Jenn Neal

Writing isn’t glamorous. It’s a lot of sitting on the couch staring into the distance. It’s hours of your life poured into a world you created, trying to prevent plot holes, leaving trails of clues, and hoping your character arcs balance well within an interesting story. You laugh and cry about hallucinated characters you constructed in your head (sometimes you just cry because you have no idea how to fix a major mistake). It’s a lot of sitting. Breathing. It’s so much self-doubt mingled with determination and love for what you’re doing. There’s the isolation of being in your head, but a constant need to keep telling this story. It’s wanting to share this huge part of yourself with everyone, and when you’re ready to share, most people don’t really understand what you’re handing them. A book was built from nothing, with months to years of work woven into the pages. Putting my story into the hands of beta readers and friends/family has made me feel more vulnerable than anything else. But the desire to share this part of my mind is just as strong as the fear, and the joy of people sharing my world with me is the best feeling in the universe.  

First, I want to thank you for being here. Even just clicking on my site or making it to this blog means so much to me. I can’t promise I’ll keep up with posting regularly, but I want to share pieces of my personal writing experience in case it helps other writers. And I always like reading what other authors have to say about their writing.

When I was first creating this site, I asked what people wanted to know about me or my writing. A lot of people asked about my writing process, so I figured I’d start there. Especially, because talking about my own process is personal, so I don’t feel like I’m telling anyone else how to write (Oh, hello imposter syndrome, we meet again).

I think the best advice I was ever given when it comes to writing, is that there is no right way to do it. Still, I think a lot of writers and authors would prefer written directions. Sure, some of it is talent, but a lot of it is just stubborn determination, making mistakes, and failing a lot before you get anywhere. On top of that, you need to love writing, because there’s no guarantee you will succeed even if you write a good book. I failed about a million times before I started getting positive feedback from critique partners, and even more before I started querying this book. Even feeling confident about what I created, I have done enough research about this industry to know how difficult it is to break in. So, I just keep trying. I keep writing.

The book I am currently querying, Vicious Miscreations, did not come about in a very organized fashion. It took much longer than I expected due to the strange, round-about way it came into existence. This book has been in the works for only a few years, but it’s been mulling in my mind for ages.

This book started with a shiver. I was in high school. My friends and I spent a lot of time in the woods at night, because everywhere else was closed. Winter evenings in Montana are a different kind of cold, and I shivered so hard I felt it down to my bones. That was it. My overactive imagination started working instantly. What if someone was so loosely attached to a world, all it would take was a shiver to knock them out of one world and throw them into another? First, I thought, “That would be awesome.” Followed shortly by, “Oh, man that would really suck.” And finally, “Imagine if you were peeing and you shivered.” Because my brain loves to go to the extreme (don’t worry, this does not become a part of the story).

From there, I started brainstorming. Summer break after graduation, I started writing in my best friend’s family coffee shop on my days off (shoutout to that friend for being the first friend I ever told about my writing). But life happened and writing was very off and on for the next seven years. I would have winter and summer breaks to write between jobs, and my friend and I would get together in the evenings. She would paint and I would write. But when I moved to Alaska for a few years after that, I was working 80-hour weeks and barely got the chance to write. This is how my writing began: grabbing precious snippets of time, trying to create a world other people would want to spend 300+ pages living in. But it wasn’t until 2014 that I really started writing my first book with more consistency. And that was a giant learning curve.

Most people who talk about their writing process either claim to be a plotter or a pantser. The plotters outline and research ahead of time, and most already know where the story is going before they write a single line of their book. I am here to tell you, that’s not me. For anyone who knows me, that shouldn’t be a surprise. I am not an organized person. My life is a string of chaotic thoughts and events, unanswered text messages, calendar reminders for everything from parties to ordering dog food, and a long list of things I keep forgetting to do. And my phone? To say I have fifty different active notes of scenes, dialogue, and story ideas is an understatement. All things said and done, if I had to put myself in a category, it would be a pantser, all the way. In other words, I am flying by the seat of my pants.

In my case, my first book attempts were closer to spiraling toward some vague goal. With my first book attempt, everything was as much of a surprise to me as anyone. Oh, that character faceplanted into a nest of hungry demons? Man, I did not see that coming. Yeah, me either.

But before you start thinking it took me ten years to write my current book, hear me out. That is not what happened. There have been many other book attempts will never see the light of day, which died in critique, or before I ever let someone lay eyes on them. I’m not being humble, or my own worst critic when I tell you I abandoned them because they were bad. I have always believed part of writing is knowing when to walk away when something isn’t working and being strong enough to be okay with that.

The books before Vicious Miscreations probably don’t bear mentioning (but here I am mentioning them!). I made all the mistakes: main character waking up on the first page, a four-page scene with a character making pancakes, you name it. I had people critique my work who pointed out problems that made me want to cry, but they were right, and I got better because of it. I also learned how to differentiate between a good critique, and one that might not align with my story. I don’t regret any of my mistakes because it’s how I learned.

