The Writing Process (or From Crazy Notebooks to Draft): Guest post by Sue Lawson

Here's a guest post from Sue Lawson about her novel planning process, as part of the blog tour for her new novel, Pan's Whisper.

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Thanks so much for inviting me to visit Hey! Teenager of The Year, on the Pan’s Whisper Blog Tour. I read your blog regularly, Steph, and love it (as I do Girl Saves Boy).

Writers all approach the process of writing differently, so I thought it would be good to explore how I write and how it has changed since I wrote my first book.

Each book I’ve written has been an adventure with differing challenges and successes, but the one thing that is constant is that with each book I’ve learnt so much about writing and about myself. The exciting thing about being a writer is there is so much more to learn.

My writing process has changed dramatically since I finished my first book, Dragon’s Tear, in 2003. I used to be what I heard John Marsden describe as a ‘brick layer’ where I’d write a few pages, stop, edit and write a few more before stopping and editing again. Talk about a stilted process!

My lack of confidence contributed to that stop and start process, plus the inability to turn off my internal editor (Boy is he loud! – and yes strangely, it is a male voice – go figure!). While I still am wracked with doubt as I write, I’ve now forced myself to either ignore the internal editor until I’m ready to polish, or if all else fails, I yell at him. True! ‘Just write, edit later’ is my writing mantra.

Generally I write from start to end, but when I’m writing more than one point of view, as I did with Pan’s Whisper, I complete one character’s point of view before starting on the next. This way I find I avoid the problem of the two voices being too alike. When I was writing Pan’s story, I’d add notes at the end of a chapter about Morgan’s piece. I write each character’s story in a different document and merge them when I’ve done a first edit on both.

I type my first drafts, though if I am having trouble finding with a scene or piece of dialogue, I pull out my trusty notebook and write by hand (with a Kilometric or Ball Pental, extra fine – I have pen issues!) until the piece feels right.

I guess where I differ from most writers in the planning. I’m an over the top planner, mainly as I find the better I knew my characters and the setting, the story flows more smoothly as I write. Each time I start a new manuscript, I buy a new notebook – nothing flash – spiral bound, plastic covered, stripes, pink, plain – and do all of my planning in this book. The science behind my notebooks isn’t impressive. It started because I’m disorganised and lose stuff. All the time! So my theory is, if I keep everything in the one book, I won’t misplace anything. At least that’s the theory!

In my notebooks I plot my story, take research notes, develop characters and even put together the character’s homes. I raid magazines, newspapers, websites, blogs, tumblr and other places for snippets that suit my characters and settings. When I was writing Dare You, I created character collages as well as writing character profiles. Not only was it fun, but it helped me nail those characters. Since then collages have become part of my planning routine.

When I was writing Pan’s Whisper, I trawled through endless real estate pages to piece together the McMinn’s home. I discovered the perfect façade for Pandora’s last home around the corner from my place when I was on a morning walk.

I revisit my notebook throughout the writing and editing process, adding bits of information, fleshing out characters and re-designing the setting.

My blog tour continues on Monday when I visit the amazing Michael at http://littleelfman.blogspot.com/

Pan's Whisper on the publisher's website

On teenagerdom, friendship & why loneliness is okay

You can file "Your teenage years are the best of your life!" under Things I Never Want To Hear Anyone Say Ever Again. Let's pretend for a moment that your teenage years really were the best of your life and you're not just being nostalgic. You should still stop saying it. This is because everyone's life experiences are very, very different. You can say "My teenage years were the best of my life". That's okay. Don't make grandiose statements that imply that adulthood is a living hell because it tends to make young people not want to go there.

And also, what the heck, do you actually remember being a teenager or what? Did they not have this thing called 'social awkwardness' in your youth? Do you not remember having no freaking idea of who you were or what you wanted in life? Do you not remember feeling like a freak or being a treated like a freak or everyone around you seeming like freaks? Do you not remember your weird formative friendships? Maybe as time has passed you've read YA novels and watched John Hughes movies and looked at photos of your smiling younger self and created a version of your youth where life is like a music video.

I think it's wonderful that you had fun as a teenager. But you should probably be enjoying the rest of your life - and the one you're living currently - as well. Because the things that happen when you are fifteen and sixteen and seventeen are generally not the be-all and end-all of your existence. The people you're close with as child and teenager have a lot of impact on you as an adult, but not having a super-tight group of friends with whom to make your carefree youthful memories does not mean you're doing the whole 'bein' a yoof' thing wrong.

I'm never going to be a person who goes out for cocktails with The Girls. I wouldn't be any of the characters from Sex in the City. The fictional character I most relate to is Chuckie from Rugrats. I don't have a particular group of friends, but I'm friends with lots of individuals - and I think that contributes to me as a person more than being friends with one group of homogenous people (and let's be honest: people in small friendship groups, especially as teenagers, tend to dress and behave ridiculously alike, and it's sometimes a bit weird). You don't need to retain the same group of friends from high school into adulthood. People change. The idea of a 'bestie' (what is this? Do people seriously isolate one of their friends as 'the best'? Humans are strange.) is socially constructed. It's okay to be closer to your family than to your friends.

There's this whole idea of what it is to be a teenager - that you have to go out every Friday and Saturday evening or you are a failure, that you must have a tight-knit group of friends with whom you will keep contact forever and ever, that you must rebel and hate your parents and that there's something wrong with you if you don't do the things other people do (Oh! The number of times I have been told how much of a freak I am for not drinking! I care about my internal organs, folks). Everyone has their own version of this, and it's stupid and you should forget about it.

And this makes it harder for people to figure out who they are and what they want. Because the media and advertising and older people and the cumulative force of their friends' opinions are saying: 'This is what you should be. This is what you have to buy. This is what you have to do.' (A lot of people seem to be under the impression that buying things will transform you into a perfect human being. Which is what the companies selling stuff want you to think.)

