The
following text is not intended to be viewed as a blueprint for other writers to
follow1. Rather, it is an attempt to both clarify/organize
my thoughts and to elucidate the methodologies I typically employ when writing
a novel. However, if other people manage to get something out of this (and also
if it helps them forge their own methodologies in turn), I won’t be
complaining.
Many writers, I’ve observed, often follow strict
schedules when it comes to writing novels: writing so many pages (or achieving
a certain word count) a day, only writing at specific times of the day, and so
on and so forth. I’ve never really been one of those writers, mainly because,
as a retail worker, my hours/days off change on a week-to-week basis, so I have
to continuously adjust my writing time accordingly. Also, every novel is its
own unique challenge, and no two projects are ever the same, so I find that a
“one size fit’s all” approach rigidly adhered to usually ends in disaster.
Therefore, I also need to be adaptive, flexible, and even at times
improvisatory in my approach to each novel. Having said that, over the years I have
designed various methods to writing (along with the creation of assorted tools)
to at least make the process go by in a smoother, and dare I say, more
exceedingly efficient manner.
First off, before starting a novel I do think it’s
important (for me at least) to have some idea for a title firmly in place. This
is taking a page from Alfred Hitchcock’s book: he would often try to pin down a
name for his current movie project early on, because he believed that (to quote
Donald Spoto’s book The Dark Side of Genius) “. . . the lack of a definite
title gave the production an atmosphere of the haphazard and a lack of focus.”
In the case of two of my more recent novels, Harlem Smoke and The Joy
of the Worm, I found the proper title well before even setting down
a word of text. Granted, it’s not always that easy, and sometimes it can take a
while for one to intuitively grasp the title most appropriate for the novel in
composition. Still, I do believe it’s a point worth considering when one is
just getting started on a project.
Secondly, I do feel that it’s not a bad idea to keep
some sort of official journal or notebook handy. This is something I started
doing with Harlem Smoke in 2015, and I did it again with my
French-Decadent short novel in 2019 and, more recently, with The Joy
of the Worm. This notebook will contain important dates (what day I
came up with the idea, what day I came up with the title, what day I named
such-and-such character), along with a list of milestones (more on that later),
notes on the soundtrack (assuming the book will have one), list of
things/details to include at some point, character sketches, rough drafts of
scenes, and things of that nature. These notebooks of mine aren’t particularly
super-organized in the layout of their contents, but the important thing is
that the information is there. On the PC itself, I’ll also create a special
folder dedicated to the novel in progress, where I’ll keep relevant JPGs,
further research material, a subfolder for prior drafts, etc.
(These are the official notebooks I used for Harlem Smoke and The Joy of the Worm)
Next, I’ll often make a list of scenes that I think
will be in the book (these might not be ALL the scenes, but at least the
important ones), often out-of-order. I’ll then make a second list where I take
those scenes and arrange them into a rough chronological order. I’ll then split
the list up into individual chapters. Looking over this list of chapters and
the scenes that comprise them, I go through each chapter and try to guestimate
how many pages in a Word document that chapter will be. By doing this, I can
then get a rough estimate as to how long I think the final book will be (in
terms of page count). While this may seem to be an odd practice to some, keep
in mind that when I wrote books in high school and college it was by hand, on
folded up pieces of paper, so I thus needed to plan carefully so that I knew
exactly how many pieces of paper I needed to use. Also, I like having a rough
idea of how many pages a book is so that I can then set milestones. For
example, if I think a book will be 300 pages, that means every 30 pages I’ll be
another 10% done that book in question (other milestones I like to track
besides each 10% mark is when I reach page 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, and so on,
along with hitting the 50,000 word count and 100,000 word count). I have become
very proficient at this: I expected the first draft of Harlem
Smoke to be 300 pages and it ended up being 292, while I expected
the first draft of The Joy of the Worm to again be 300 pages, and it ended
up being 302. Generally speaking, with novels I usually aim for around 270-300
pages, sometimes going to 400 but not usually. Again, it all depends on the
individual project and that project’s requirements.
(This was the milestone page that I kept for Harlem
Smoke)
(Of course, sometimes the special particular needs of
a project dictate a slightly different working method. Going into The Joy
of the Worm, I knew the book would be divided into twelve main
chapters, each being assigned one of the months on the calendar, so in the case
of that book I listed the chapters first, then decided what scenes would be in
each one. But usually, I start with a list of the scenes).
When it comes to the actual writing of the book, I
try as hard as I can to write the scenes/chapters in chronological order, from
the first page to the last (one book where I didn’t do this was Confusion,
where I wrote the first half in chronological order, but kind of skipped around
the second half, an experience I later swore I would avoid in the future).
