Writing in Layers

With Guest Hallee Bridgeman

Last fall, I committed to taking part in a box set of never-before-released Christmas novellas. All of the box sets which I’d previously been involved had all incorporated already published books. This one consisted of seven never before published Christmas novellas. I was buried under other deadlines, and found myself starting the novella just a few weeks before the deadline. Because I try to give my editor at least two weeks, if not three, before a deadline, I was totally crunched with time writing this book.

I write full time while my kids are in school. One Monday morning, I came home from dropping them off at school and started writing. That Friday at the close of my business day, I had the entire novella written and packaged and sent off to my editor. It wasn’t already outlined nor even conceptually sketched, and this isn’t the first time I’ve been able to write a novella in a week. I just have a process that allows me to write really fast.

I teach a class on my process, and the amazing Seekerville ladies asked me to write a blog post about it. So, I’m going to try to explain it and hope I’m able to make it make sense to you. As I explained what I do and how I do it, it occurred to me that the way I write is in LAYERS.

I’ve tried outlining in the traditional sense before, but my mind doesn’t really work like that. Rather than an orderly “I, II, III, A, B, C,” I have a big swirling mass scrambling for attention in my mind. When I get ready to write a book, I usually know the entire gist of the whole story and can see it like a movie in my head. Major scenes are detailed and everything else is kind of a black-and-white vague.

LAYER ONE

And that’s how I start - sitting down with a massive story trying to escape and consuming my every thought. But I need to make order of that swirling mass, so I start typing as fast as I can, 110 words-per-minute, and just get out action and dialog.

She walked into the room and said this. He said that. She walked out of the room.

I don’t set the scene. I don’t bog myself down with thoughts and feelings. I don’t much care about passive sentences or how many times I start a sentence with the word “she”. I just let the movie play out in my head until I get to the end.

The end result is a bunch of short chapters and all of the major plot points hit. With a novella of about 30,000 final edited words,  I can do this is about two full days (10-12 hours) of writing.

LAYER TWO

Once I have all of the action, I go back into the each scene and set the scene. What originally started as:

Joe rode his bike to campus.

Now became:

As he walked, he accessed the audio Bible on his smartphone, plugged the earbuds into the headphone jack, and secured the phone to his arm with the Velcro athletic band. The deep voice of a narrator reading the second book of Kings filled his ears before he strapped on his brightly colored helmet. When he reached the pavement, he hopped onto his bike and started pedaling, slowly enough to warm up the muscles in his legs without cramping, but rapidly enough to make good time.

He left the scent of the sea behind him as he worked his way into thicker and thicker traffic. The temperature rose with the sun and sweat poured down his face. At a stop light, he straddled his bike and pulled a small towel out of the bag strapped to the center bar, using it to wipe the sweat out of his eyes while he listened to Jehu war with Jorab.

An hour later, morning rush hour in full swing, he avoided colliding with a hybrid car by hopping his bike onto the sidewalk. The woman driving it while talking on her cell phone never even noticed him. Without breaking pace, he maneuvered back onto the road and kept going.

Most mornings, he made it to the University of Southern Alabama’s campus in an hour and fifteen minutes. He had come to realize that he needed that daily time spent listening to the Word of God. Interestingly, he could read a passage then listen to the same passage and hear things he never picked up reading. As he approached campus, he waited until the current chapter came to an end then turned off the audio. He locked his bike in the bike rack by the Student Recreation building and went inside to shower.

Photo credit: Crestock/Andriy Solovyov

LAYER THREE

This is the hardest part for me. *I* can see the scene, hear it, taste it, smell it, feel it. I often jokingly say that the reader should be able to as well, if not by simple osmosis. My content editor has to come back to me over and over again telling me to add “thoughts and feelings.” To which I often think, “ugh.” Not the most delicate response an author of romance novels can give, I know — nevertheless.

So, at this point, I go back through to every single scene and add thoughts and feelings.

After locking his bike, he turned and ran into a group of four Cru Students going into the building. Of course, he recognized Madeline Viscolli. After talking with her privately the day of the meet and greet the year before, she always stood out to him in a crowd. No matter how many students he could count in attendance, one glance through the group and he’d spot her. She hadn’t participated in the summer program this year. He knew she’d taken classes all summer long. Partway through the summer it had occurred to him that he kept hopefully looking for her in the crowd until he consciously forced himself to stop.

