Why You Can’t Make the Draft Without Making the Time... by guest author Harrison Demchick

Good morning writers! Today we have with us return guest author Harrison Demchick to talk with us about how to make time for writing. Because, as we all know, it's not an easy task. However, it's a necessary one if you want to realize your writing dreams, right? So, without further adieu, here's his words on...


Why You Can’t Make the Draft Without Making the Time
by guest author Harrison Demchick

A couple weeks ago, my friend Jen finished her first draft.

I was there when it happened. Since August of 2013, my friends and I have been meeting every Sunday for what we’ve come to call Write Club. Write Club, as our matching T-shirts indicate—yes, we have matching T-shirts—is a time for writing, and nothing but. It’s a four-hour window during which the only priority is each of us developing our own individual projects. Jen, also the designer of the aforementioned T-shirts, had spent the preceding several months almost finished her first novel. Any Sunday in that span could have been the day, but then there was always something else that had to be written, and logic issues to hurdle, and all of the other things that make finishing a draft so frustrating. The end, somehow, seemed to move further and further away. Until it didn’t.

Jen didn’t have to say anything when she finished her draft. I knew. I could see it in the look on her face as she stared at her laptop screen. I expect I looked much the same early this year when I finished the first draft of my screenplay Ape Canyon. It’s a pretty incredible feeling, the warmth tiptoeing its way across your neck and down your arms, into the fingers that have devoted hours, days, months, years to the completion of that one magical story completely and entirely your own. Your heart pounds, and the tension floats away like misty rain on a summer night. The world becomes a pretty spectacular place to be.

I’d already been working on Ape Canyon for a couple years when we started Write Club. Though actually, working is a strong word. I’d started Ape Canyon, for sure, and I’d written some pages, and by the summer we began Write Club I was trying to devote time every weekend to writing. I’ve always been a disciplined writer, and moreover a writer who works best in solitude, so I was confident I could maintain that routine and, simultaneously, skeptical that the writing group friends had proposed from time to time would be of any use. I didn’t need it, and if I was going to spend time with friends, I wanted to spend it having fun, not working quietly on my own projects.

But the truth is that the day we started Write Club is the day I began to build momentum on Ape Canyon. I completed in five months what I’d been tinkering with on and off for two years. It was amazing, and it felt amazing. And I knew that it would never have happened had I not forced into my schedule at least four hours every week to devote to writing. The existence of a group kept me accountable. It kept us all accountable. It became the highlight of my week, and it’s the reason that I’ve never been more productive as a writer than I am today.

Now if there’s anyone who shouldn’t have the time to devote to writing, it’s Jen. Jen is one of the most absurdly talented and driven people I’ve ever met, but these attributes also make her extraordinarily busy pretty much at all times. She works in publishing during the days. She works on her art around the clock (which you can see for yourself at http://herchenroeder.see.me/). She works in architecture and design when she can. Her obligations have obligations.

And yet she still makes the time nearly every week to come to Write Club and work. This devotion of time and energy is the reason she was able to experience the unmatchable high of completing the first draft of a manuscript on which she’d worked seven years.

Jen has finished any number of amazing projects in the interval. And I wasn’t being idle either while Ape Canyon was in progress. I wrote a couple work-for-hire screenplays. I wrote songs. I was creative. But neither Jen nor I was devoting the time to writing until we started Write Club and made that effort every single week.

Another thing Jen and I have in common is a background in publishing, which means that our expectations are realistic. That is to say, Jen may have completed that first draft, but the next step is editing and revision, and this, too, will take a lot of time and a lot of energy. It was the same for me when I finished the first draft of my novel, The Listeners, and for that matter I don’t imagine that I’m entirely finished with Ape Canyon. The end of the first draft is not the end. In a lot of ways, the end of the first draft is just the beginning.

But it’s a pretty incredible benchmark. It’s a tremendous accomplishment to reach it. It’s the first part of the whole process during which you can sit back and say, I’ve done this. I wrote a book. I’m a writer. 

And writers write. They take the time, and if there isn’t time, they make it. That time doesn’t need to be four hours on Sunday. It can be a half hour every morning or a writing binge at midnight every Thursday. That time doesn’t need to be with a writing group, either. But if it weren’t for attending Write Club and making the time to write, Jen wouldn’t have a completed draft of her novel, and I wouldn’t have Ape Canyon. If you don’t take the time to write, you will never know that feeling Jen experienced on a very important Sunday just a couple weeks ago. It’s worth it.

