A few weeks ago, I was scrolling through Bluesky when I found this screenshot of a text that Gabino Iglesias had sent to a writer friend of his (not me, unfortunately). It read:
“I write a book or a short story and by the end of it I’m a fucking expert… at that book or story. Then I start a new one and have no clue what I’m doing. Sure, you improve with every page, every story you write, but each one is different, teaches you different things, forces you to learn its heart, its reason.”
That insight cut me right to the bone in the best way possible.
When I finished Clean Freak, I did so at a marathon pace of three pages a day. Except really, it was two and a half-ish depending on where I left off the previous day. My goal was just to break that third page each day, get to the end of the paragraph I was writing, and leave it there for the day. It felt weird to leave off in the middle of chapters and scenes like that. But it also helped me come back to the story the following day. Because I knew exactly where I was picking up the story. I never had the chance to lose momentum. And if I got to the end of a chapter, if I hadn’t written my three pages, I started the next chapter.
But this was something that I needed to challenge myself to do. I’ve been re-reading old blog posts. Call it vainglorious nostalgia or trying to retrace my steps of this journey to find my way again, but I found a post in which I set a challenge for myself: to write three pages a day, every day for thirty days. Previously, I’d save up my writing ideas/energy and knock out a whole chapter at a time at a sprinting pace. At the end of it, I’d feel depleted and it would be a long stretch of time until I’d saved up enough creative juice to write another chapter. But challenging myself to write every day and set an attainable goal changed how I write.
And I thought that I’d changed it forever. When I tried jumping into the next idea after Clean Freak and just hit the ground running, I stumbled and fell. For a long time, I didn’t understand why. Now I realize that I didn’t take the time to learn another story. I just thought I’d be able to dive in head first and make it up as I went along. But that’s not how my brain works and I understand that better now.
What Mr. Iglesias calls learning the story, I call story development. I do a lot of notebook work after I get a story idea. I’ve always wanted to standardize this process to make it repeatable. That’s just the mechanic in me. So far, I haven’t settled on the one development process that works for every story. But, maybe that’s because every story is different and needs different approaches, different tools from the same tool box.
By accepting this about my process as a writer, I’ve been able to work with what feels right for the story. For the last three projects I’ve worked on, I’ve used three different methods of learning the story. Each one felt right for that story, which made the process feel more natural and comfortable. If I had tried to shoehorn any of those stories into a different process, I don’t know… Maybe they wouldn’t have worked. Maybe they would have, but they’d be different stories, by degrees or leagues. But part of learning the story is learning how it wants to be told.
So I’m thankful to Mr. Iglesias for his insight about learning a story’s heart. It’s a good one to keep in mind, especially at a story’s beginning, when you’re just getting to know each other.
