Don't ever tell me how hard it is.

Today I finished a complete scene audit of my novel: 25 chapters, 49 scenes, and after many pages (and weeks), I've concluded that if someone had grabbed my ear before I started this whole writing thing to tell me how much effort was required to make quality literature, I very well might have quit.

Look, am I overdoing all this writing prep? Maybe. This is my first novel, though, so I have the sense that I'm feeling my way through a process I'd like to repeat later. The first time you do anything new, it sucks. Life extracts a tuition of time to learn the lessons you need. The next time I do this, it will go twice as fast.

Do I need to do all this work to publish something?
Of course I don't.

Do I need to do all this work to publish something excellent?
Of course I do.

Like my friend Emmy once said, "I don't want to write something that wins awards—I can't control that part so why should I care? What I can control is writing something award-worthy."

Making something truly worthy of being read has been my constant goal, and that takes a lot of work. I did months of soul-searching before I could admit my past work was okay, but not great. Ouch. As they say, the first step on the road to recovery is being willing to acknowledge the truth.

An audit all writers should embrace

I've looked at this one story for months (years, at this point) and done lots of different kinds of audits: audits of structure, character, tropes... and all of those audits pale in comparison to doing a scene audit.

The scene audit forces you to stress test each scene to ensure characters have proper motivations, scene are properly established, and the action is not a simple talky-talky moment where nothing happens. That's not drama—that's a vignette. Drama means conflict and conflict means characters start out with expectations about what they want to do which are immediately pushed up against another character's expectations. That shit is fun to watch!

I heard a story about an improv scene where an improv teacher gave two actors radically different understandings of their backstory: one improv actor was a parent who thought their child was an angel, while the other was playing a school principal who thought the other's child was the devil. As you might imagine, the energy that exploded out of that improv interaction was riveting.

In a scene audit, everything gets put under a microscope. What is this person's agenda? How are expectations ironically reversed? How does this scene set up the next scene? Honestly, it's grueling work, and the only way I could do it was sticking to my morning work time (6AM–11AM) every day to only work on this. Each scene takes about 30 minutes to go through my detailed checklist, so it becomes total of ~25 hours to do the first pass (after this, I still need to synthesize all my notes into a unified narrative treatment in order to dictate it). But I can't audit more than 4–5 scenes before my brain gets tired. All told, a scene Audie takes 3–4 weeks to complete.

How much of this really matters?

Naturally, that's a subjective judgement, and quite unfair because I'm not showing you my before and after work, but trust me: the audited scenes are so much better. The checklist I use forces me to deep think out all the nuances that didn't exist before and its plot holes become much more obvious. Maybe for my members, I'll post a before and after at some point.

Oh! The new book cover is done.

I may iterate this cover later, but the latest book cover design is complete. I'm on a deadline so this is all you get from me today.