The Writing Process

This is Sarah’s book, and Sarah’s story, but as her co-writer I would like to pull back the curtain a little bit on our book and into the writing process. Turning a book from a dream into a reality is a long, hard process. When Sarah came to me, she had a completed first draft of her story, but it lacked structure. The characters and plotlines were all over the place, coming and going haphazardly, and while that fit in with the chaotic nature of the life reflected in those pages, it didn’t make for a compelling book yet. Whether we know it or not, we’ve all been raised on narrative structure – whether you’re reading a book, watching an Oscar-nominated movie, or binge-watching a sitcom on Netflix, there are certain expectations that a story needs to fulfill in order to feel complete.

Take Mean Girls as an example. Essentially, we expect an inciting incident (Cady gets put into regular school), rising action (Cady going from being an associate of the Plastics to gradually becoming entrenched in their club), conflict and climax (Regina finding out about Cady’s treachery and trying to bring her down, leading to the gymnasium scene where Regina gets ridiculed by the whole school and getting hit by a bus) and resolution (Cady coming to terms with herself). These tropes can take many different forms in many different films or books, but usually if you scratch beneath the surface of a well-told story you will uncover them.

In our story [SPOILER ALERT], Sarah’s inciting incident is going overseas to model for the first time – a change which opens all sorts of possibilities. The rising action occurs as she spends more and more time in Asia, losing touch a little bit with her life back home as she falls into a world of boys and jobs and tries to make it in the industry. The conflict comes as she oscillates between two men in different countries and her career begins to sputter, climaxing as she finally moves on from the man of her dreams and runs out on her agency to go join a car rally. The resolution is when she comes back to Canada to find herself again.

Even though we plan to market this book as creative non-fiction, it was important to me not to manufacture any of the above pieces of the puzzle. A true-to-life story will almost by nature not adhere as rigorously to the classic narrative structure, but it’s important to find these narratives as they exist in our lives. Sarah’s book appealed to me because I felt that the story that was hiding out in her original manuscript was one that could work beautifully if told right. All the ingredients to an exciting story were already in place – we had the ever-changing landscape of a story that takes place in at least five different countries. Just in boyfriends alone we had a wide cast of characters – from Japanese surfer dudes to sweet-talkers to sketchy club-owners to gay pretty-boys. We had a world which not many people have seen in close-up – a modelling scene outside of the hubs of Milan, New York and London. And we had the spectre of Sarah’s modelling career looming over the whole thing, a pipe dream which transformed into a reality that was everything she had hoped it would be, until it wasn’t.

I put these structures into place for our second draft, which was really more like a really long outline, and our third draft is where the pieces really begin to click into a fully realized story. Each chapter takes place in a different city from the previous one, and each chapter builds up the story in a slightly different way so that the action is always moving forward and never stalling. Currently, this third draft is incomplete, but it is our plan to complete it once we have found a platform for this story.  

Thanks for reading!

-Simon