Jessica Martin | Author

I wrote more than 170,000 words for a book that is no longer going to be the first book in my series.

So, that’s fun.

Let me explain.

The first book I actually wrote for this series was Always On. It follows Tessa and Chase after they’re already married. They’re on their honeymoon, driving through the cities where Tessa’s mother performed as a theater actress before she died.

Tessa is also pregnant.

She hasn’t told Chase yet. He suspects, because of course he does, but she’s trying to understand what becoming a mother means when she lost her own mother so young. During the trip, she’s reading her mother’s journals and learning about the woman behind the famous actress she remembers. She’s trying to reconcile her mother as an artist, a wife, a public figure, and a person with the woman Tessa knew for such a short part of her life.

Somewhere after writing it, I realized that Always On isn’t really a romance.

There’s a love story in it. Chase and Tessa are very much in love, and their relationship is sweet and stable. There simply isn’t any romantic conflict because, by the time the book starts, they are already a consolidated couple.

The actual story is about Tessa. It’s about grief, identity, her relationship with her mother, and her fear of becoming a mother when she feels like she didn’t get enough time to learn from her own.

So I thought Tessa and Chase needed their romance.

And I started writing Fair Game.

170,000 Words Later…

I wrote, rewrote, changed the premise, tried different versions of their relationship, and kept writing.

The problem was that every plot I gave them eventually started feeling like something I was making them do because I needed a romance novel to happen.

Eventually, though, I found a plot that I thought was promising, so I committed to it.

By the time I reached 120,000 words, I was seriously considering throwing in the towel. I even posted about it on Threads. I have screenshots to prove it.

A lot of people encouraged me to keep going, so I did. After a considerable amount of dawdling and pushing myself to finish the damn thing, I ended up with more than 170,000 words.

The problem is that a lot of those 115,000 words are just me beating around the same bush. I kept trying to find something in the story that simply wasn’t there.

Eventually, I asked myself a very annoying question:

Does this relationship actually need its own romance novel, or do I just think every couple in the series is supposed to have one?

And… fuck me.

It was the second one. Of course it was.

I Already Knew Tessa and Chase’s Story

Once I stopped thinking about tropes, plot structure, and what I thought the series was supposed to look like, I realized that I already knew exactly how Tessa and Chase’s relationship happened.

They see each other for the first time when they’re seventeen. They have this tiny moment of recognition across a crowded fair, but they never actually speak to each other.

Then they meet properly when they start college.

And I think they probably start dating within a month.

That’s really it.

There isn’t some enormous obstacle keeping them apart. There isn’t a believable reason for them to spend years desperately wanting each other while doing absolutely nothing about it.

They meet, like each other, fall in love, and stay together. Eventually, when they’re ready, they get married.

Every time I tried to change that, I was forcing a plot onto two characters who didn’t belong in it.

I tried making them friends who took years to realize they were in love. I tried creating reasons for them to avoid acting on their feelings. I tried different romantic setups that could plausibly keep them apart long enough for Fair Game to happen.

I could always come up with an explanation, but I never believed it.

If Tessa liked Chase, she would do something about it. If Chase knew Tessa was interested, he would eventually do something about it too. These two people were never supposed to spend six years dancing around each other while everyone wondered when they were finally going to get their shit together.

In my head, they had always been together.

It just took me more than 170,000 words to accept what I apparently already knew.

So What Happens to Fair Game?

Fair Game, at least in its current form, is gone. It is no longer the first book in the series.

I’m not deleting 170,000 words from my computer and pretending none of this ever happened, though. There are scenes in that manuscript that I love. There are conversations, character moments, pieces of backstory, and interactions between the entire friend group that still belong to these characters even though the plot surrounding them no longer does.

I’ll probably reuse some of that material in Always On.

I’m probably going to weave parts of Tessa and Chase’s early romance into Always On through memories and flashbacks. While present-day Tessa travels with Chase, reads her mother’s journals, and tries to understand her own feelings about marriage, family, grief, and impending motherhood, the reader could also see selected moments from the relationship that brought her to this point.

That would allow me to show their romance without manufacturing a conflict that doesn’t belong to them. It could also add another romantic layer to Always On, which is already a very sweet book despite the fact that its central conflict isn’t romantic.

There is, however, a slight problem with this plan.

I have no fucking idea how to do that.

I Have Zero Professional Training in Fiction Writing

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I have a bachelor’s degree in Accounting and a master’s degree in Business Management. Most of my professional experience has been in teaching middle school, recruiting, and the operational side of marketing.

See? Zero knowledge.

I have no formal education in creative writing, literature, or publishing. Everything I know about writing fiction has come from reading, studying on my own, and attempting to apply what I learn to my manuscripts.

One consequence of that is that my natural method of storytelling is aggressively chronological.

