i try to keep going but it's not that simple

"caught in the middle" by paramore & decision points

I’m in a real crossroads moment right now in a lot of ways — there are personal decisions, publishing decisions, other decisions all weighing on me. Of course this is what life is, a series of choices. But sometimes I feel more aware of those choices and the flow chart of all the different ways they can branch out, and it gets overwhelming.

Unfortunately I have to be a little coy about all of that, because a lot of it is stuff I either can’t or won’t talk about in a public newsletter. But what I can talk about is these decision point moments in writing, which — surprise! — will turn up in every single thing you write, because what is a novel if not also a series of choices.

My husband’s been working on a project which has gotten me thinking about this a lot. I’m very impressed — he’s been a writing machine lately (making me feel like a slacker lol but in my defense it’s harder to rack up those sexy word count numbers in revisions). Just the other day when we were back porchin’ it he was like “I think I took a wrong turn and have to go back a few pages” and I was like ahhh yes. That moment. But hey, at least it was only a few pages. Sometimes you don’t realize you took a wrong turn for a WHILE, and it can be hard to follow the threads back to where they got tangled in the first place. Sometimes you don’t realize until you finish the book.

Let me share three examples from writing The Art of Catching Feelings so you can see what I mean.

Chris initially asked Daphne out.

Okay, I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.

I KNOW I’ve told this story before, so if you’re a long-time newsletter reader first of all thank you! and second of all please forgive the repetition but — I wrote my first romance manuscript when I was 16, a novel I sent away to Harlequin and got a quick form rejection on. (Technically the form was made out to another writer for another manuscript title, so I maintain my book was never officially rejected! Sensual Chaos¹ is still alive!) I remember passing around pages of my novel to a few of my friends in class as I was working on it, which was a mistake for many reasons but one of which was because they didn’t read romance and had no idea what the conventions were.

“So she likes him?” my friend asked.

“Well, she can’t help but be attracted to him,” I said. “She doesn’t think she likes him. He’s so uptight.”

My friend seemed doubtful. “And he likes her?”

“He’s attracted to her,” I said patiently. “But he thinks she’s a mess.”

My friend handed the pages back to me, clearly at a loss. “I just don’t get why he doesn’t buy her a drink or something. If they’re into each other.”

In real life, the romance I hope for all my friends is that they’re into someone, the someone returns the feeling, and then they go to dinner and a movie or whatever and boom, happily ever after. In real life, I want as few angsty decision points for my friends as possible — they’d never fall in love with their annoying coworker or their ex’s brother, they’d never have to decide between pursuing this dream they always thought they wanted versus sticking around to be with the one they love, they’d never self-sabotage out of fear.

But in a book, of course, we have to make the choices that lead to more friction, that have the most potential, that are just more interesting. Which is why I can’t believe that I even briefly took my foot off the gas and thought, hey, if Chris likes Daphne why doesn’t he just ask her out²? It did have a very cute part of the scene where Chris and Randy were warming up before a game and talking about her and Randy was encouraging him to go for it, but . . . it was too easy. I had to delete, and find another way to get them together.

Justin was going to appear on page.

Daphne’s toxic ex Justin was such a character to me that I really wanted him to show up at the end of the book. I just thought he’d be fun to write! (Ryder, the toxic ex in Never Been Shipped, for example, was a BLAST to write.)

And I mean, c’mon. The best revenge is living well and Daphne’s looking better than ever (taking care of her curls), reporting like a badass on the sidelines (guess you could say baseball’s more her sport now, Justin), and dating a hot professional baseball player (Justin’s in Chris’ autograph line; Daphne’s in Chris’ DMs; they are not the same).

I remember exactly where I tried to put this scene. It was after everything blew up between Chris and Daphne toward the end, when Chris is wandering through the stadium hallways and realizes he’s automatically looking for Daphne because his body/heart haven’t quite caught up to the fact that he shouldn’t be looking for her anymore. In this scene, I had him stumble upon her and her brother and her ex, and there was this tension where a part of him wants to run away and a deeper, more primal part of him wants to stake his claim and never let her go.

It was a sweet scene, because of course once he sees that Justin is there the protective side of Chris comes out and he’s not about to let Daphne look pathetic in front of her ex, so he plays the role of the loving boyfriend. But then it was painful, too, because Daphne thinks maybe this means that he really is softening toward her and gets her hopes up, only to have them dashed again once they’re alone and she realizes Chris is still angry and hurt and not ready to be back in a relationship with her.

Unlike Chris asking her out, this scene did have tension and conflict, it did have a lot of potential as a direction to take the story. But ultimately, it just didn’t feel right to have Justin show up toward the end of the book when he’d never been there before. He’s not my ex-husband, but frankly I felt done with him. I was like, why the fuck should this jabroni get any page time? Daphne’s moved all the way on. We don’t need to prove anything to Justin, because he’s not worthy of having anything proven to.

(I’m not ruling out an eat-your-heart-out-Justin bonus scene tho)

There was no phone sex scene.

This is a story about where the decision point came and you decided NOT to go in a direction . . . and then later you realized maybe that’s what the book was missing.

There’s a scene where Daphne and Chris are talking on the phone early on . . . or at least, he’s doing most of the talking and she’s mostly trying to keep a low profile because he still doesn’t know that the mysterious Duckie he’s been chatting with online is also her. When I was first writing that scene, I wanted to take it farther, but then I got there and . . . I don’t know. I couldn’t quite figure out how to transition? I chickened out? So I wrapped up their conversation and that was that.

