Courtney Brandt On Always Being Alert for Inspiration

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today's guest for the WHAT is Courtney Brandt author of seven YA novels, including The Queen of England: Coronation. She also writes adult works under the pen name Ann Benjamin.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

Promise not to laugh? I was out for my birthday in 2014 and had, to put it delicately, a few too many glasses of champagne. At some point the next morning, I was having a lie in, and as my brain was wandering, it focused on the topic of British royalty (as one does) and I somehow wondered what the United Kingdom might be without Queen Victoria. I was lucky enough to hold onto that thread, and sometime later began the first draft of what would become The Queen of England: Coronation. Ideas drop in like this from time to time, it’s just important to listen and be alert.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

The book was always going to be driven by my protagonist, Queen Juliette. Here is this poor girl, made Queen of England, with her country under attack and she really has no idea what she’s supposed to do. Juliette needed to find out who was behind the death of Victoria, and plan for her coronation. Those were the concrete plot points I had in place. From there, I was able to build in supporting characters and other plot points.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

In this instance, I thought the coronation was going to serve as the final action in the book, only to be surprised when it ended up in the second act. How Juliette works through her ‘chaos coronation’ is the foundation for her real role as Queen. As much as I wanted to use the coronation as the grand finale, it wasn’t going to happen. In the second and third books of the trilogy, there’s been a bit of moving around, but for the most part, I’ve followed the original plot.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

I’m fortunate in that ideas come to me all the time. I have three novels waiting to be written at the moment, and am still quite active in certain fandoms (I got my start by writing fanfiction).

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

Excellent question. For example, I usually write a novel a year, and I really thought 2018’s was going to be one I’ve had in my mind for two or three years (sorry, A.U.!). Then, out of nowhere, late last year a new, more timely idea, popped in my head and it’s going to be this year’s book. I’m looking forward to both projects, but there is something about my new novel that seems more relevant. An exception to this is when I’m working on a series…and tend to work those out before moving onto another project. However, I wrote my first series out of order, which I realize that makes almost no sense.

I have 8 cats (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

I have an old lady cat who has a basket on my desk. I’ve written in all kinds of environments, but for now, I love my desk top and a twenty-two year old Japanese bobtail. I also have a dear author friend who lives in Texas, quite a few hours behind me in Dubai. We don’t check in every day, but we touch base when big projects are nearing completion.

MEM Author Bethany C. Morrow On the Need for Representation Throughout the Publishing Industry

Today’s guest on the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire podcast is Bethany C. Morrow, author of MEM which released this month from Unnamed Press. Bethany graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a BA in Sociology (but took notable detours in the Film and Theatre departments). Following undergrad, she studied Clinical Psychological Research at the University of Wales, in Great Britain before returning to North America to focus on her literary work.

Bethany joined me to talk about her query process, as well as writing in a post-election world as a black woman, and the concern that minority authors need to be looking for agents that want to represent them for a long-term career, not just as a response to a trend as well as whether or not white writers should attempt to write main characters of color, and the difference between that and being inclusive in your writing.

3 Steps to Writing Success

 by Maxine Kaplan

It’s a sad fact of life that some of the most imaginative people you’ll meet are also the most paralyzed. It’s even sadder when that person is you—or, since this is a post about me, I might as well just as say me.

I spent my life as a chronic procrastinator: clinically disorganized, in my own head to a debilitating degree, always sure that I wasn’t good enough just yet. Those qualities make writing a book hard. But I wanted to write a book. I wanted to write a lot of books. And eventually I did: The Accidental Bad Girl, my debut, came out from Abrams / Amulet on May 15.

So how did I do it? Was it because I suddenly had a surge of muse-given lightning-like inspiration? Um, no. Was it because I had an unexpected amount of free time and was bored? Hell no.

It happened because I managed to put myself in a position where my nerd-based anxiety and Jewish guilt worked for me for once. Follow along my step-by-step process to success:

Step One: Keep your expectations for yourself low, but do keep them.

As mentioned above, when drafting The Accidental Bad Girl, time wasn’t something I had an overabundance of. I had a full-time job, close family in town, and a burgeoning relationship that eventually turned into a marriage. I also don’t sleep and am always exhausted. Some nights writing was the last thing I wanted to do.

Here’s what I did: I set my daily expectations of myself so low that if I didn’t fulfill them I would feel like an ass. I wrote 500 words a day, one day off per week. The words didn’t have to be good. I could add unnecessary adverbs if I needed them to fill out the quota. But I HAD to put 500 new words on the page every, single day.

And I did. Because if I didn’t, I would feel incredibly guilty and unbearably like Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites—living in a den of slack. I was a middling, ambivalent student in high school, but straight As in college broke me of that option. It meant too much to me to not be a slacker, so I wasn’t.

500 words a day sounds like nothing. That’s because it is. But eventually it makes a book.

Step Two: Make friends with smart people who like to read

Unless you’re Krysten Ritter, chances are you do not have an agent or editor to lean on for notes once you churn out an inevitably crummy first draft. And maybe you’re thinking, “I’m a good reader; I can edit this all by myself.”

You are wrong. You will have a million thoughts about your work. Some will be correct, some will be ridiculous, and some will be neither. You need other voices to contribute to a critical mass of opinions, to verbalize your blind spots—I needed someone to tell me I had forgotten to put in stakes for god’s sake. So make some friends.

Why is it important that they’re friends? Because you have to want them to be critical; you have to want all the actionable notes you can possibly assemble. You have to want to be told what’s not working. Being told what’s good about your work feels good, but it’s not really all that useful. And it’s easier to want criticism from people you’re already pretty sure like you.

You could do what I did and luck into a crew of people who turned into writers when you were eleven (see my acknowledgments page). But the internet is a wonderful thing. The Electric Eighteens debut group was my lifeline this year—you can find your people if you look.

Step Three: Calm down and be patient

This is the hardest one, but I discovered a basic truth when writing my first book—and The Accidental Bad Girl is the first book I wrote, not just the first I sold. If you internalize this lesson, it will change your writing life:

You cannot fix what you do not write. You cannot polish what you do not revise. Go step by step and celebrate whenever you finish an iteration of making your story more its ultimate self. Keep going. It will take forever. But it’s there.

Look, I’m no guru. I’m just a thirty-something who doesn’t know how to put on eye makeup and writes in bed even though it’s bad for my back. I don’t meditate even though I should. I don’t do yoga, even though I really should. But I can do nerd. I can do guilt. I can do stubborn.

And sometimes that’s all it takes.