Google Doc and feel like you've done something. But it can also be the worst because the vision of the final product doesn't even remotely match what you've first produced. In any other medium, you can immediately dash off something that's perfect; writing a book is so long-form that, although technically possible, it's unlikely that your vision matches your reality. Mentally, that makes the sacrifices hard to justify until you're at a point of critical mass, but you still have to make them. (Unless you're fabulously delusional and ego-driven, which might actually help you in this case.)

(I think for raw prose, I start in a running doc until I have enough to structure, at which point I'll move it to a processor and start actually organizing glimpses and moments.)

But, I've figured out scrapbooking works for me here—

One of my issues, both in working and writing, is that I hit a point in my day in which looking at a screen exhausts me and makes me deeply sad. For my creativity, it's helpful to shift into doing something with my hands, which is why I often write a lot longhand. That's also responsible for my 2025 purchase of the Freewrite Traveler, which I plan to review at some point (mixed thoughts.)

As a studio art minor, I also learned a lot of how to construct a mood or sensation—one of the strengths of my writing, I'd say—visually and when to basically switch into another language when my existing one (typing English) is starting to wear me out.

So the other day, I actually printed a ton of mood images from my Sun Guilt Pinterest board and started taking notes on the specific inspirations or moments that a given snap inspired.

For example, these are specific feelings or sensations that build the mood of the first chapter that ultimately will need to make it into the book—whether or not I describe them verbally or the knowledge of them informs the details I do curate for the book.

One of the primary anchors of my year, both as an author and a person, has been the concept of SALIENCE and how our brains process so much information at a given point that each detail standing out has something to do either with what's primed us already or with what we want to feel. From a writer's perspective, this is called Chekhov's Gun. So I can generate a ton of detail, but then I have to whittle it down so that each detail relates to the promise of the book itself. I only have about 70,000 words to play with (which sounds like a lot if you're not an author) so each descriptor has to matter.

“A storytelling principle that suggests any element introduced in a story should be relevant and serve a purpose, or else it should be removed.”

Anyway, I'm not necessarily an outliner in the sense that I will map out the threads and arrange them per storytelling structures, but I am an outliner in that laying out the images and having a sense for the order or how rearranging them builds on each other in different ways can help me achieve the aims of a given scene.

Similarly, when you get many drafts into a book and start to cut and paste back in specific lines or passages depending on what's working, how you angle everything, etc. you can sometimes forget what you've cut and forgotten to put back in. So you can use a method like this to "fact-check" that you've put each detail in that you intended to. I had a haunting moment during [redacted book process] in which I realized that I'd cut a line I really loved, so it's in my revision notes that I'd like to add that back in when editing.

Printing the mood images out and pasting them into a journal has been fantastic for reordering and organizing them in a way that tells me what to write next.

Because I've largely figured out that I want to influence how people feel when they read parts of my books, and if I can nail that through what I create—at least within a bell jar of feeling—then I've done my job properly. You can never get this entirely uniform because, per DFW-esque ruminations on language, everyone has a wildly different bundle of associations with each specific word, but precision here is I think where people feel that moment of, "Wow, that book made me alive in some way," regardless of whether the overall impression is positive or negative.

So I have to care about the overarching mood, the details within it, and the order in which they appear. It's why a thousand books can have the same exact plot and there is one that "gets" you or stands out.

Might sound obvious, but at any given time, there's always a different method that helps me make progress on a manuscript.

Right now, scrapbooking—versus just having the boards pulled up in a browser tab—is leading me to actually putting down concrete words versus the abstract feel of solely "storyboarding," so that feels tangible. And it's making the words go easier! So we love that. If I get stuck on what to do, I can just try to brainstorm as many descriptors, prompts, etc. as I can based on a specific image rather than feeling like there's no material from which I can draw. (For me, having source material is nearly never the issue, but still. What am I trying to recreate or evoke?)

A Reading List of Sorts

I also think it's helpful to map out all the book-related inspirations that are striking me for this one—not solely fiction i.e. comps or related titles, but studies, tidbits, or references that will build out something about the book.

For example, I know Sun Guilt will have a lot of The Odyssey references. Like, Homer only talks about the sea being wine-dark, so there's going to be a moment right from the beginning where a character spills a glass of wine into the ocean. Or like naming a secondary character Dawn specifically so I can have moments of blush on her fingertips, for the dawn always being "rosy-fingered."

More broadly: thematically, one of my constant literary fascinations is who you are when you return somewhere (i.e. earned suffering, the journey, what changes you, how you choose what to return to), fate you try to outrun (cue the literal Fates), emphasis on red. There are way, way more spinoffs than what I can allude to here, but just as a starting point: these are the cinematic tiny bits that might spiral out of the specific study of a classic.

Or Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart: the selkie wanting to find her skin feels a heartbeat under the floorboards (poetic for more reasons than one.) The bass pulsing in the house, the heartbeat and guilt wrapped up into that allusion, and the physical hauntings. Then you can get all into the seaside imagery, Annabel Lee, etc.

Knowing small details like that from the get-go make me realize I probably plot a book from small to big rather than big to small, but the layers will ultimately coalesce around the spine of the book as it forms. So the book already pulls from:

• The Odyssey — Homer — who you are when you've returned, what you can't get back vs. what you can
• The Iliad — Homer — what warps heroism
• Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson — Greek otherness, basically
• various works by Edgar Allan Poe
• How to Be Multiple — Helena de Bres — fear of enmeshment
• All Things Are Too Small — Becca Rothfeld — being sickened by excess
• Before I Fall — Lauren Oliver — complicated, morally gray friend group
• The Chemistry Between Us — what's chemical vs. emotional, and whether there actually is a difference
• The Urge — what makes something addictive
• What Have We Done — the lines between group and individual morality and what happens when those clash
• Endure — overriding body signals, at what point that's helpful vs. harmful
• How Emotions Are Made — how we construct emotion at all (helpful on both a character-level within the narrative and a craft level in putting it together)

etc.

Anyway,

Right now I'm falling victim to my favorite trap, which is to write a blog post which then pulls from my limited mental resources for the day—so I should hop off, finish my word count, and shift to the work that will actually pay my bills. But: here's a peek into the beginning of a process.