Sneak Peek into my Writing Process

I got the idea for Desire and Social Distance from something that happened to me in real life. The man Greyson is based on is a real human, who old-school courted me long-distance for six months back in 2020. Although he and I didn’t get to have our HEA, I decided to write a book in which a version of him did.

Elena is completely fictitious, loosely based on my idea of myself as a writer, but with a personality much different from my own.

From that seed of a beginning grew my debut novel. I lived in Buffalo, New York for 22 years, so it seemed natural for me to have half the novel take place there.

The reason I wrote Greyson as a father was to help show what kind of person he was when circumstances dictated that he be reclusive and cut off from his friends. But the one friend whom he hadn’t ejected from his life, Sebastian Benjamin, was probably the most fun character for me to write. I have to admit giggling to myself when writing their banter! Writing Greyson’s trauma flashbacks was the way I helped construe to readers that he was damaged, and why a man of his wealth and stature wasn’t crawling with eager ladies. He was too traumatized by his past to want anything to do with that. But when Elena came back into his world, she connected him to a past that was before the trauma, a past that he remembered only too well. A past that, for once, brought him joy.

FYI: most mothers who have read my book have bluntly stated that they’d have killed Sybil Jameson if she were their daughter, which makes me laugh every time. That was intentional. Just throwing that out there.

When rewriting–yes, rewriting–the novel for the second time from the ground up, the characters were practically telling me what to write. I had coaxed them into existence in the first version, then deleted 79,000 words to rebuild afresh to listen more closely to what they had begun to say. It was a hard decision to make to delete all that work, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat because the book that resulted from following my creative gut was so much better than the one I wrote the first time around.

In my writing process, I tell the story to myself first. I usually write this in third person, using stage-direction type language. I use a purple font and enclose the text in brackets to distinguish it from reader-ready text. Then, during round two, I write the actual book in first person, in text meant to be read by the reader, deleting the blocked scenes as I go. So I tell myself the story first, then I tell you.

Tell me in the comments if you’d like to go more in-depth about my writing process, and want all the nerdy-writer details about scene blocking, three-act structure, and all the rest, and I’ll be more than happy to tell you all about it!