Guest post written by author V.S. Holmes
V.S. Holmes is an international bestselling author. They created the BLOOD OF TITANS series and the NEL BENTLY BOOKS. Smoke and Rain, the first book in their fantasy quartet, won New Apple Literary’s Excellence in Independent Publishing Award in 2015 and a Literary Titan Gold in 2020. Travelers is also included in the Peregrine Moon Lander mission as part of the Writers on the Moon Time Capsule. In addition, they have published short fiction in several anthologies. As a disabled and non-binary human, they work as an advocate and educator for representation in SFF worlds. When not writing, they work as a contract archaeologist throughout the northeastern U.S. They live in a Tiny House with their spouse, a fellow archaeologist, their not-so-tiny dog, and own too many books for such a small abode.
Ask anyone who’s worked with me and they’d tell you I was a Grade A Control Freak, enneagram type 1. Writing wise, I was a hard outliner. I planned everything. I took meticulous notes in digital and physical formats, and that’s not including my daily planner. I made mind maps for each character with color codes breaking down who they were at the beginning versus who they became. I outlined each transformation my creation would undergo. Until last year, when I underwent my own.
Many of us have changed over the protracted months of 2020. The fires of pandemic, political upheaval, and economic disaster have forged us into something we hadn’t planned on. Someone we couldn’t have ever predicted. I could write a dozen essays on the ways 2020 transformed me–empathy, career paths, gender, life goals–but perhaps the one I expected least, was how this year utterly razed my creative process.
This year, as I’m speaking on podcasts and interviews in preparation for my May launch of Heretics, I have a wildly different set of answers when asked about my process.
We joke a lot about screaming into the void these days, but so much of the writing process involves finding pieces we can fit neatly into a story-shaped void. So what happens in a year where routines disintegrated, where everyday life was overwhelming, underfunded, and isolating? How do we fill the gaps in our stories during The Year of the Void?
When I spoke to Reader’s Entertainment about what last year taught me, I said the year broke me. And for once, that’s not just a melodramatic creative’s hyperbole. It broke my writing too. With the utter lack of routine, I tried to force everything I had into an arbitrary schedule. I even went so far as to try blueprinting every scene down to fifteen bullet points, each with their key words or feelings. During the strange expanse of summer 2020, this whole process culminated with a 20,000 word outline that was utterly useless and a deadline I feared I would never meet.
I was wrung out, exhausted. I faced the bleak isolation and terror of the pandemic, the bone-aching weariness of being a marginalized person in the United States, and the insurmountable grief of losing a parent. I was slamming my head against a literary wall with the book for which readers had endured two years of waiting–after a cliffhanger ending I might add. My readers are saints.
But how could I possibly finish a manuscript when even the glimmers of excitement at having a book launch were tempered by the fact that most opportunities would inevitably be postponed if not canceled? And, perhaps most complex of all: how can I complain when everyone is drowning in the same ocean?
Meanwhile, I had a back-burner project. I often have multiple works-in-progress to act as creative palate cleansers. But this was different. When working on this one, I told myself I could ignore every rule. It was an unrelated project in a new world, with a different point of view, and an utterly self-indulgent, meandering voice. And somehow, while I was unable to pull a single word for Heretics from my brain, I wrote close to thirty thousand words in this other manuscript. Without an outline. Without a publishing date. And without even a hint of a plot.
Guiltily, I looked back at Heretics and, for perhaps the first time all year, truly saw Nel. She was exhausted. She was isolated in space with barely an ally in sight. She was terrified of killer sound waves that had taken one of her crew mates. And she was overwhelmed with grief for her best friend in all the world.
Oh.
Being a professional creator isn’t always an easy road–often you’re your own boss and while that comes with its share of freedoms, it also yokes us with a lot of responsibility. Every choice, even with something as behind-the-scenes as our creative process, becomes a gamble. In the midst of this I have been making some needed and drastic business changes, and with that added investment came a huge dose of anxiety. How could I face one more transformation? Would scrapping all the work and time I’d put into this project set me back even farther? But what I had, and the process I’d stuck with wasn’t working.
So, tucking the novella-length outline into a folder where I no longer had to make eye contact with it, and with two months until it was due at the editors, I started over.
And there Nel was, angry as ever, wanting to protect her family and planet, isolated and ill-equipped for most of what she faced, but determined to at least try and save the world. I didn’t check the outline once. And now, with her fourth adventure ready to blast into the world in early May, I’m already almost finished with her next one.
In a world where so many of us are floundering, it’s easy to search for structure in all the wrong places. As my day job as an archaeologist begins again, with the thawing soil, I know my writing schedule will change and probably morph over the coming season. But now I have one more tool in my creative toolbox. Moreover, I’ve taken the terrifying plunge of tossing an entire outline and method in favor of something I’d never tried before as a professional.
Transformations are as inevitable as they are uncomfortable. But what is the creative process if not calculated transformation? We collect our raw materials– complicated emotions, imperfect personalities, and impossible choices–and dump them into the creative fires of our minds. Then, like this past year did to us, we forge those fragments into something complex, imperfect, and utterly unexpected.