Harrison Demchick came up in the world of small press publishing, working along the way on more than three dozen published novels and memoirs, several of which have been optioned for film. An expert in manuscripts as diverse as young adult, science-fiction, fantasy, mystery, literary fiction, women's fiction, memoir, and everything in-between, Harrison is known for quite possibly the most detailed and informative editorial letters in the industry—if not the entire universe.

Harrison is also an award-winning, twice-optioned screenwriter, and the author of literary horror novel The Listeners (Bancroft Press, 2012). He's currently accepting new clients in fiction and memoir at Ambitious Enterprises (http://ambitiousenterprises.com). 

Interview with Harrison Demchick, author of The Listeners... Lia Mack's BB Writers Retreat presents...

Welcome back to Lia Mack's BB Writers Retreat Series!

In honor of Halloween week and all things horrifying and disturbing, I'm very excited to have with us as our featured guest author literary horror writer Harrison Demchick, author of The Listeners (Bancroft Press, 2012).

The Listeners (Bancroft Press, 2012)

"Harrison Demchick has written a beautiful and disgusting, wonderful and horrifying book with a strong voice and lyrical quality . . ."
   —Ageless Pageless Reviews

Harrison Demchick

Lia Mack: I'm glad it's still light outside as I'm already a bit creeped out by your book cover. 

Can you please start us off by telling a little about yourself:

Harrison Demchick: Most of the time, I'm a developmental editor with editorial boutique Ambitious Enterprises. What this means is that I work with authors of fiction and memoirs on improving all elements of their work, from character arc to logic to story structure and dialogue and everything in-between. It also means I get to read for a living, and to analyze stories for a living, all of which I absolutely love. When I'm not doing that, I spend my time being very odd, frequently in ways that have to do with Spider-Man, but often also in ways that have to do in some respect with writing, whether it's a song or a story or something else entirely.

Lia Mack: Can you tell us a little about your book?

Harrison Demchick: The Listeners is a coming-of-age story in a literary horror context. In a borough quarantined due to an airborne illness that causes deformity, insanity, and death, a 14-year-old boy named Daniel, orphaned by the plague, is caught up with a one-eared gang/cult called the Listeners. But all he really wants is to find his best friend Katie, trapped elsewhere in the quarantine.

Lia Mack: What was the most challenging aspect of writing this particular story?

The Listeners has undergone so many transformations that it's difficult to say. In its screenplay form, it wasn't my first--not by a long shot--but it was my first original. My background was in writing short stories, so developing a full-length narrative was a substantial challenge. The biggest turning point in all of that may have come once a film producer became interested. His feedback completely changed the third act of the story, which proved to be fundamental in completing Daniel's character arc.

On the novel side, the greatest challenge was the process of rediscovering my prose voice, and more specifically the appropriate voice for this novel. As formats alone, screenplays and novels operate with a drastically different language, meaning that, although the substance of the story is the same in both formats, the way it's told--and so much of an effective novel is based upon the way it's told--has changed substantially. It took a lot of trial and error to find the style that worked for me, and then quite a bit of revision to rein myself back when that style became overbearing.

Lia Mack: Ultimate question...Why do you write?

Harrison Demchick: Because I can't not. If I didn't write, all these weird ideas and narratives and character interactions would spend all their time bouncing around in my head, in which case there might not be room for anything else. I've been doing it since kindergarten--or at least that's the earliest record that exists, as my parents still have my carefully illustrated story about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Writing is intrinsic to who I am. I can't really imagine my life without it.

Lia Mack: Can you describe a bit how your venture into writing looked like? How did you come to be a writer as your career?

Harrison Demchick: Well, writing isn't my career just yet. Writing is rarely an author's career, and if it is, then they've become spectacularly successful at it--which would be great, obviously, and I'm working hard to make it happen in one way or another. But as far as my venture into publishing, or specifically publishing The Listeners, I came at it in an unusual way. I've been working in the publishing industry since my first internship in the summer of 2005, which is coincidentally the same time I began work on The Listeners.