Then in her edit letter, my editor pointed out that the book felt a little uneven. It heats up quite a bit in the latter half of the book, when Daphne and Chris are fully together, but tonally the first half felt like it was missing some of that. Since the first half is a lot of Chris and Daphne talking and flirting via text messages, there’s still chemistry between them but . . . it’s not the same.

LUCKILY I knew just what to do and where to do it! I really like the addition not only because it’s hot and it does help even out the book, but also because it subtly changed the dynamic of Chris and Duckie/Daphne going forward. It raised the stakes. It made them more connected, more vulnerable, and added an extra layer of complication for when the truth would eventually come out.

So how do you tell when you’ve made a wrong turn, or what to do when it happens? I tend to be a fairly intuitive writer — a fancy way I guess of saying I prefer pantsing to plotting, although I do often work off notes of milestones I want to hit or scene ideas I have going forward. A lot of times when I’ve made the wrong choice I can just kind of feel it, even if it takes another painful chapter for me to go wait wait, go back, this ain’t right. If a novel is 350 pages of very finely calibrated tension, I can just kind of feel when I’ve let it drop or amped it up in ways that aren’t working.

With the “Chris asks her out” scene, for example, I could feel myself getting bored. Like okay, he approaches her, he’s sweet and bashful about it, she’s surprised but also really really wants to, and maybe I could add some tension back in because she can’t say YES right away when she knows about why it’s a bad idea . . . but no, I was already getting bored.

If you like to get more analytical about it, you could also stop yourself at these moments — whether in an outline or in the draft itself — and brainstorm various ways the story could turn and how that would affect the characters and plotlines going forward. When you’re at a crucial pivot point, really think about it. If I have her talk to her friend here what does that do. If I have her argue with him, where does that get me. If I cut back to her conflict at work, why would that make sense here.

In those situations, I’m trying to think through a lot of different factors: maybe the friend hasn’t appeared in a scene for a while so it would be nice to get her back; maybe I can feel the tension dropping and an argument could pump it back up; maybe the conflict at work also gets at some overarching theme in the book. I’m thinking about setting — do I want to change it up, what would that do to the scene — I’m thinking about the balance of light/heavy; I’m wondering if I need to slow things down or speed things up.

Again, though, I think your subconscious does a lot of this work for you, especially if you read a lot and you’ve just kind of internalized how the beats and rhythms of a story should feel. Sometimes you can’t dwell too much on that endless flowchart of options and decisions, or you’d never be able to move forward.

Okay, that’s enough of all that. I’ve made my points! You can’t be surprised to see another Paramore song already, and this is one of my favorites. I get it stuck in my head all the time. It also gets thematically at things that are always on my mind (and come up in my books a lot): I can’t think of who I was, ‘cause it just makes me want to cry, cry, cry and can’t look back, can’t look too far ahead . . . if that’s not Chris not wanting to see Last Year’s Chris on the screen or Daphne living aggressively in the present, I don’t know what is.

The title of this newsletter was originally going to be gotta keep going or they’ll call me a quitter, because it’s probably the line that gets stuck in my head the most, but then I worried you’d get the wrong idea. I don’t need no help, I can sabotage me by myself . . . Hayley really popped off with that bridge, huh?

Currently reading . . . I just finished The Lust Crusade by Jo Segura and all I gotta say is THANK GOD someone is writing fun, horny adventure romances like this, because I always have the best time reading them. I mean, at one point they are SLIPPING AND SLIDING on a grocery store floor covered in olive oil like something out of a Three Stooges skit, trying to get away from their kidnappers, and then later they’re in a tender bath moment where she washes his hair and then it turns horny again when she gets a bit more of a peek than she’d intended to . . . I was just so fucking in on this book. It publishes in January (and is on NetGalley now), so be sure to check it out!

watching . . . I watched Sign Stealer on Netflix, because when you’re in the mood for a sports documentary nothing else will do. I remember seeing this whole thing discussed on SportsCenter around the time — the sketchy picture of this guy on the sidelines of other games, all the memes. It was fascinating to see this whole other underbelly to college football, how strategic it gets. Like you KNOW it’s strategic but man. A guy making a database of thousands of signs by taking pictures of himself he could cross-reference? The spreadsheets and maps of recruitment data? Sports are so fucking nerdy and I love that about them. I also love when I get to scratch a true crime-adjacent itch but where it’s not about murder.

I’m also into season 2 of Peaky Blinders, a show I somehow never got around to even while my in-laws were OBSESSED with it, but I love Cillian Murphy so here I am. I told this to my father-in-law the other night at dinner and he lit right up. “Tommy!” he said. “I’ve never loved another man but I do love that Tommy.”

listening to . . . I’m making my second attempt to listen to The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. I know people who both swear by this book and people who hate this book. When I asked my husband (who pays way more attention to music producers than I do and knows all kinds of stuff about individual people, what albums they’ve worked on, etc.) he just said “well he basically broke up Skinny Puppy, but yeah, I mean, you can’t deny his credentials.” My first attempt to listen to the book failed just because it is VERY “can you see her face”-meditation-tape feeling on audio, but now I’m trying again and I do think I’m getting stuff out of it. I don’t know. It’s like any other self-help book, where it’s simultaneously mind-numbingly obvious but also comforting to hear reiterated, and powerful if something happens to hit you in the exact right way at the exact right time.

1. She was a drummer in a punk band; he was a buttoned-up businessman newly and reluctantly in charge of the club where her band plays; I still laugh out loud when I type out this title.

2. Seriously, pay attention to how RARELY in romance novels someone just . . . asks someone out. It’d be like a hacker opening a drawer and finding a password book. We need the hacker to remember a niche detail or an important date to figure it out! If the hacker’s not getting inspiration from a random framed picture of a sailboat on the desk I feel cheated!