Your novel-writing questions answered

Earlier this week, I asked if you had any questions about writing novels, and so many of you did! I've combined similar questions into a few umbrella questions and reworded some of these slightly, but these are the things you wanted to know about. I'll answer to the best of my ability!

First, though... preorder my debut novel! Woodworking follows Erica Skyberg, an English teacher and recently out trans woman in Mitchell, South Dakota, who decides to start asking the only other trans woman she knows for advice. Except that woman is Abigail Hawkes, one of her high school students, who would rather do anything else. And all the while, an election looms on the horizon...

Woodworking has starred reviews from Kirkus ("pristinely characterized") and Publishers Weekly ("a must-read"). Remarkably Bright Creatures author Shelby Van Pelt calls it "an ode to authenticity and a must-read in our current times." Nevada author Imogen Binnie says it's "one of the most heartfelt, funny, and moving portraits of transition I’ve ever come across."

It's out March 4, and yes an audiobook and an e-book will be out that day too! Preorder with the buttons below.

And if you are in New York, Minneapolis, or Los Angeles, please come to one of my live events promoting the book! I promise they'll be a blast.

Now on to your questions!

This was by far the most popular question (I got several variations on it), so I'll lead off with it:

How do you transition to writing fiction when you're used to writing nonfiction? How are the two forms different?

My situation here is a bit specific and weird, so I'm going to start there and back my way into talking about nonfiction versus fiction. The truth of the matter is that I had to teach myself to write nonfiction. When I started blogging (cough) many years ago, it was under the pretext of using my blog to further the TV writing career I figured was just around the corner. Lots of wannabe writers were using blogs to connect in those days, and I was sure one of them.

However, in addition to posts about writing, I started doing occasional TV episode recaps. Those recaps soon became so popular that I started "hiring" other writers to recap different shows (I don't think I ever paid anybody a single cent), and off those recaps, Matt Zoller Seitz found my work and brought me on at The House Next Door. From there, I went to The A.V. Club, and you know the rest.

The thing that made people appreciate my recaps was that they weren't being written by a wannabe TV critic but a wannabe TV writer. Every time I wrote about an episode of TV, I was running it through a filter in my brain of how I thought about the way stories functioned. I was more than happy to credit shows that did something different from what I would have done and pulled it off, but I was always, always, always looking at TV from the perspective of someone thinking about its creative potential as a medium, even when I'd been working as a critic for a decade.

What this meant was that when I got to Vox, I very suddenly had to teach myself a lot about writing nonfiction and journalism that I hadn't previously known. Yes, I had gone to J-school, but a tiny one that primarily existed to turn out small-town newspaper editors. I would go into meetings with Vox editors and be occasionally thrown by the expectations they had for how I would be handling the job. I'm a fast learner, and I caught up quickly, but that was where I had to learn on the fly. Every time I slipped back into writing fiction, it was like I was speaking my first language if that makes sense. I love nonfiction, journalism, and criticism; it's also something that comes a bit unnaturally to me.

When I submitted the first draft of Woodworking to editor Lindsay Ribar – long before I had an agent or anything – she very quickly sussed out that I was writing prose fiction like a screenwriter. I had added maybe four or five instances of interiority, and I thought I had, frankly, crushed it, because interiority is death to a piece of screenwriting. Lindsay quickly disabused me of this notion, and that was the single biggest lesson I had to learn in writing the book: I get to nod to what the characters are thinking in a book in ways I don't in a screenplay.

Yet I think this advice is also useful for nonfiction writers making their way into fiction! Nonfiction certainly will speculate as to the motives of people it writes about, especially if it has some kick-ass primary sources, but for the most part, it requires a kind of detachment, the eye of a neutral observer. Fiction invites you to imagine the whole person, from the inside out. So if you're struggling to do that with your characters, just write a couple of scenes describing intensely emotional experiences they've had. They don't have to be good. They just have to be on the page. The more you do this, the more it will start to feel natural.

(Also: If you've written a lot of nonfiction work under the time crunches often inherent to journalism, gig work, or academia, you've probably gotten very good at writing cleanly and quickly, which is a huge boon to writing fiction!)

Why did you pick the agent you have and why did they pick you?

