How to Write by the Seat of Your Pants: Outline or No? by Jess Lederman

 

           

 

Write Now Literary is pleased to be organizing a two-week book tour and book giveaway for Hearts Set Free by Jess Lederman. The book tour will run January 18-29, 2021.

 

Book Title: Hearts Set Free

Genre: Literary Fiction/ Historical/Christian

 

ISBN-10 : 1098511093

ISBN-13 : 978-1098511098

 

 

A graduated with a degree in music from Columbia University, Jess Lederman is an author of Christian-themed fiction who lives with his wife and two young sons in the Pacific Northwest.

 

He is currently at work on a novel that begins in the last days of the Wild West and ends in Las Vegas in 1955. When Jess is not writing or chasing his young sons around, he can usually be found at the piano playing Chopin nocturnes for his wife, Ling.

How to Write by the Seat of Your Pants: Outline or No?
(or perhaps retitle this post, “Adventures in Plotting and Pantsing”
Jess Lederman

While I was writing my first novel, Hearts Set Free, I became convinced I was a plotter, not a pantser. The arc of the plot and key scenes, especially in the climactic last third of the story, were clear in my mind almost from the beginning. This provided tremendous inspiration—I couldn’t wait to get to those scenes, and I didn’t allow myself to write them out of sequence. As a debut novelist, having a detailed outline gave me great confidence. I’m certainly not the only writer for whom starting a novel feels like taking the first step toward climbing a towering mountain. You look up and the peak is hidden, shrouded in mist. At least having a detailed route to the summit allays some of the anxiety.

The plot of Hearts Set Free was clear in my mind; all I had to do was the hard work of actually writing it. A little over two years later, I completed the 129k word novel, which interweaves three different plot lines over multiple time periods. It’s won a couple of awards, garnered critical acclaim, and has been selling steadily since publication in March of 2019. Success! Being a plotter had worked for me, and I resolved to stick with that approach.

I was about to learn a very painful lesson.

I had the first embryonic ideas for my second novel in the fall of 2018 and started work on it soon after Hearts Set Free was released. As you can guess, my first priority was to create a detailed outline. I was a bit concerned, because I wasn’t starting with the clear, overall vision that I had for my first novel. So I allowed myself to jot down notes and ideas and then hope they could eventually be shaped into an outline. I was so convinced that a detailed outline was crucial that I spent one full year filling notebooks with those notes and then reading them over and over.

No outline emerged.

The success of Hearts Set Free had given me tremendous confidence, but had it been a fluke? Was I a one-hit wonder? Did I have what it takes for the long haul? It seemed I had wasted an entire year!

Okay, Lederman, I told myself, this is all just a colossal exercise in procrastination. You’re a writer—just write! Take that germ of an idea and write by the seat of your #$%$ pants! At first I thought that was exactly the right decision. I wrote two very decent chapters and then realized it simply wasn’t the right story.

All right, I could deal with that. I started again, and a few months later ground once more to a dead halt.

I was especially excited about the opening scene of my third reboot, made it through five chapters—several of which received terrific feedback from prominent people in the publishing industry--before once again crashing. It wasn’t a case of writer’s block; I was simply convinced that I wasn’t writing the story I was meant to write.

Finally, in June of 2020, everything came together. I simply knew that I had the right story this time, and I’m on track to finish The Ballad of Henry Midnight by this coming summer. My new approach is a blend of plotting and pantsing. When I began to write, I had only a general idea of the story’s arc, but I had what to me is the most important thing—characters who were completely alive in my mind. In retrospect, there were twists and turns in Hearts Set Free which in fact hadn’t been planned from the start. My characters had simply taken matters into their own hands and led me to see what needed to happen. Sure enough, the more I write by the seat of my pants, the more the characters themselves fill in the (many!) blanks in my outline. It’s an iterative process, writing and then outlining.

The idea for my third novel is something I’ve been kicking around for nearly ten years, and I believe I’ll finally be ready to write it. Will the technique I’m currently using work for that one as well? Who knows! Writing is an adventure, I can’t wait to find out.

 

  

 

Seven Lives Inexorably Intertwined. Over Eighty-Six Years. That Will Bring a Revelation Beyond What Any of Them Could Imagine.

 

The Alaska Territory, 1925. When Yura Noongwook’s husband abandons her and her thirteen-year-old son, she vows to win him back and destroy the woman who stole his heart. They embark on an epic cross-country quest that leads them to the Nevada desert, where they meet a man who has turned into the last thing anyone expected him to become …

 

David Gold. Reno, 1930. A Bible-school dropout known as the Pummelin’ Preacher. His boxing career is fading, just like his faith. But then a former call girl shows up, tells him about the rag-tag congregation she’s part of; how their pastor was murdered. And that the Spirit is moving and David’s destiny is to lead their tiny flock.

 

Las Vegas, 2011. Cable TV star Tim Faber is an atheist bent on proving God is only alive in people’s imaginations. But Joan Reed, his producer, is trying to recapture the faith of her youth. And both of them are driven to unravel a mystery surrounding the Big Bang theory, never dreaming the answer will forever change their lives.

 

To do that, they have to meet with the now 99-year-old Luke Noongwook and David Gold’s grandson, Daniel.

 

The veil is being pulled back, but none of them are prepared for what they’ll find on the other

side.

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Chapter One

Luke and Yura: The Alaska Territory, 1925

 

My father deserted my mother and me when I was thirteen years

old. He had become famous that winter on the Great Race of Mercy, one

of the Athabascan mushers who brought diphtheria serum to Nome

and saved ten thousand lives. He’d done the impossible, a blind run in

the howling darkness, crossing the open ice of the Norton Sound, the

temperature falling to sixty below, the sun a distant dream. He was our

hero, our North Star.

 

And then he was gone.

 

He left us, of course, for a woman. A blizzard had hit him at

Unalakleet, a storm so powerful that it travelled four thousand miles,

till at last it reached New York and froze the Hudson River. The woman

lived in just that far-away land, on the wild island of Manhattan, and

her name was Kathleen Byrne. The Hearst papers had been giving the

Great Race front-page headlines; Kathleen was a reporter, lean and

hungry, she’d go to the ends of the earth for a good story, and one day

she got her chance.

 

No one in my hometown of Nenana had seen anything like her,

a slender redhead with emerald eyes, smoking Lucky Strikes and

exhaling expertly through her nostrils, this coolly confident young

woman with fiery hair.

 

She wanted details that would bring the story to life, so Father

brought her to our home to show off his sled dogs. At least, the ones

who’d survived, for three he had raised since they were pups had died

on the trail. Somewhere in the madness of that journey he’d forgotten

to cover their groins with rabbit skins, and they’d perished of frostbite

in the unfathomable cold.

 

I gaped at her stupidly.

 

“Excuse my son,” said my mother. “He has no manners.”

 

 

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