This morning, she wore an olive green shirt belted at the waist with a leather belt and a pair of blue jeans. With large sunglasses covering her face and her long black hair pulled into a loose braid that fell over her shoulder, she looked like a woman about to command an army.

When he expected to see her, he could usually brace himself and control his reaction to her presence. The unexpected times, the chance meetings, those actually took his breath away and made him feel nervous, jittery, and uncharacteristically shy.

He had seen a lot of beautiful things in his life. He had experienced sunrises and sunsets on the horizons of crystal seas that would envelop every sense like a living symphony of light. He had seen longboats and yachts that had been handcrafted with the finest attention to the smallest detail soar over the water like sea breezes. He had seen real beauty in his lifetime. Even so, he had never seen anything as beautiful as Madeline Viscolli.

Maybe other men didn’t see her as beautiful. Maybe to them she looked just like any other girl with dark hair and deep blue eyes. Unlike those other men, Joe had to struggle not to let her beauty distract him.

Now, at this point, I basically have a fully written book.

LAYER FOUR

While it may be fully written, it is certainly not fully edited. At this point, I read it out loud. You use a different part of your brain when you speak and hear than you do when you read silently. Because by this point I’ve been over the same words two or three times, I have to read out loud or my brain will skip and skim so much. So, I read out loud and find all of the places where I’ve written a passive sentence that would sound so much better active. Or I hear where she sat down in a chair but then walked back across the room and sat down in a chair again. I realize the places where the emotions are stilted and the conversation doesn’t flow naturally. I hear if I use a single word too many times or start too many sentences in a row with the same word. I fill in the holes that have been left and smooth out the rough edges.

This will take me almost as long as the original writing. Despite how long it takes, I never send a book to my editor without reading it out loud first. I simply do not. I write too fast that I need that forced slowing down of reading it out loud to truly examine my story.

My husband likens my layer writing to an artist who first sketches a drawing in pencil, then fills in a painting one color at a time until it results in a vibrant masterpiece.

How do you write? Is your method in any way similar to mine?

The scenes in this article are from my latest release Christmas Star Sapphire — the very book I wrote from beginning to sending it to my first editor in just five days. I am thrilled to give an autographed copy of this book away to someone today. {Note from Missy: Let us know in the comments if you want to be entered.} You can also find this book inside the Snowflake sand Mistletoe collection of 7 Christian Romance Christmas novellas available on Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited.

CHRISTMAS STAR SAPPHIRE

Inspired by the Jewel Series

MADELINE VISCOLLI finds herself on the Gulf shores of Alabama, where she takes part in a graduate program to earn her MBA. On her first day there, she meets JOE WESTCOTT, team leader for a campus ministry. Despite a mutual attraction, Joe’s personal rule of no romance with any student keeps any kind of deep relationship from developing.

Joe has no desire to have a relationship with anyone, ever, anyway. He left a life of luxury and his family’s business behind to live alone on a sailboat and serve in ministry. Then Madeline walks into the auditorium the week school starts and Joe suspects his personal rules might not apply to this graduate student.

That is, until he discovers Madeline is one of the Viscollis, and that her destiny lay in running her father’s massive corporation. Having rejected wealth and all its trappings since childhood, Joe finds himself falling for the vivacious sapphire-eyed beauty. Madeline knows she loves Joe, but is not willing to throw away her destiny of taking over at the helm of Viscolli Enterprises.

A Christmas Eve funeral washes all Joe’s plans away. Will their love succumb to the rising tide caused by their differences in lifestyles, or will raging seas calm and allow them to sail off into the sunset?

Hallee Bridgeman is a best-selling Christian author who writes action-packed romantic suspense focusing on realistic characters who face real world problems. Her work has been described as everything from refreshing to heart-stopping exciting and edgy. Hallee loves coffee, campy action movies, and regular date nights with her husband. Above all else, she loves God with all of her heart, soul, mind, and strength; has been redeemed by the blood of Christ; and relies on the presence of the Holy Spirit to guide her.