My Creative Process
A Pot of Forced Hyacinths
When I retired from teaching at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, one of my priorities was to find a new project. I’d always liked reading and writing and had graduate degrees in English. Writing a novel was an obvious choice. Twenty-some years earlier I’d written a bad novel—it would be an interesting challenge to see if, this time, I could do better.
So, I wrote a crime novel.
But a lot happened before I could hold a copy of that novel in my hand. And that’s what I’m going to talk about here—the process of bringing to life 73,000 words of creative writing.
My theme had been percolating for a long time. I’d given talks on the pain and ambivalence I felt at the prospect of selling my family farm. And about the need to preserve small farms and rural communities. When I decided to write fiction, it felt natural to turn to that topic. I would write about an older woman, recently widowed and facing the prospect of losing her farm.
Choosing what to write about was easy. But with one failed novel behind me, I needed to brush up on my fiction-writing techniques. Crime novels are no longer pure “who dunnits;” they require flawed protagonists who vanquish their personal demons in order to achieve wisdom. I read four or five recent books on the subject. Then I was ready begin writing—not the novel itself, but the notes and outline that would enable me to write it.
I made pages and pages of notes. On setting. On characters. On theme. On voice and structure. On point of view. On plot. On sources of conflict.
And then I made an outline consisting of about 60 scenes arranged in chronological order. This is especially important if your novel contains more than one story. Which most modern fiction does. Both my first and second novels contain three strands—the thematic story, the crime story, and the romantic story. A good outline helps you weave these stories together into a cohesive whole.
By the time I sat down to write the novel itself, I’d already spent many months on preliminary work. It would have seemed reasonable to assume that the process of writing would then proceed without a hitch. Only, that wasn’t the case. Some characters turned out to be unimportant, and so I got rid of them. And added new characters. Ditto for plot elements. I deleted some and added others. This really messed up my outline, which I had to keep modifying as I went along.
Finally, I finished a rough first draft. Which I revised at least twice before sending the manuscript to generous first readers (including friend and blog subscriber Kathryn Green, who proved an excellent critic.) I also paid for two professional manuscript evaluations. These early readers gave me feedback, which I incorporated into subsequent drafts. Until, finally, I felt ready to send my work to a publisher.
Three or four weeks later, in June 2023, I signed a contract with ECW Press in Toronto.
The process, up to this point, had taken well over a year. And it wasn’t finished yet. It would be another 15 months before my novel appeared on bookstore shelves.
During that time, I worked with a substantive editor on another two rounds of revisions—some of them minor. Then with a copy editor. And finally with a proofreader.
In September 2024 my novel was released—almost four years after I’d started working on it.
I’m an impatient person, and the waiting wasn’t easy. Nor was the anxiety I felt about its reception—first by the publisher and then by the reading public. But the writing itself gave me something interesting to do during the pandemic. I didn’t always enjoy it, but it gave me satisfaction. And that’s no mean achievement for a jaded oldster whose first novel was published when she was 72.
I’m over halfway through the second draft of my second novel. Work is going faster this time. I still feel anxiety about whether or not it will be published. But as most women who have given birth know, it’s easier the second time round.
My only regret is that I didn’t retire from teaching earlier. And taken up writing instead.