Now for the full disclosure of my current book. Sometime back in 2020, I thought my book was ready, and I actually queried about twenty agents and got nothing but rejections. It made me look back at my book a second time. I realized I was querying something I knew wasn’t working, and I just wasn’t ready to let it go. After I let it sit for a few months, I realized the problem. I had outgrown the writing and the story. Tinkering with little line edits wasn’t going to fix it. I needed to do something drastic. So, I abandoned it, cannibalizing pieces of the magic system and a few characters. This is why I consider Vicious Miscreations to be its own separate project from the one before. Because everything else is completely new, and I approached it in a totally different way.

This time I forced myself to do a little bit of outlining, to decide where I was trying to take the story, and determine how it would end. Vicious Miscreations was still a lot of chaotic layers woven together. But I learned so, so much. It still took a long time. Granted, I was working full-time or overtime throughout this process, and experiencing a lot of anxiety and mental health issues (thanks to working veterinary emergency medicine during the pandemic). So, it makes sense that it took so long. I was experiencing and recovering from my own trauma simultaneously, which anyone who reads Vicious Miscreations can see in the pages. My three main characters are struggling. One is an abuse victim who suffers from anxiety attacks and fights to believe she has value, one suffers from severe PTSD and tries to deal with it through self-harm, and one is grieving a father he believes he killed. Not to mention another character who struggles with feeling powerless against the tide of the world. So, yeah, not light stuff.  

The funny thing is, those characters just kind of happened. As I go, I discover things like character backgrounds, magic systems, side-quests, and romance. My first draft is always about discovering, and just getting everything down on paper. I live by the belief that crappy first drafts are not only to be expected, but necessary. Once I have the story down on paper, I can go back and litter in description, worldbuilding, tension. Eventually, it starts to look like a book. But it’s still bad at this point.

That’s when I start editing. Painful as it is, I cut thousands of words. I nitpick every single line, search for all those unnecessary filter words. Once it becomes a coherent story, that’s when I reach out to beta readers. For me, beta readers are a combination of readers I know and trust to be honest with me, and people I’ve found other ways. For anyone else in search of beta readers, I’ve found some incredible people on the Critique Circle website, as well as on fiverr.com. The point of these readers is to tell me what is working and what isn’t. It’s about fixing things.

Side note: If you ever agree to beta read for someone, you should know that the writer is asking for ways to improve. If you are a writer asking for beta readers, you should know you are inviting criticism. Of course, it’s difficult to hear criticism of something you’ve put your heart into, but none of this is an attack on you. It is so HARD to hear what didn’t work, but it’s all part of the writing game. No one, I repeat, NO ONE will ever write a book that can’t be made better by beta readers. Now, I will step off that soap box.

My writing process is an explosion of thoughts and stream of consciousness, followed by heavy editing, critique, editing, more critique, more editing, and so on. This is a slippery slope. You could get stuck in a spiral of editing and critiquing forever. But you need to decide when you feel like it is the best you can make it. That’s where I am right now. I finally reached a point where I think I’m ready. I’ve had countless people read my pages, and let’s be real, I can’t afford a developmental editor. And since I’m hoping for traditional publishing, I shouldn’t need one until after I find an agent. But it’s hard to know when you are truly ready. My anxiety is constantly reminding me that I can only query individual agents once with this book, so I should make sure everything is perfect. But no one can tell you when it’s perfect, so I just keep tinkering and trying, and seeing where it takes me. All I can do is my best, and hope that leads me right.

So, now I begin again.

Now that I’m starting my new book, Bone Thieves, I’m trying something new. This is a book with entirely new characters, worldbuilding, and magic. I know I have to find some place to meet in the middle, where I’m not entirely pantsing, and I’m not entirely plotting because, my god, my brain wants to short circuit out of boredom just thinking about outlines. My writing style is more about layering pieces of my chaos brain together like some kind of mad scientist and hoping it doesn’t explode. Most of the time, it feels like I have no idea what I’m doing. And then, all of a sudden, there’s something there and I feel like an evil architect.  The characters come together and meld into a world that I created. I learned to trust my process, even though half the time I feel like it’s going nowhere. But this time, I’m doing it with more of an outline in hand. It isn’t much, but I’m already 20k words in, and I only started in November, so that still feels like a major win. It’s all happening much faster this time, and I can already see how much my writing has improved.

So, thank you for reading this ramble about my writing. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to know after reading this, that I wrote all these paragraphs completely out of order and then puzzled them together. Yikes. Anyway, I really appreciate you all.  And just because, I can…

If you’re a writer, I see you. Writing is hard. I just want to take a moment to recognize you. You wrote a book, and that’s amazing. Maybe you’re trying to write part of a book, you started and you’re struggling. Or you wrote an article, or a short story. Whatever the case is, you did a hard thing. Don’t ever diminish that, published or not. Keep going. And if you’re waffling with the idea of whether you could write a book or not, well, this is your resident chaos gremlin telling you that you can. You’ve got this, you just have to want it enough to be willing to fight through the slog of challenges that come with it.