The Game of Writing by Guest Kara Seal

So you successfully defeated the boss on level three and achieved a high score. You think to yourself, “that wasn’t so hard, this game is easy.” Level four is a little more demanding, but thanks to your well-honed skills, the dungeon is soon in sights and victory is inevitable! Only this boss has moves you’ve never seen before, and after three hits it’s game over. Sometimes, this is it how it feels starting a new writing project, except the game’s not over unless you give up.

There are several ways to write a book, and every writer has their own process. But what happens when your tried and true method fails? What worked for one book might not work for the next. To date, I’ve completed four manuscripts, all of which were written chronologically and all of which I employed the “edit as you go” approach. The method was golden. Or so I thought. Enter current project, which after four false starts still didn’t feel right. Things weren’t clicking. This story refused to let me write it in the way I thought was MY process. Somehow my book decided it wanted to be written out of order and without much fixing before moving on to the next scene or chapter. When I lamented my trouble, several writer friends expressed similar frustrations. Just as no two writers create in the same way, every book is a different game.

If, like me, you find yourself reinventing your process, how do you know if you’re doing it right? After fighting this story for months with very little progress, I realized I needed to stop resisting and listen to my characters. I needed to go where the story took me. Like real people, characters aren’t cookie-cutter creations, so why should I expect the telling of their stories to be a uniform process? This isn’t to say that your method SHOULD change from book to book; some of us are creatures of habit, and if the shoe fits, wear it. But for those of us who thrive on variation, we might find the need to adapt our process with each new idea.

The bottom line is writing is hard no matter how you go about it. The key is to keep putting words on the page and keep improving your craft. And remember, the game isn’t over until you give up, so press start to continue and play again.

Kara Seal holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from Colorado State University. By day, she’s a Programming Assistant at a public library district. By night, she’s a writer of young adult and middle grade fiction, and an active member of Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and Pikes Peak Writers. Kara was a finalist in the 2013 Colorado Gold writing contest. She lives in Colorado with her husband and two high energy dogs.