I had a few agents interested in Woodworking, but from the moment Lindsay (whom you should work with!) mentioned Victoria Marini to me, I was semi-certain that she was going to be a great fit for me. Some of this was research I did into her client list, some of it was Lindsay insisting that we would work well together, and some of it was just vibes.

However, while Victoria loved Woodworking, she also didn't think she could sell it effectively and worried we weren't on the same page about its overall artistic aims. Perversely, this made me even more sure she was exactly who I wanted to be working with. We had a phone call in which I said I wanted to make sure the book wasn't just a niche title – nothing wrong with niche titles! – but, rather, something "a lady might read on an airplane." Sufficiently persuaded that we were on the same page, Victoria was in.

For some screwed up reason, I like to surround myself with people who will tell me when they think I'm not hitting the mark. The other agents who talked to me about the book were very much in the "We could take this out with minimal edits" camp; Victoria thought it needed a much more extensive reworking. I ended up agreeing with her. With her notes, the book became a million times better.

So that's my advice: Find someone with whom you're creatively aligned who also won't be afraid to tell you when you're not quite pulling it off.

Do you write for a specific reader?

In a first draft, no. A first draft is for me. I'm using it to scratch an itch I've got somewhere in my brain, to tell a story I want told but have never seen told in quite this way. A first draft is also research and development in many ways. The story slowly reveals itself, and eventually, you've got something that starts to look like a novel.

In subsequent drafts, the reader starts to become more apparent to me. I started out writing Woodworking for me, but somewhere in the middle of writing it, I started imagining someone picking up the book in a Target. I didn't want to specifically target people who read semi-casually, but I wanted to leave the door open for those readers all the same. At the same time, I wanted to make sure there was plenty of good stuff in there for trans people who long to see themselves represented in fiction.

This is ultimately how I landed on "a book a lady might read on an airplane." I have had some of the most emotional reading experiences of my life on planes, and that was how I started to think about Woodworking – a journey one could take, perhaps even literally.

How do you develop character names?

Here's my hierarchy of character-naming methods:

1. A character name just pops into my head wholesale. (This happened with "Abigail Hawkes," one of my protagonists in Woodworking.)
2. I think of a person in my life or an actor whose vibe I want to capture with the character, then swap that person's initials and come up with a new name from there. So if I were to base a character on Taylor Swift (IT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN), I would come up with a character whose initials were S.T., then something like Sarah Trammell. I honestly don't think any characters in Woodworking were named in this method, but it tends to be my go-to when I'm stuck.
3. I figure out roughly when the character would have been born and consult the government's top baby names for that year, then look up the geographic locale where they live and look for last names in old phone books there. There's a minor character in Woodworking named Hank DeWaard who was named in this fashion (though "DeWaard" is a name from around where I grew up).
4. If all else fails, I make a joke. There's a character in Woodworking named Ron, and he is named for Ron Livingston, whose voice I always heard in my head when I wrote the character, though the two are quite different in almost every way. Thank you to Ron Livingston.

I'm curious on the timeline. Did you sell it before or after you wrote it? How many publishers did you/your agent shop it to? How long did it take to write? Did you write it during 'work' time or your free time? How long and how many edits between the first draft and final version? How long between final version and publication date?

Here is an extremely rough timeline:

I started writing Woodworking on November 2, 2020. We had just wrapped principal production on Arden, season 2, and all of my pent-up, pandemic lockdown creative energy was looking for somewhere to go. So every night after I wrapped Vox work, I would settle in and write for several hours. Did I lose my mind? Yes. I still got the thing done.

I tend to write first drafts quickly, so by February of 2021, I had a complete first draft of around 105,000 words, which was a bit long for a debut novel. I set the book aside for a few months to focus on other writing. In the fall, I reached out to Lindsay, who had an opening in her calendar for January 2022. That gave me a deadline to work toward. I revised to meet that (draft two), then worked with Lindsay for what became draft three.

Draft three is the one I sent out to agents. I ended up signing with Victoria that fall, with an eye toward having a major revision of the book done by early November 2022, just in time for my child to be born. Except... oops! The child came a month early, which meant I was writing the draft of Woodworking that ultimately sold while caring for a newborn. Did I lose my mind? Yes. I still got the thing done.

