On Drafting, Travel, and Serendipity
I’m in the drafting phase of the third book in my trilogy, the point in any project where I need to remind myself that messiness is a vital part of the process. I’ve been here before, full of self-doubt, trying to quash perfectionism because “perfect” and “draft” don’t belong in the same sentence. As Annie Lamott says in Bird by Bird,
“The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later… There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love… but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.”
A friend who’s a brilliant writer says, “The first draft is where I tell myself the story I’m going to write.”
So I’m attempting to keep all of this in mind and not stress out over the messy, disjointed, at times banal content I’m creating, but it’s hard. Some of what I’ve written at about fifty pages in is quite decent, much of it is not, and this is how it’s supposed to be. But as someone who can barely send a first draft of a text, this is challenging.
There are two fundamental schools of thought as to how to approach a draft—plotting, or writing with an outline, and “pantsing,” a ridiculous word that connotes flying by the seat of one’s pants. As is my norm, I’m doing a combination of both, writing down the broad strokes of where I want to go but not being too precious, yet, about how to get there. You’ve got to get it all out before you concern yourself with how to clean it up.
An outline (for fiction) works best if you view it as a road map with plenty of room to detour and be pleasantly surprised. A writing coach I worked with warned that if I stick too close to my outline (back when I created detailed ones), I risk missing out on the “life blood” of the story I’m telling. Adhering rigidly to a plan doesn’t allow for those magical moments when you enter the Zone, or the Flow, or whatever you call those times when you write with abandon and watch the word count rise to exciting, unplanned heights.
When I allow myself to draft without second-guessing myself, unexpected things occur that may well enhance my story. During a freewriting session while I was working on the sequel to The Coat Check Girl, for example, in walked Curtis, one of my favorite characters from the first book. He was not part of the perfunctory outline I’d created for this one and has since become an integral part of the story.
As storytellers, any time spent not writing is research, as our every experience might wind up in some form on our pages. The woman across from you in the dentist’s waiting room, and the backstory you make up for her based on the loud cellphone conversation she’s having, might form the basis for a future character. A couple of years ago I sat next to a very inebriated young man and his unhappy girlfriend in a restaurant—they became an ill-fated couple in The Coat Check Girl.
There’s a metaphor for the serendipity that comes with unstructured writing that I’ve experienced when traveling for writing purposes. For The Coat Check Girl and its sequel, I went to to locations where I’d set chapters—New Orleans for CCG and Denver for book two. On these trips, flexibility—the travel equivalent of pantsing—greatly enhanced my storytelling.
I am not an inherently independent person. I’ve been to exactly one movie by myself and will dine alone in a restaurant if I have something to read and can sit at the bar and chat with friendly strangers. So traveling alone for the first time to research The Coat Check Girl was a big deal.
Once I decided to set part of my book in New Orleans, it made perfect sense that I visit the city I love so much. I had no shortage of people who have expressed interest in visiting with me someday, but when it got down to logistics, it made most sense for me to go alone. For the many years I’d visit the city before working on the book I’d stay with my dear friend Keith, a proud native New Orleanian. I had a small handful of friends, including Keith, whom I could meet for brunch or dinner. But by and large on these excursions I’d be traveling alone, spending hours in Keith’s house writing and then wandering the city for inspiration.
I quickly learned how great solo travel can be, how liberating to be entirely on your own schedule, and how easy it can be to meet people if you open yourself up to possibility.
On my first trip I went to Muriel’s in Jackson Square, had lunch (at the bar, of course) and talked to the bartender about their resident mischievous ghost, Antoine. She suggested I go upstairs to see the Séance Lounge where, according to legend, Antoine took his life after losing the building—his dream home—in a poker game. When I did, I walked in on a woman telling Antoine’s story to her friend, asked if I could listen and record her, and wound up meeting them later for evening cocktails. At the time the woman, Melissa, led French Quarter ghost tours and she became both a friend and an invaluable resource.
In fact, many of the people I met on those trips worked their ways into my book in dialogue or anecdotal form, since nearly everyone you encounter in New Orleans has a ghost story. One person told of the “pretty little girls in Creole dress watching you from the top of the stairs” who haunted her former home and wound up on my pages. A man in a shop said the city’s ghosts, “are real friendly” and “will help you out if they can, not that they can do much”—lines that now come from my protagonist’s seatmate on her flight down. Navigating a place without a strong agenda allows for moments like these, inspiring conversations with strangers who become friends and whom you wind up thanking in your acknowledgements.
When I was in Denver last year working on my sequel, I happened to post a photo of a dramatic western sky from my hotel window. I say “happened to” because I seldom post photos in real time while traveling solo. A friend’s wife commented that he was in town as well and suggested I call him to make plans, so I did. He invited me to dinner and by pure chance was sitting in the bar of the hotel where I planned to set a significant scene. The photo above is from this place, Ship’s Tavern, at the (haunted) Brown Palace Hotel.
Like an outline for a draft, an itinerary for travel can be helpful in making sure you hit all of the necessary marks, but as in drafting it is essential you view this as a fluid document and leave yourself open to diversion and the unexpected source material that can accompany it. I’m writing this essay in part to remind myself how necessary and correct it is to “wander” in the drafting stage, how when you turn down a side street in your plot, so long as it’s not a dark alley steeped in foreboding energy, you leave yourself open to possibility. More often than not, this is where the magic happens.