Granted, sometimes I might leave a scene kind of sketchy (with the intention
that later on I’ll go back and fill it in in greater detail: a good example of
this is in The Joy of the Worm, where in the first chapter there’s
a scene set at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts: I started writing the book in
September of 2025, but didn’t actually visit the museum until July 2026, so for
a long time that scene was very vague and almost a placeholder). The important
thing is getting the main flow of the book down, so that by the time the first
draft is done, the book is essentially complete (though still raw and imperfect
and in need of refinement). This was something I picked up on when reading an
interview with David Crane in an older issue of Retro Gamer magazine,
where (in regards to his game Ghostbusters for the Commodore
64), he described his method of designing a game, by which he would first
create the game’s total flow, from the title screen to the congratulations
screen at the end, and focus mainly on getting the primary gameplay loop down
first, before later on going to pretty it up with the cool little extra
details. The point is, the first draft might not be the most elegant pf
documents, riddled with typos and unnecessary words and fat to be trimmed, and
with skeletal portions that need meat added to them, but what’s important is
that, for the most part, it can still be read as a finished and complete story.
Once the first draft is done I’ll make a copy of it
on my computer. The original document gets set aside, and the copy I’ll rename
to something like “Second Draft – in progress.” With the second draft, I’ll go
back and add in a lot of the small details that I neglected to include the
first time through, expand sketchy scenes that need expanding, things like
that. Just as the character of Morpheus uses various totems of power in Neil
Gaiman’s The Sandman comic book to make his tasks easier, I
myself have developed a number of useful tools that help me with the editing
process of my books, and which I usually deploy once I reach the second draft
stage. One of the first of these is what I call my Word Repetitions List. This
is basically a list of words/phrases/dialogue adverbs that I tend to
unconsciously use a lot without really thinking about it while working on the
first draft. Originally this was just a handwritten list on a piece of paper,
and it was getting pretty funky and hard to read from repeated usage, so a
couple of years ago I had the brainstorm of typing it up as a document on my
computer. Now, I can just print a new copy up whenever I need it, and as I go
through the manuscript and eliminate excessive repetitions I just cross them
out with a red pen on the printed document (one function of Word that makes
this process even faster is the “Search Document” feature on the navigation
sidebar).
The first two pages of my Repetitions List, starting with
general words and phrases, then adverbs
Another of my favorite tools is my Weird Word List, a
document I’ve been adding to on my computer for well over a decade now.
Essentially, whenever I’m reading a book and come across a
weird/unknown/archaic word, I’ll make a note of it, and every four months I’ll
go through this small list of weird words and add them to my master list of
weird words. This Weird Word List of mine is currently a 45 page document with
over 1800 entries, and with my second drafts I’ll go through the list to see if
there are any words on it I can insert into the manuscript, along with also
using it to make sure that I don’t repeat any of those weird words more than
once. I basically liken this process to a chef adding spices to a meal, and a
judgment call is needed as to how many such words is too many. For example, I
didn’t need to use all that many such words in The Joy of the Worm:
unlike my horror, fantasy, or decadent writings, where I like to use such words
to generate a particular effect or to create an otherworldly atmosphere, The Joy
of the Worm is set in the more mundane and realistic contemporary
world, hence a lot of weird words would seem jarring and out-of-place. So with
this most recent book, I kind of held back a little. Anyway, once that step is
done, I’ll then do a basic spellcheck on the manuscript.
Two pages from my 45 page Weird Word List document
Finally, I’ll print out the second draft, and
carefully read it (usually a chapter a day), using a red pen for corrections or
to make notes for myself. Once that’s done, I’ll create a third copy of the
manuscript, the third draft as it were, and this will be the corrected edition
(where I’ll also add in beginning papers and end papers such as an epigraph
page, acknowledgments, the “about the author” page, and so on), along with
finalizing the soundtrack (assuming that the book has one). This third draft is
usually the one I send to publishers, though sometimes I might also do a fourth
draft if I think the project calls for it. But usually I don’t go over three
drafts.
A brief note on the soundtrack: it’s probably a good
idea not to plan out the book’s soundtrack in detail ahead of time, because
then if the project crashes and burns, it can be dejecting if one had assembled
a really cool soundtrack for it (this is a lesson I’ve painfully learned many
times over the years, so I speak from experience here). So I think it’s a
better idea to just start with a few major songs that you know will feature in
certain scenes, or which gives you an idea of the book’s “vibe.” Much like
Tarantino does with his films, where he tries to find the title song early on
because that song then informs the film’s character, I try to do the same with
my own books. In Harlem Smoke, the two key songs were “The House That
Dripped Blood” by Insane Poetry and “Gimme Hell” by The Jesus and Mary Chain
(the latter of which became the book’s “title song”). With The Joy
of the Worm, it was “Time To Pretend” by MGMT (which ended up being
the book’s “title song”), though “Birds of a Feather” by Billie Eilish was an
important one as well. Once one has made great progress on a book and
completion seems assured, then feel free to start adding songs in more detail.
Naturally, this only applies if music is called for in a book; with my
French-Decadent short novel, this wasn’t necessary, as that book was set in the
1890s.
I hope this gives a brief idea about some of the
processes I generally employ when working on a novel. Short story collections
are a bit of a different beast so some of these methodologies described above
don’t apply in those cases, though the editing process I use is still basically
the same for those.
1 Back in 2020, on Facebook + Twitter, I posted a number of helpful tips and advice for aspiring writers, which I later collected on my old Onxy Glossary blog. You can read those here (but keep in mind with some of them I was either being perverse or not entirely serious): https://onyxglossary.blogspot.com/2020/09/james-champagnes-writing-tips-collected.html
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