Like a lot of people, music is a big part of my writing process. The way it captures emotion in such a concentrated way, the way it can really get you in the extremely specific mood that you want for a scene—when I'm writing, I'm basically living inside a playlist at all times.
Last night I went to see Keshi, and it felt like a full-circle moment, for a few reasons.
I started listening to his music around this time last year, right after I'd signed with my agent, and I was doing a third full rewrite on When the Sky Is Deepest Blue to get it ready to go on submission to editors.
I was looking around on Spotify to refresh my book playlists (I make an unreasonable amount of playlists, down to separate ones for individual scenes 🤪). And I came across this song that felt like it was resonating on the same frequency as my brain while I was thinking about this story. It was like I could feel this song reverberating in my internal organs.
The way the "Tear me to pieeeeces" line feels—that really hit on an emotion I was trying to write.Â
So I was listening to Keshi on loop while I was working on that last rewrite before sub, the one where things really gelled and came together.Â
It was a time in my writing life when I was enjoying myself, and I felt like things with this story were clicking and becoming the best version of themselves. I still go back and look at my old Instagram Stories when I want to remember what that felt like, rereading my overly earnest captions like I'll get a contact high.
"having one of those days when it actually feels really good to write
i'm always too quick to forget those when they're over
got to savor the moment."
"finished the bigger line edit round
half way through a second round of smaller line & copy edits
sending it in on monday
i actually really love this book ðŸ˜Â
i love something i wrote
i don't know what will happen next
but i know that feeling usually doesn't last, so i want to remember it 💙"
But much more than the flimsy words, the music takes me back. I listen to Blue more sparingly now—my head's been in another story, in different playlists and songs, a different emotional palette. But when I listen to it again, it's wild how it brings those feelings back to the surface.Â
Listening to it now, I can slip through time for a second, to that sunny moment in the middle of that third full rewrite. Dappled light falling across my desk, writing through the weekends. Drinking iced coffee, stress-eating mango tamarind candy. The clacking of my keyboard, and the familiar colors on my screen, toggling between Scrivener and my outline spreadsheet. Scenes coming into focus in my mind, more vivid than ever. Characters I knew so well, coming more into their own, their voices getting clearer in my head.Â
Two other artists who were also on heavy rotation in my revision playlists, around then, are James Ivy and No Rome.
I especially associate these songs, respectively, with: Jay's character at the start of the story, and Deedee's character at the midpoint FOR REASONS I CANNOT DISCUSS.
A couple months after I got my book deal, I saw that Keshi, James Ivy and No Rome were touring together (very considerate of them to me, personally!) and I rushed to get tickets.
Aaand last night, I finally went!Â
I roped in three people who'd never heard any of this music to come with me (true friendship lol). We sat in the nosebleed seats so it would be low stakes, and went to get late-night diner food after. It was, all around, a good time.
Writers pursuing traditional publishing talk a lot about celebrating every win and making the feelings of accomplishment along the way tangible, because the Big Milestones are few and far between, and even those can feel pretty unreal.Â
Take signing with a literary agent: On the one hand, truly life-changing, a day I had longed for and worked toward for literal years. On the other: A day in most respects like any other, but I had some very exciting emails and a lot more Twitter notifications, chased with bone-tingling anxiety about all the challenges ahead.
The truth is that things have felt pretty shapeless and vaguely unsettling for me since I got a book deal—lots of waiting, lots of researching and thinking about all the things that can go wrong with sending a book into the world and all the ways it can fall flat. Lots of stressing about the million things I could potentially do for promo but not actually finding myself able to really…do them yet.
A concert, though—that feels tangible, like it has a shape. A concert feels like a party.
Blue wasn't on the setlist, but a lot of my other favorites were (and there were a few where I belted out the lyrics along with the strangers around us). After a year of listening to this music alone in my headphones and feeling things about it, it was pretty cathartic to be surrounded by people screaming and waving their phones and singing along too.
I don't even really know what I'm trying to say—music is my favorite form of time travel? The good writing days might be my favorite milestones? I should go to concerts more often?
Anyway, if you want to listen to my book playlist, it's here 😌
Should we talk about full rewrites one more time? Sure, why not.