And you say, but Steph! The characters in your book have tight-knit groups of friends! They are rebellious teenagers! And I say, it's a book, guys. Books about one kid being awesome on her lonesome are kind of difficult to sustain for 300 pages (look out for my next book Stephanie Bowe: Legend* next summer**).*** And YA books and movies for teenagers exaggerate and simplify (generally speaking, there are exceptions) all the good and bad aspects of being young ridiculously, and that's what makes them entertaining.

Being on your own helps you figure out who you are. Loneliness helps you along your path to being a tortured artist. It's okay not to find a group of people, or individuals, who you really connect with - they probably just don't go to your high school or live in your suburb. The world's a big place. It's not worth compromising yourself to fit in or have a traditional teenage experience. This is your life, and you get one go at it, and I don't know about you, but I don't think it's really worth doing things just because everyone else does. (And you will find that 'everyone else' is never everyone. It's usually just some people.)

If dressing like a Kardashian and being a foolish youngster is what you truly want to do, go right ahead! Just don't judge other people for living differently to you.

Let's dance and be friends and never become people who say "My teenage years were the best of my life!" because our entire lives will be awesome.

I'm going to write actual posts about reading and writing, soon! Get excited. (Moving house and rewriting a book is distracting and time-consuming, obviously.)

*Actual title of a speech I made for Toastmasters in Grade Six. I kid you not.
**Kidding. I'm working on another book, though, that will be a whole lot better.****
***I really love asterisks if you can't tell.
****Stephanie Bowe: Legend would just be: Steph paces the room. Steph thinks about some stuff. Steph eats a lamington. (It's a psychological thriller.)

I want to know:

• Are you still friends with or do you plan to stay friends with the people you knew in school?
• Were/are your teenage years the greatest? Of all time?
• Which Rugrats character are you? (This is the most serious question.)

I have too many questions, I know.

Self-doubt: It's like the least fun thing ever

I have not blogged properly in such a long while that this makes no sense to me anymore. Sometimes when you look at things too closely it's all very weird, isn't it? Like, what is this blogging thing? Why do people like to read what I write? Do people like to read what I write? How strange it is to write to all of these people I do not know as if I know what they like. And the internet, gosh, what a bizarre beast it is. My desire to broadcast my thoughts into the ether has lessened considerably over the past year or so, hence the lack of posts and reviews and general internet activity. So I am feeling somewhat doubtful of my blogging abilities.

At the moment I am looking at the word doubt very closely, and I am thinking, what is up with that b? Really, nothing makes any sense.

I have this whole blog post/motivational speech composed in my head - maybe not the exact words, but I've got the vibe of the thing - but every time I try and write it, it doesn't come out quite right. I'm finding the same thing with my writing lately, too, but I'm just blindly stumbling ahead and trying to fix things when I go back (something I'm undertaking at the moment with a third round of rewriting of book two.)

I have to say, this entire self-doubt thing seems the most pointless ever. There are plenty of negative emotions I can see some value in - for example, jealousy can be motivating - but self-doubt is not one of them. It doesn't listen to reason ('But I know I'm not the worst writer alive. Some people like the stuff I write!'). It doesn't motivate me at all. It just stops me from doing things because I won't do them well.

Something that occurred to me the other day, is that when someone tells me how much doubt they have in themselves, it makes absolutely no sense to me. Whether I think they're awesome or not isn't even relevant (though I do know a lot of people who are awesome) - other people believing in you doesn't automatically mean that you have faith in yourself, and even people who seem really ridiculously successful and fearless and talented still grapple with this.

Which is kind of depressing: it would be nice to believe that you will someday reach a point at which outside circumstance will mean you will have unending belief in yourself. Like, you will someday have a NYT bestseller and never again will you sit down to write and get the overpowering sense that nothing you write is really good enough. Because, hey! Other people think you're great, therefore you are great, therefore you think you're great!

When I was younger, I built up in my head many ideals of what it would be to be an author, what I would be like. This was my main goal in life, and not knowing any writers firsthand, writers were godlike in my mind. When I was a writer, I would be sophisticated and mature and I would have unfailing confidence in myself as a writer and as a human being. I would walk around all the time, smug with the knowledge that I was a capital-W Writer. I would wear scarves and look terribly chic.

Yeah, the scarf thing never really worked out. Nor the rest of it.

And then of course I met lots of authors and discovered that they, too, were actual human beings. And that even the ones I believed to be the greatest writers ever to walk the earth thought that they were terrible at least some of the time. And that a lot of them can't bear to read their finished novels.

As bizarre as it is to think that the people you believe are amazing do not believe the same of themselves, it's reassuring. I think it's important that people are honest about things like this - I mean, I'd love to delude myself and pretend I am super-productive and super-confident, but this is not the case. I find self-doubt to be absolutely crippling on a daily basis. But I keep reminding myself of how many worse things people are going through than struggling to write that next novel.

There is no easy, five-step process to self-belief. Or at least the quashing of the voice that says, 'Hey! Give up this writing thing! Other people are doing it way better than you ever will!' Which is unfortunate. I would like to be able to cast a spell upon everybody that would make self-doubt disappear and allow us all to be far more productive and fun to be around. At least the knowledge that everyone is going through this makes it easier to deal with the ongoing curse of the writer.

This is not as motivational as I had hoped. I think maybe I should just make a poster of me, with a speech bubble saying 'Steph Bowe believes in you!' and you can print it out? (Gosh, I am such a creative mind.)

Anyway, how do you deal with self-doubt? (Specifically that applying to writing?) Ignore it? Remind yourself of your awesome? Talk to other people about being a tortured artist?