Starting
The situation so far.
Starting is hard.
There is a moment at the beginning of every new book where I open up my laptop, pull up a fresh document, and stare at the blank screen and blinking cursor and wonder, “How on earth do I write a book?” The enormity of the project is so vast, and the deadline seems so far away that the idea of actually successfully writing an entire manuscript’s first draft feels somehow impossible. Yet I have done this more than a dozen times before. I know by now that the most important thing when starting a book is to simply…start.
Last week, I began to work on book #3 of my Evelyne Redfern historical mystery series. I have already pitched the book but a page-long pitch does not a plot outline make, and so I opened up Notion (where I do all of my plotting, character sketches, etc.) and got to work.
For me, the early stages of writing a book bear no relationship to what readers will eventually read on the page. Instead, I focus on what I call “Prep.” This looks slightly different for each book I write (it’s partially driven by the needs of the genre I’m working in), but essentially what I am trying to do is build myself a structure to write my first draft around.
For Evelyne Redfern #3 prep looks like this:
A book-specific list of characters. I start out with the people I know I’m going to want to include (killer, victims, suspects, incidental characters that my sleuth Evelyne will run into). I give them names, jobs, ranks, etc. and a short description of who they are. I find that making up character names and descriptions on the fly while writing slows me down, so putting as much of this as I can on paper before I start the book can help me understand the world I’m playing in.
Alibis & motives. I have a document that lists very clearly who my suspects are, their major identifiable traits, their alibis for each murder (because one isn’t enough in a murder mystery), and the reasons that they might be guilty of that murder. I go into these books knowing who my killer ultimately is, but I find that assigning every suspect a reason that the might have done it even if they didn’t to be hugely helpful when it comes to writing those chunky scenes where Evelyne and her sidekick David sit down and discuss what they know in the case thus far.1
A research dump. Messy and often disconnected, this is where I drop quick scrapings of information, websites, etc. as I begin to figure out the world I am working in. For this book, it’s Lisbon in 1940, so I have lots of random notes on bits and pieces that I think I’d like to weave into the book.
A book timeline. Historically, I am not good at keeping track of my book’s timeline, so this is a work in progress. However, I have learned that mystery novels more than anything else I’ve ever written require a strict timeline that I monitor and keep up to date. I write down everything from characters’s dates of birth to a minute-by-minute list of the events leading up to a murder. This is because, at least in the mysteries I’ve written, the strength of alibis rely on timings and things that happened before the start of the book can have a profound impact on the mystery.
A detailed outline of the novel. This might feel a little redundant with the timeline I mentioned above, but the outline serves a slightly different purpose for me in the prep stages before getting merged into the prep timeline.
Once upon a time, I thought I was the kind of author who sat down and just started writing with very little planning. A pantser, if you will. However, I soon discovered that this approach was a really great way for me to write 40,000 words and realize that I had written myself into a corner. I decided that it was time to change my ways.
With each passing book, I have become more and more of a planner. I now will take the synopsis that I pitched to my editor and break it down into its constituent parts, outlining roughly what is going to happen in each scene. For Evelyne Redfern #3, I’m going one step further and working off of a key that reads like this:
Q: Question raised
E: Emotion or reaction elicited
C: Clue
A: Alibi
M: Motive
F: Foreshadowing2
Under each scene, I’m dropping in information related to the above key to help me keep track of things that I will need to mention later in the book or resolve. My hope is that this will help me stop losing bits of plot as I work away.
I’m sorry I can show you virtually nothing else from this outline because it is immediately a giant spoiler for Betrayal at Blackthorn Park (Evelyne Redfern #2).
Prep takes time—sometimes lots of time—and not everyone’s writing process works like this. However, I’ve found that the stronger my structure, the easier a time of it I have when writing a first draft.
In editing, I will often also go in and add another section that is a running log of what the detectives have found out scene by scene so that I don’t have someone revealing information twice or end up with loose ends.
If someone can rearrange these to come up for a nifty anagram for me, I would be delighted.