So while I was learning to be an editor, The Listeners was always there, though not necessarily in its present form. At first it was a series of short stories. Then it became a screenplay, which was optioned for film; then, finally, on the eventual publisher's advice, I adapted it into a novel.

But even then, I wasn't sure I was going to pursue publishing--not because I wasn't proud of The Listeners, but because being in the publishing industry is a bit of a mixed blessing. On one hand, you know the field and know what goes into making a book successful; on the other hand, you know what goes into making a book successful--and that's marketing. Most of the time, it's an incredible effort that yields very little regardless of the quality of the book. I'd been Sisyphus too many times, advocating for terrific novels I'd had the opportunity to edit, like Ron Cooper's Purple Jesus and Elizabeth Leiknes's The Understory. I hated marketing--still do--and didn't want to take on that fight for The Listeners.

Fortunately, I had enough people around me to tell me how stupid that was. I'd written a novel--a really good novel. It should be published. And the publisher that had recommended I write the story as a novel was interested in publishing it. So that's what we did, and I am very glad about it. And the marketing hasn't even been all that horrible.

Lia Mack: If you don't mind me asking, what are you working on now?

Harrison Demchick: I've actually just finished the first draft of my second entirely original screenplay, and a vastly different one at that. It's a cryptozoological dramedy called Ape Canyon, in which a guy in the midst of a quarter-life crisis drags his big sister along on a Bigfoot-hunting expedition. Alongside that, I'm collaborating with a friend on a zombie musical called Brains. I've written a couple recent short stories, and I've been contemplating releasing a short story collection.

Maybe, someday, I'll write another novel, but right now I have no such plans.

Lia Mack: A zombie musical! I'd like to see that ;)

What does your typical writing day look like?

Harrison Demchick: The idea of typical has undergone a pretty radical transformation in the last few months. For me, writing has always been an isolated activity, and I'm generally self-motivated enough that, if I sit down at my computer and decide I'm going to write, I will get something done. So when my friends would suggest that we get together for "writing parties" in which we would all sit down at a table and work on our individual projects, I was skeptical. I didn't think I would or could be productive in that environment.

But I was seriously wrong. Since we started our writing parties, I have been absurdly productive. And when you're absurdly productive, writing carries with it a high like little else. Without these sessions, I would not yet have finished Ape Canyon. I don't even know if I'd be close.

So now, a typical writing day includes me and a friend or three, either in a coffee shop or at my apartment, working for hours on whatever it is we happen to be writing. If any of us is stuck on something, we can ask the writers around us for feedback. If I write a line of dialogue I particularly like, I can get immediate confirmation as to whether or not it works. It's made writing more fun for me than it's been in years.

Lia Mack: Can you share a photo of what your writing space looks like?

Harrison Demchick: I don't know if I can. I don't own a camera. There's a camera in my computer, but it can't take pictures of itself, and the computer is pretty much the most important part. I'll see if I can come up with something.

Lia Mack: Do you read while you write? What are you reading now?

Harrison Demchick: I'm an editor, so I'm always reading--but most of what I'm reading is unpublished. And when reading is your job, as wonderful as that is, it's often not what you find yourself wanting to do with your free time. But I'm in the middle of a book of H. P. Lovecraft short stories, and there's quite a lot on my bookshelf I'm looking to dive into should I ever go on one of those "vacation" things I've heard so much about.

Lia Mack: If you could go back in time, what advice would you give yourself if you could speak to the aspiring writer you once were?

Harrison Demchick: You know, I honestly don't think I would change anything. Maybe I would clue myself in to the fun of writing with a group, but most likely I'd just leave myself to figure it out on my own.

Besides which, as a dedicated science-fiction and comic book nerd, I know that messing around with the past has terrible repercussions. I go back in time to give myself advice on writing, and the next thing I know, I've never been born and the president is a stegosaurus.

Lia Mack: Thank you so much for being our guest author today. Where can BB readers go online to find you and your work?
Harrison Demchick: Well, they can always check out my poorly maintained website, www.harrisondemchick.com, or my slightly better maintained Facebook page, www.facebook.com/HarrisonDemchick (I don't really have an aptitude for this social media stuff), but if they want to buy the book, they can do that on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever books are sold. The paperback just launched this past weekend.