#10: The Story as Project
Book News: Celebrating a finished first draft!
Earlier this month, I finished the first draft of The Sandsea Trilogy Book #3! Of all the first drafts I’ve written, this one surprised me the most. Sitting at nearly 165,000 words, it’s the shortest first draft I’ve ever written. (For reference, The Stardust Thief was 297k words as a first draft and 144k in its published state!)
Why are my drafts so long, you ask? While some authors prefer to outline before writing, I find that brainstorming on the page feels most natural. What this means is that my first draft is usually a map of the different paths a character could take to get to the end. Then, during edits, I pave one road. By the final draft, I’m confident the characters’ journey is the one that feels most natural & satisfactory to me.
Book 3 has been a bit of a different beast. While Books 1 and 2 introduce two different sides of a world & conflict, Book 3 brings all those pieces together, which means there’s less world building—and less paths—for me to explore in the first draft. All that being said, it’s been incredibly rewarding watching this finale unfold. I can’t wait to share more about it in the hopefully near future!
Writer’s Corner: The Story as Project VS. The Story as Book
In my head, there are two phases to the writing process: Project and Book. When the story is still in its early drafts, it’s a project—a still-malleable work in progress. It’s only when I move past developmental edits that I begin to perceive my work as a book: a cohesive narrative that will eventually sit on shelves.
This may sound like an obvious breakdown, but it’s a difference I remind myself of often. For me, early drafts are a playground, a place for me to test boundaries & ideas. But when the pressures of a finished book—reception, expectations, promotion—come in too early, the process I love suddenly feels laborious and not efficient enough. While working on Ashfire, I weathered that frustration a long time before realizing my creativity was being thwarted by conflating “project” with “book.”
Writers talk about this all the time—how daunting it is to go from a finished book to a blank document. This designation, I’ve decided, is my answer. It’s why I’ve found drafting while off social media helpful; when I’m not focused on the industry, it’s easier to lose myself in a draft. It’s also much easier to feel triumphant about the smaller victories when you’re focusing on the journey rather than the destination—a thing that can be surprisingly difficult when you’re working on a series, which is both a work in progress AND a finished book(s)!
For the time being, Book #3 is still a project, but that makes me all the more excited to talk about it as a book! Right now, I’ve been having a—dare I say it?—good time with it. And so, on that note, I leave you with some of my comments on the first draft, if only to show you what I mean about enjoying the process…
Out-of-Context Mayhem
A section in which I share a screenshot related to my work-in-progress, completely out of context 👍
Music Corner: A Song from the WIP Playlist
A song from my Work-In-Progress Playlist
The Forlorn Heart by Takeharu Ishimoto
Outro: Come See Me at the Brooklyn Summer Writing Festival!
Next month, I’ll be attending the first ever Brooklyn Summer Writing Festival on July 26, happening at Long Island University (Brooklyn Campus)!
I’m so thrilled to be on the fantastic panel, SHADES OF FANTASY: EPIC, ROMANTIC & WITCHY with Melissa Albert, June Tan, MK England, and Swati Teerdhala, moderated by the incredible Zoraida Cordova. The event is at 1 p.m.
You can find the full schedule and location of festival events on the website. If you’re in the area—attendance is free—pop by and say hello!
— Chelsea
That is such a fascinating distinction! I've been thinking myself this month about the choices I make as I write, and how often having too many choices, too many options, and not knowing which one to choose, paralyzes me, and I end up not writing at all because I'm waiting for a choice to emerge as the best option. It works eventually, but takes a long time. I feel like whenever I try to just write and worry about things later I start getting worried about wasting time and words, even if I'm just outlining. Which is why I really love this distinction of Project and Book; I feel like it's so easy to lose that joy of writing when one is focused so much on the destination of Book rather than the journey of Writing.