 Good morning! Welcome back to the Springtime in Surrey blog swap. It's me again, this time with a post from Kellyn Roth, author of Courage to Stay, sharing lessons that she has learned by writing through creative difficulties. Hi folks! My name is Kellyn Roth, though you can call me Kell, and I’m more than honored to be sharing a blog post on Rachel Leitch’s blog today! As you may know, Rachel recently published a story with my anthology/collection, Springtime in Surrey. It’s our first Wild Blue Wonder Press collection, and we’re so excited to hear what you think about it! I also have a story in the collection, and that is a Regency romance novella called Courage to Stay. The idea was to pick something easy, in a genre I’d written before, get it off, and focus on mentoring the other authors in the collection. The idea was not, however, that I would be stuck on this one story for months, struggling to finish a first draft and then to get through the edits! For whatever reason, that just didn’t appeal to me. However, that’s what happened. It’s been a while since I’ve struggled much with a story, and my last three projects (a short story, a novella, and a full-length novel) have been ridiculously tough. More tough than any book I’ve worked on has been for years. I’ll admit it: it boggled my mind. Whatever the reason these last three projects have been so tough (probably just exhaustion), they’re all done now, and while I’m glad of it, it’s always a good idea to give some thought to how I responded and how I would respond next time. The first that caused my trouble was the novel. Like a Ship on the Sea is releasing in September, and it took me FOREVER to get a passable draft together. So much so that I had to push back my editors to get it finished. The problem? The plot as I had it written in the outline was not working. Yet instead of adjusting it as I went or just finishing a draft that was bad, that froze me. I had enough intuitive knowledge to know something was off, but figuring out what and figuring out how to fix it was proving impossible. Even when I went through the rewrites, I found myself hesitating, getting stuck on getting my rewrites set up in a way that made it easy to finish them all in one fell swoop rather than just pushing through and figuring it out as I went. Eventually, with the help of a developmental editor, I managed to get it into some kind of shape—but I can’t say I was in the best of moods after this. And, because my deadlines had been pushed back so much, I had to drive right into Courage to Stay, my Springtime in Surrey novella. At first, I did exactly the same thing I did with my novel—I dove in and discovered that elements of the outline needed tweaked. And then I procrastinated, because I did not want to go through what I did with the novel again. Frozen in place, I waited … Until I decided to give up and just write something, anything. This left me with an unreadable draft—but at least something was written. And after giving it some thought, I dove into revisions by taking one chunk at a time and making it match the rest of the book (because by that point, it had taken on several different tones!). After several rounds of edits, I sent it to beta-readers for feedback and hoped for the best. They gave me some tips to make a few things I knew weren’t working fit it, and that was it. It was done (at least, until the editor got to it). With these lessons in mind, I tackled the last thing—a short story for a collection that’s coming out in 2024 or so. I knew I wanted to just get a fast, ugly draft done—revise a ton—and then have betas give me tips on how to make the silly thing work. So I dove in—and in a week, I had a draft completed—revisions and all. The thing is, I like to write nice first drafts. For many years, I have been able to … but though my energy and inspiration levels change, at the moment, I am tired and creatively bankrupt. Yet I’m a writer—and sometimes working on deadline is a thing, whether you like it or not. Next time I’ll probably be a little quicker to adjust my methods to whatever suits me at the time, rather than clinging to the way I “usually do things.” The truth is, it doesn’t matter how you do it as long as it gets done when it comes to writing novels. Get the words out—and worry about editing them later. Keep testing different processes until you find one that works for you, and then don’t get too worried about needing to adjust if you need to adjust. And whatever you do, just keep writing! About Kellyn Roth Kellyn Roth is a historical romance & women’s fiction author who writes about the empty places where hope has the most room to grow. Her novels include the inspirational Victorian family saga, The Chronicles of Alice and Ivy. When not building her author career or her indie-author-helping business, Wild Blue Wonder Press, Kell is likely getting lost somewhere in the Pacific Northwest with her friends, watching period dramas and facetious comedies, or spending time with her husband. You can find her online at https://kellynrothauthor.com/
Return next Wednesday to hear from another Springtime in Surrey author about compassion versus apathy.
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