Before you take someone's writing workshop

+ September 2023 updates

What’s that sweet sound? Could it be—a school bus? Y’all, the bus stop is in our literal driveway for the second year in a row and as my spiritual director said, “See? Sometimes God just winks at you.” God bless a homeschooler but having three glorious mornings to myself to scribble, sell, and buy overpriced muffins is a gift. If you know me, you know that I love, love, love summer and am far from a pumpkin-spice-clutching Fall Girl™ but there’s a small bit of glitter, deep in my bones, that’s aching for a return to routine. You can only sweep the sand out of your minivan so many times before you start thinking a crock-pot full of soup is sounding pre-tty delectable.

This month, I’m continuing to plug away at my historical fiction middle grade. I’m usually obsessive about writing books in order¹, but for this book, I’m writing the historical timeline first, followed by the modern-day timeline. I finished up the first draft of 1943 Paris and am now mentally hanging out in 2023 Paris. Pass the croissants, s'il vous plaît.

I’m also working on some marketing plans for The Funeral Ladies of Ellerie County—such exciting things coming! Eek! If there’s a bookish or foodie podcast/blog/YT channel that you love, make sure to let them know about the book!

Thank you so much to those who of you who have already preordered—I love how many people have told me they’re planning to use the book as a book club! There will be book club questions provided, so it takes a bit of grunt work out of it for ya.

I was thinking recently about the process of writing The Funeral Ladies of Ellerie County, and how…different of a process it was. Ditto my next middle grade book. It seems as though with every book, the process is radically different for me. There’s no strict process; no hacks or common themes. I wrote Funeral Ladies in a couple of months, practically in a fever dream of Spotted Cow and Anthony Bourdain. The middle grade book I wrote after it, as you’ll remember me telling you, was hard to write. And the one I’m working on now is different, too; the historical aspect requires a ton of research and pauses and googling “the Louvre 1940”.

It’s hard to make a living as a writer; I’m fortunate in that I’m married to someone with a well-paying career and I also have a paid newsletter for Christian women that supports me financially. But it’s not like I get a regular paycheck for telling stories. Many author-friends I kinda-sorta-know on the internet make money by teaching writing, and I was recently approached with the idea of running a paid writing workshop.

Yeah, that was a hard no.²

I don’t actually know how to explain writing to a single person.

I know that sounds crazy—this is my literal job. But as I told this very kind writer, I have no idea how I do this. I could not explain this to another person. It involves a lot of caffeine and crying and driving around listening to playlists and having ideas in the shower. There’s no 5-step process, here. I would hate to take someone’s money only to tell them, “uhh, not really sure; I’m just very tenacious and have a daydreaming problem.”

In college, I once stood in a Very Long Line to meet a Very Famous Author. I told her I wanted to be a writer, and she grabbed my arm and told me, dead serious, not to take any writing classes or workshops because they suck the creativity out of you. It was bizarrely intense. I’m sure this is not a hard-and-fast rule and that there are tons of fantastic writing classes out there. For all I know, she just got fired from a writing workshop or something ten minutes prior.

But.

I’m not against learning how to write, per se. I’m just beginning to become more and more against paying to learn how to do it. There’s so much that goes into writing, and it’s such a taste-specific industry. One person’s Mary Oliver is another’s Stephanie Meyer (no hate intended towards the Cullen family). Go look at the one-star reviews of your favorite book; you’ll be shocked at how many people think it’s a pile of flaming garbage floating down a river of crap. Can any of us really teach each other anything? I don’t know how sure I am. At the risk of sounding like a ridiculous, humble-bragging jerk face: I haven’t taken a creative writing class since the eleventh grade, where I received a B because I cut a lot of class (sorry, Mom, I know you read this) and wrote the final short story that morning before school. Whenever I do so much as read a blog on writing, I find myself over-thinking the next day. Wait, is this pacing following that formula? Did I make a list of this character’s favorite foods yet? Should I go buy some post-it notes? It takes me completely out of that magical flow and into a clunky, self-obsessed doom spiral.

Of course, there are some writers I’ve learned from. So without further ado, here’s a short, choppy list of people and things that have helped me hone my ~CrAfT~.

• If I really love a show or a book, I listen to every podcast that writer has ever been on. So for instance, when I finished Station Eleven³ in a couple of days, I went bananas googling interviews with the writers. I learned a lot about timelines, character development, and asking people to fall in love with a large cast. The number of hours Anthony Doerr or Kate DiCamillo interviews have been played in my car is…high.

• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is the only book on the craft of writing I’ve ever found useful. It changed my life.

• I read this blog series on story structure when I was in high school, and I still revisit it now. It transformed the way I map out my stories before writing them (I’m not a plotter, but I pretend to be sometimes when I need to get paid). If you’re a pantser who can never get past chapter 2, you might find it helpful.

• Fredrik Backman infrequently posts pretty broad writing tips on his Instagram that I’ve found useful. He’s a modern master; if I write anything half as good as Beartown before I die I’ll consider my writing career wildly successful.

…and honestly, that’s it.

Your mileage may vary. If you’re hoping that MFA, or that online writing workshop, or that one book on writing might suddenly make you into a Genius Author…maybe it will! What on earth do I know? I have none of those things. I also don’t have a National Book Award or a ginormous fanbase. If Mary Oliver were alive and hosting poetry classes, I would pay an obscene amount of money to attend one.

But maybe that’s not what you need.

Maybe what you really need to do is just sit your butt down at a coffee shop and write a terrible scene and fix it tomorrow, and do that over and over and over again. And read a lot of great books in your free time.

And maybe, out of that pile of flaming garbage floating down a river of crap, a story will be told.

And lastly, a book I’ve loved lately for…

Kids: We love The Apple Doll by Elisa Kleven this time of year! My daughter is begging to try and make an apple doll of her own, and although I’m the least crafty mom in existence I feel like we might give it a whirl.

Middle graders: The Dollmaker of Krakow by R. M. Romero is a historical fiction fantasy book about the German invasion of Krakow, and I devoured it in two days. I’m going to be in Krakow in a month and a half and it made me so eager to visit that old beaut of a city again.

Adults: I really enjoyed The Vanishing Sky by L. Annette Binder, another World War 2 story, but told from a German family’s point of view. It’s very dark and pretty—slow isn’t quite the right word, but something like it. Lyrical, maybe? It’s not a page turner, it’s a book you sit with for a while.

Thanks for reading along!

-Claire-

1. Ironically, given the nature of this post, I’m about to throw some writing advice I once got that’s helped me. If you’re jumping around different scenes in your book, you might be avoiding the drudge-work of a certain scene. And if you’re dreading writing a scene because it’s so uninteresting, your reader will find it uninteresting, too. I find the easiest way to discern this is to just write scenes in order!

2. One thing I’m actually VERY interested in doing one day is leading some kind of creative retreat, where we gather somewhere beautiful to write during the day and eat a lot of fancy cheese at night and critique each other’s work…but not in a learn-how-to-write way. No panels; no how-to sessions.

3. The show, not the book. I’m aware this might get me thrown in book-jail, but I truly believe this is one case where the show outperforms the novel. I SAID WHAT I SAID.