Victoria submitted that draft to a few publishers in early 2023, and it seemed to me that Crooked Media/Zando jumped in very quickly to buy the book. From there, it was a process of revising with Caolinn Douglas, my editor at Zando (and a brilliant human). She and I kicked around a couple more drafts, and then there were copy edits to be finessed. The final major revision was done in early January 2024, and the final copy edits were done in October 2024. And the book comes out on March 4. Phew!

The final word count? Just under 105,000 words. A bit long for a debut.

When writing adult literary fiction, how do you decide how much plot to have?

I am too much of a screenwriter at heart to avoid plot altogether. I wouldn't say Woodworking has an especially tense plot, but it certainly has a fairly detailed, complicated one, with lots of characters, all of whom have at least rudimentary arcs. I tend to love books where there's not a lot of plot, but I simply cannot write one to save my life. So I wouldn't especially say that I made a "choice" on plot, so much as I struggle to think of fiction as being about anything other than a character making big choices when confronted with a dilemma. It's just who I am.

Oddly enough, one of the things that first inspired me to write the book was Gone Girl. The feeling I had in the middle of that book when a new narrator suddenly took over the narrative was so jarring and delicious to me, and I wanted something like that for my own readers. You would really never know that to read my book now, but it was part of why the book is told in alternating voices – to the degree that some chapters are in third person and some in first. So even though I knew I was writing something closer to a comedy of manners, I was still drafting off a very plot heavy genre.

I have honestly found this a useful hack when writing books that don't have obvious plot hooks. I read a lot of plotty fiction, then let that steep in my brain as I'm writing. A huge influence on Woodworking, for instance, were the Locked Tomb books by Tamsyn Muir, but I would dare literally anybody to explain to me why that was the case. On the other hand, when I'm writing something that has a heavier plot, I'll often read a lot of experimental fiction to keep my brain whirring in a different direction.

I want desperately to be a writer like Kelly Link or Octavia Butler who can have an intricate, bizarre world but center it deeply in a 10- or 15-page story about one person's life, but my plots keep running off. How do you know how long a project is or should be before it announces "I'm a short story/a novel/a half-hour pilot/an hourlong"?

This eventually becomes second nature, but my life as a critic helped me considerably here. I had seen so many TV shows that didn't have enough story to spread across however many episodes that I started to develop an intuitive sense about my own work when I was writing a TV pilot that longed to be a movie or something. It made it so much easier to imagine the version of myself who might be reading or watching something I had written completely cold.

Screenwriting is also helpful here because it eventually teaches you to jettison parts of scenes that are just there to take up space. (My friend Jessica Ellis has a great post about this here.) A screenwriting question that I think also applies to most fiction writing is "Are you entering the scene too early?" because you're almost never entering the scene too late. What's the heart of this beat? How does it matter to the characters? And so on.

Genre fiction makes it so tempting to go all in on elaborate worlds, but if you look at Link's writing, especially, she is very careful to nod to a much larger world beyond that depicted on the page without ever actually depicting it. A lot of David Lynch and Hayao Miyazaki films operate under a similar principle. The less your characters know, the better.

Honestly, this is good advice to myself, too! I'm writing something that is very overtly an homage to the mystery box TV shows I loved as a teen and twentysomething, and the temptation to over-explain is always there. Resist it as much as possible.

Who's Roberta?

Woodworking is dedicated to Roberta, who was my maternal grandmother and one of the few people who saw me even a little bit when I was a little girl struggling to make myself heard. I do not think she ever would have called me her granddaughter had I tried to tell her I was (I never did), as she was very Catholic, but I think she understood I was different on a very primal level and made sure to support me in the way I needed. So the book is dedicated to her!

Thank you for all the great questions, and here's one last plug to buy Woodworking. Preorders help me out so much!

This week's reading music: "Townie" by Mitski

The free edition of Episodes, which (usually) covers classic TV and film, is published every other Wednesday, and the subscriber-supported edition of Episodes, which covers more recent stuff, is published every Friday. Paid subscribers also have access to the weekly Monday Rundown. This newsletter is written by Emily St. James and Libby Hill. If you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).