I’m Molly Magestro, and I teach writing
at UW-Washington County in West Bend.
And I have a Ph.D. in creative writing
from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Part of my process as a writer is, you know, learning from and
teaching other people how to approach various aspects of creative writing.
I start on my laptop, just because that’s always around and easy enough.
So usually, when I have a draft of something, I print it out and mark it up.
And then I have various notebooks.
And when something is bothering me, when a scene’s not working,
or I’m having trouble getting my thoughts down, like,
the pen-and-paper writing usually helps get my process flowing a little bit.
And I start out setting out some writing goals for the day.
Today, I’m working on a chapter that I’m sort of
in the middle of, and I want to write at least 500 words.
And always stopping where I still know what I need to say next.
What I actually usually do is start a new document
to type the day’s words so that I don’t have to do any math.
I’m reading a book right now, but it uses the phrase “as it turned out” a lot.
And that’s [chuckles] literally the phrase that I’m supposed to be
writing right now, and I don’t like it.
So I’m going to feel stuck for a minute.
[typing sounds]
I’m writing a novel. It’s called Everything Possible After.
And this is [chuckles] draft six.
So I wrote the first draft based on an idea
that I had just to get everything down.
Went through, flushed it out, turned it into something that was novel-length.
I have a writing -- had a writing group at the time, so shared it with them,
got some feedback.
Incorporated that feedback into draft three.
Have a friend who’s an agent. Sent it to her.
Incorporated her feedback for draft four.
And I thought draft five was the draft. I really did.
And I was happy with it for a couple months,
and then I took a break to write my other book.
And came back to this and said, nope, not yet.
So I’m in the process of turning this book into
more of a romance novel than it started out as.
So making some drastic changes and trying to cut about 15,000 words.
One of the things that I am trying to figure out in this scene
is what it exactly is that causes the tension between Nora and her mom.
And I had this idea in draft five that was working pretty well.
But I’m not sure that it still works
because I’m actually changing the premise of the book.
So it had started out as a response to Nora’s brother-in-law dying.
I changed the circumstances of his death.
And I hadn’t really realized how widespread the ramifications of that
were going to be in the motivation for a lot of the characters throughout the draft.
So, I mean, really I just changed one detail.
And I’m going to have to lose characters, probably.
And, like, getting the rest of the pieces to fit together the way they were before.
It’s not quite working out the way that I had hoped.
[typing sounds]
And now I have to go through and spell check because
I can’t handle the little squiggly red lines.
It’s particularly challenging at this point because mostly
I feel like my character is acting like a jerk.
And I’m just, like, what are you doing?
But it makes sense to her, which is more important, I think,
than whether or not it makes sense to me.
Or whether or not it’s something that I would do.
And this is the part that’s frustrating because this is,
like I said, draft six of this paragraph, essentially.
And I don’t like it.
It’s not -- it’s not working yet.
So it’s one of those things that I know I’m going to have to come back to again.
And this is the part in the process where I try and decide,
do I need to do it again now and try and, like, fix what’s not working?
Or do I just let it be?
I’m almost 7,000 words into a project that’s hopefully
going to end up to be about 90,000 words.
And I have a few spots already that I’ve flagged that are, like,
paragraphs or sections that I’m not quite sure about yet.
And some of it is specific detail that I haven’t figured out yet,
which is why I have my other computer over here
with my list of important dates and information.
Like, how many years apart are the sisters?
Just those sort of little comments about, since she was so much younger than me,
or what have you, that you don’t really think about needing
until you need it, and then you can’t find it.
[typing sounds]
I only like the end of this paragraph.
[typing sounds]
One of my teachers when I was an undergrad at UW-River Falls,
Jenny Brantley, said to me, if you have a surprise ending,
what happens to the story if you take it and you put it at the beginning?
You put the ending at the beginning and then let the story be
about the story instead of being about the surprise.
And that advice pops into my head actually quite a lot,
but I think that might be the answer for this paragraph.
I like the last sentence and not the rest of it,
so I think I’ll try -- move that to the beginning.
See what happens from there.
Might be a better approach than trying to force this paragraph
into the shape that I had it here.
Okay, I’m excited about that.
[ Silence ]