| Hi friends! Thanks for joining me on this weird experiment. I appreciate you and am looking forward to this! But I suppose I should first backtrack and explain what “this” is. BACKGROUND I’ve always been obsessed with different creative processes. As soon as I was old enough to read novels, I read the acknowledgements pages to get a hint of what the writing process looked like and who the author leaned on. When other authors were mentioned, I would go find their books and see where their styles may have influenced each other. When I started writing music in middle school, I found anything I could online about how different bands or artists put their songs together. Did they start with the lyrics? Just the hook? A guitar riff or a chord progression? (Shout out to Song Exploder, a podcast that explores this exact question! How I wish you existed back in the day!) I decided to teach myself to write novels during the pandemic. The why and the history behind that might be worth sharing at a later point, but the relevant point here is that I did what you would expect a nerd like me to do: I tried to learn how everyone else did it. I read craft books, of course. Dozens by now. Some with great insight and useful lessons, some…less so. But I also learned as much as I could about the process behind each book that I read. Every time I read a book, I would go out and find as many interviews as I could with the author. I spent far more time listening to authors talk about their books and their processes than I did reading the books themselves. Each interviewer would ask questions in a different manner and elicit different answers, shedding light on the process from different angles. (As an aside: One downside to this approach is that if you unexpectedly get the opportunity to work with an author you’ve studied, it takes significant effort not to be a complete weirdo. Sorry, Alix!) Once you understand the process behind the creation of a book, you can then compare different authors. How does NK Jemisin’s approach differ from Sabaa Tahir’s or Travis Baldree’s? How does the collaboration between Kevin Hearne and Delilah Dawson on humorous fantasy differ from the solo approach of Jasper Fforde or Christopher Moore? How does someone like Alix Harrow, who signed with an agent and had publisher interest before even writing her first book, approach this differently from someone like Olivie Blake, who self-published for years before going the traditional route? How can I do what Leigh Bardugo did and make 8 figures on a book deal? (Ok, that one may be less replicable.) Also fascinating (to me at least) is how writers change their process from book to book or series to series. How did Tomi Adeyemi’s approach to Children of Blood and Bone differ from later books in the series? How did Marie Lu’s approach to The Young Elites series evolve from when she wrote the Legend series? I could go on and on, but the point is: I love this shit. THE PROJECT Given all I’ve learned and built on from hearing other people’s processes, I want to share my creative process with you. Instead of explaining after the fact how I wrote a novel, however, I want to write the novel and share my thought process as we go. You may be wondering: How exactly will this work? And to that I say, “Who knows!” I want your input and your participation. Let’s figure it out together. But here’s my starting point: I will write up everything I’m thinking as emails (and later, blog posts on mattlanewrites.com), from the seed of the idea to the development of the core concept to the preliminary outline. I’ll explain every decision that I’m making as I make it. When we get to drafting, I’ll post draft chapters and keep a public google doc that is the most recent version. I’ll even share beta reader feedback (if they’re willing to share publicly), how I interpret it, and what that means for revisions. At the end, we’ll have a completed book that will be distributed to everyone on the email list. I’m starting from absolutely nothing. I don’t know what the book will be about, what genre or age it will be, or anything else. I’ll be starting completely from scratch and will share the entire process. I WANT YOUR HELP! I want this project to be as interactive as possible. I want to hear from you early and often! Sometimes I will have specific asks, whether for your opinions on a potential direction or your ideas, but I’m always interested in hearing anything you want to share. This can be about the story, about the process, or about how I can improve the experience for y’all. With the next email/post, I’m planning to walk through where my ideas have come from in prior books, and use that as a jumping off point for brainstorming some new ideas with you for what we should write. But we’ll save that for next time. For now, please share your thoughts, let me know anything you’d particularly like to get out of this project, or share any ideas for how I should manage this experiment. Oh, and please share with any friends you think might be interested! I think this will be fun, and the more input the better! Thanks! Matt |