Every Book a Stepping Stone
On writing diaries, re-using ideas, and the messy process
I often keep a diary while writing my books. It’s nothing close to daily. (I’ve also kept a personal journal since I was about 8 years-old, and years and years may go by between entries and then a frenetic daily scribbling, usually in times of emotional upheaval.) It’s similar to my writing diary.
When everything is going smoothly, I don’t feel the push to write. But when I’m struggling and confused, when I’ve written myself into a corner and can’t see the way out, that’s when I reach for it. Writing out my thoughts is how I think. It’s literally why I’m an author. So my diaries are records of the hard writing days and allow me to think and write my way out of the quicksand of creativity.
It also helps to be able to look back at my thoughts a year or two later, when that book finally comes out and I’m expected to answer interview questions about it. So I’ve been reading through the entries, refreshing myself on my thought process as I worked on my upcoming novel, The Inevitable Undoing of Zahara Douglass, which releases August 11.
Those entries have helped me realize something: every book I write is a stepping stone on the way to the next one. Even more, each book is also a step toward a clearer picture of myself.
When Zahara hits the shelves in a few weeks, it will mark the end of a 13-year journey. Of course, I didn’t work on the book for 13 years straight. I would come back to it between other projects, with more time off than on, but the idea has been around that long.
In 2013, I first started a draft of a book I was then calling The Book of Secrets. So many things about the story changed over the next decade: it went from YA to adult, the time period shifted, the book mentioned in the title disappeared from the narrative, characters were cut and re-added.
The current iteration started in earnest in January 2024, and that’s where the diary starts. Reading those entries now is really illuminating. The story I’d been carrying in my head for 11 years always had problems I couldn’t quite solve. I’d written a full draft of it about 10 years ago, but it didn’t really have an ending, and the middle sagged under issues I kept circling without resolving. The journal entries from early 2024 are full of me wrestling with all of it again, with over a dozen books under my belt, older and wiser and hopefully ready to whip the story into shape.
Then came February 2024, and I did what I so often do in the thick of figuring out a story: I threw a lot of new things at the wall. Secret societies. Time travel. Gnostic deities. Lots of delicious ideas that felt right for a while, but ended up being stripped out again a few months later. sigh
My process is often messy. I’m still trying to make my peace with that.
But even though so much landed on the cutting room floor, none of that work was wasted. Those discarded ideas, the ones that didn’t belong in Zahara’s story after all, watered the soil of my next idea, my current work in progress, code-named Blitches. The research, and notes, and ideas were waiting for the right book.
It’s not the first time this has happened, and it won’t be the last. Lots of the research I did for The Monsters We Defy led directly into the book that came after it, Daughter of the Merciful Deep. The work I did for one, the ideas I generated and then set aside, the emotional questions I couldn’t fully answer the first time, all of it resurfaced in the next book, used in new ways and pointed in new directions. The discards aren’t failures. They’re fertilizer.
It’s interesting to look back on my body of work in this way and see the seeds and threads of ideas, themes, and emotions that I use again and again but approach from different directions.
Someone can read my fiction and learn a lot about me. Between the lines of the themes that I’m interested in, the characters I write, and the way that I write them, there is a lot to be learned about me as a person. The path of stepping stones isn’t just leading toward my next book. It’s a record of who I’ve been at each step.
I’ve been considering this much more as I work through my current manuscript and the types of characters that I’ve chosen to include.
My very first book, Song of Blood & Stone, taught me an early lesson about this. After the hardcover came out, my editor asked me to create extra material for a special paperback edition. What she actually wanted was a novella threaded through the completed book, weaving into the existing story. I needed the character at the center of that new material, Ella, to be very distinct from my original heroine, Jasminda.
That was my first time really writing a character very different from me, opposite in personality, outlook, desires, and background. The entire exercise, adding new material to a book already on the shelves that felt connected but was also optional (as some would never read it), was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do as an author to this day. It stretched me in a way I hadn’t been stretched before.
I’m currently rereading Song of Blood and Stone to prepare for a book club meeting, since I haven’t read it in many, many years. And revisiting the character of Ella and remembering how I challenged myself to write her has been really rewarding. Because I’m in the middle of that same challenge again. The characters in my current manuscript are different from me, and I’ve been struggling to sink into the mind of someone who, in so many ways, thinks the opposite of how I think.
We have to become so many different people when we write characters, especially with large casts. I’ve done it before. I know I can do it. But knowing I can doesn’t make it any easier, and I think it’s worth being honest about that, especially for those of you who are in the murky middle of a draft right now, wondering why it’s so hard.
So I keep coming back to the whole picture. My body of work taken together. The things I’m actually trying to say with my books, the hopes I carry for my readers, that they’ll enjoy the story, sit with its questions, maybe even walk away changed in some small way.
When I’m deep in the struggle and the diary comes back out, that bigger view is what keeps me going. Every hard page is a stepping stone to the next one. The discards feed the next book; the characters who fight me teach me something, and the whole winding path keeps revealing, one stone at a time, both where I’m headed and who I am.
📣 Do you keep a writing diary, or any record of your process? And have you ever noticed an idea you cut from one project quietly resurfacing in the next? Let me know in the comments.
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This was so helpful, thank you!
Just in the last year I've started using journaling as part of my revision process. I'm not sure why it never occured to me before, given that I journal regularly in my personal life, but I was on a week-long trip, about to start my next draft, and I decided to hash things out on paper instead of digitally.
Point being, this notebook method is now my FAVORITE revision tool, especially when I'm stuck. I typically start by free writing whatever I know about the stuckness, which invariably leads to specific questions, and through answering those questions, I progressively get clear on what I need to change and how. I can practically feel my brain unlocking as I go.
Thank you for this! Working on my novel has had its ups and downs, but I'm currently in the murky realm of revision. Your last paragraph is particularly powerful--a good reminder for when it's hard to see the forest for the trees, so to speak.