How I approach a full rewrite, pt. 3
I promised a three-parter on how I approach a full rewrite, and man, I just love follow-through. So here's the third part—how I organize the ideas I get while I'm making my way through a full rewrite and how I continue to do scene-level planning along the way.
(If you're revising a novel and want to see how I approach a full rewrite from start to finish, you can read the first two parts here and here.)
So let's go back to last spring again, because the way I approached it then was my favorite way I've done this so far.
I'd done all this planning and character work and brainstorming. I had a new outline. I had a plan! I was ready to actually dig into the rewriting itself.
But I'd done this a couple times now, and I really wanted to do it right, finally, so maybe I wouldn't have to rewrite this book again. And a key part of that for me was making sure things were building consistently in the emotional underpinning of the story, and that I was taking into account how the events impacted all the major characters and reflecting that in their actions, big and small.
Something about how my brain works makes it hard for me to fully think through those ripple effects until I'm in the thick of it, typing line by line. So I made an adjustment to my process to work around that: I alternated days between planning a scene on a more granular level one day and actually rewriting that scene the next.
Feelings timelines:
To force myself to think through each scene from the perspective of all the major characters, I started doing this thing I called feelings timelines. Basically, for each scene of the book, I would make myself answer a bunch of questions about each character to help me think through what’s going on with everyone in that scene, under the surface—how they're impacted by what took place immediately before this, what they want right now, how their attitudes to certain things are changing, how they feel about each other, how they leave the scene a little bit different than they came in. I'd answer these questions and write a messy little summary of the scene from four character's perspectives: Deedee's, Jay's, Deedee's mom's, her best friend Suzy's. This wasn’t good prose that I was writing; it was all very tell-y, just to help myself think things through.
I did this because I wanted to make sure the characters felt dimensional and consistent, and I wanted to make sure that a sense of momentum was building in the underpinning of the story—that the things that happened, even in moments with quieter, mostly emotional stakes, felt consequential and like they were contributing to a growing swell.Â
A lot of what came out of this was bottom-of-the-iceberg kind of stuff that showed up on the page indirectly, but sometimes I'd get ideas that made it onto the page too—bits of dialogue, a clearer idea of how two characters would interact, an idea for a transition, even ideas that made me want to totally recast scenes. It would also spark ideas for parts of the book I wasn't working on yet.
Scene-by-scene idea catcher doc
While I was making my way through, I would have so many mini a-ha! moments for different places in the book.Â
But I really like working chronologically, because it lets me feel in my gut how things are building from beginning to end. So I set up a Google Doc that was structured in a way that made it easier to catch my out-of-order ideas.
At the top, I have a table of contents (using those shorthand names for scenes that I used in my outline spreadsheet):
Each scene name is a link that goes to a bookmarked section for that scene below. So when I click on one, it jumps down to an area where I can drop notes about that scene:
And I added a link back to the top at the end of each scene's area, so I can pop around more easily.Â
When it's time to properly write through that scene and I come back here, I'll usually have a bunch of material waiting for me. (I'm not showing you my notes here lol, it's too much like showing you the inside of my brain).
If I'm cutting and combining scenes on this rewrite, this is also a good way to keep track of material from a deleted scene that I might want to relocate somewhere else.
Scene skeletons
At the end of my "planning day" writing sessions, I'd comb through the feelings timeline doc and pull any ideas I wanted to use in the scene itself into a new doc that would serve as a loose outline for the scene. I feel like outline is even too structured a word for this—my scene skeletons read more like a bad verse novel at this stage. For some reason it just helps me to take thinking through what happens as its own step, and then turn that into full sentences as a second step.
I'll pull things from the feelings timelines, from my scene-by-scene ideas doc, and from my older draft(s), if applicable, into this skeleton for the new scene. I'll organize it the way I want, think about the arc of the scene and the right sequence of things and the transitions.
Then when I come back to write the next day, I have this doc in one half of my screen and the actual manuscript doc in the other, and I'll look at this skeleton and write it through. It helps me a lot to work up to facing the blank page instead of going in cold.
I'll alternate like that, between planning and writing, and eventually I'll get to the end. And in between is my favorite part of this whole thing, where the moments I want to remember the most happen.
I hope you get to have lots of those moments too!
Thanks for reading <3
Love always,
Clare