Signs You're on the Right Track

I'm just starting a new project, and it's in that extremely exciting phase where you haven't realized all the traps you've set for yourself, yet, and you fool yourself into thinking maybe you really ENJOY this writing thing, and it's totally going to go smoothly this time, and probably every other time from here on it it will too, since clearly you've now figured the whole thing out.

Fool's paradise, I know. I feel like first chapters in a first draft are like the writerly version of doing whippets or something.

Except, you know, way less fun.

But I think there are some objective signs when you're on the right track, one that leads to somewhere worth going to:

• You're way too many steps ahead of yourself (read: you know the big things you have in store for your characters, and you can't wait to get to them).


• So far, you haven't gotten even a little bit bored during the writing (if I could boil down everything I've learned about writing over the last way-too-many-years, I think I'd wind up with "if you're bored writing it, people will absolutely be bored reading it").


• Specific to YA: adult readers are almost universally unaware of the cultural moments/flashpoints you're referencing (i.e., you've stumbled upon some STREET CRED).


• You know not only what you need your characters to do, but why they, specifically, would do it.


• Some part of what you're doing is, at least in a small way, fun.

That last one comes with the massive caveat that you may still be avoiding writing like a champ, because that's 87.4% of what being a writer consists of (another 7-10% is caffeine and/or adult beverages). But once you've dragged yourself kicking and screaming to the chair, you don't hate every second of being there.

Of course the fact that I feel like I'm ticking all of my own arbitrarily-created, not-particularly-insightful boxes doesn't mean I'm writing something GOOD yet.

God. No. It's possible that hasn't happened even once yet in my entire body of work, and it certainly hasn't ever happened across any meaningfully large chunk of a first draft.

But I think I'm on to something, which is a rare enough feeling that it deserves comment.

I'll keep you posted, not because you want to hear, but because right now, I'm really, really excited about sharing the thing I do.