THIS HAPPENED. THEN THIS HAPPENED. THEN THIS HAPPENED.

That is how my brain wants to write a story.

Unfortunately, Future Jessica is eventually going to have to revise these books and discover that some events would work better if they were revealed later. Scenes are going to need to move. Information that currently appears chronologically might work better as backstory. If I decide to incorporate Tessa and Chase’s early relationship into Always On, I’m also going to have to learn how to write flashbacks without making them feel like somebody hit pause on the actual book so I could deliver an info dump.

Excellent.

Don’t get me wrong. I can absolutely gut a book I’ve read and explain why I think it works or why it doesn’t. I can look at characterization, pacing, romantic development, conflict, and structure and tell you where I think something went wrong.

Critiquing someone else’s finished book and constructing one of my own, however, require very different skills.

I am discovering those differences one manuscript at a time.

What Happens to the Rest of the Series?

If you’ve followed my previous writing updates, you already know that Tessa and Chase aren’t the only couple in this series.

I had already developed the ideas for Soft Launch, which is Quinn and Reed’s story, and Hard Launch, which is Cassie and Sawyer’s. I’m currently drafting them.

The mildly infuriating part is that I’ve never had this particular problem with either of those books.

Those relationships actually have stories that need to be told. There’s history between these characters, there are mistakes that have consequences, and there are things they need to work through before they can actually be together.

Tessa and Chase looked at all of that and said, “Couldn’t be us.”

Fair enough.

I’ve accepted defeat.

My Slightly Academic Approach to Learning How to Write

This entire process has also made me realize something about the way I’m learning to write fiction.

I approach it almost academically.

When I don’t know how to do something, I study it.

When I first decided to seriously attempt writing a novel, I realized fairly quickly that I didn’t know enough about story structure or how to outline one. So I bought books about outlining and started reading.

• The Little Red Writing Book: 20 Powerful Principles of Structure, Style & Readability — Brandon Royal
• Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence — Lisa Cron
• Romancing the Beat: Story Structure for Romance Novels — Gwen Hayes
• Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need — Blake Snyder
• Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer — Roy Peter Clark
• Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel — Lisa Cron
• The Psychology Workbook for Writers: Tools for Creating Realistic Characters and Conflict in Fiction — Darian Smith
• 500 Romance Writing Prompts — Erica Blumenthal
• Thinking Like a Romance Writer: The Sensual Writer’s Sourcebook of Words and Phrases — Dahlia Evans 

Then I tried to apply what I learned.

Mostly.

I experimented with different methods, kept the things that made sense to me, discarded the things that didn’t, and slowly started figuring out how my own brain approaches a story.

Now I’ve reached the next enormous gap in my knowledge: I don’t really know how to edit a novel.

I can edit prose. I can rewrite a scene. I can recognize when something isn’t working. What I haven’t learned yet is how to take an entire novel apart, evaluate it as a complete structure, decide what needs to move or disappear, and then put the thing back together without creating seventeen new problems in the process.

So guess what I’m doing next?

I’m reading books about developmental editing and revision.

• Revising Fiction: A Handbook for Writers — David Madden
• The Last Draft: A Novelist’s Guide to Revision — Sandra Scofield
• Fix the Right Thing First: A Fiction Writer’s Step-by-Step Approach to Confident Self-Revision — Sarah Waterman 
• Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself Into Print — Renni Browne & Dave King 
• The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself — Susan Bell
• The Elements of Style — William Strunk Jr. & E. B. White 
• Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts — Matt Bell 
• Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose — Constance Hale 
• The Elements of Editing: A Modern Guide for Editors and Journalists — Arthur Plotnik 
• Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style — Benjamin Dreyer

Then I’ll try to apply what I learn to my own manuscripts and find out which parts actually work for me.

Learning While I’m Doing It

Writing a book is such a personal endeavor that I don’t think there’s one correct way to learn how to do it.

This is mine.

I’m learning while I’m doing it, and sometimes that means discovering a problem, studying how other writers solve it, trying those methods myself, and figuring out what works with the way my brain tells stories.

This time, it meant writing more than 170,000 words before realizing I had been trying to solve a problem that didn’t actually exist.

Do I wish I had figured that out at 20,000 words instead?

Absolutely.

I would have saved myself an obscene amount of time.

But I also know Tessa and Chase much better now than I did when I started Fair Game, and I understand the rest of the series better too. Those 170,000 words contain years of their lives, pieces of their personalities, friendships, conversations, and moments that may still find their way into the books that survive this process.

I also know something about them now that I kept trying very hard to ignore: Tessa and Chase don’t need an elaborate romantic conflict just because the other couples in the series have one.

They found each other early, fell in love, stayed together, and eventually got married.

Their story was Always On all along.

Now I just have to learn how to revise and edit the fucking thing.

Wish me good luck!