So I’ve been offline for a while. There are a lot of causes of that; some I’ll get into later, some I can’t for contractual reasons, some I just won’t bore you with. The biggest challenge is moving — always a crisis, but especially when your two primary hobbies are records and books, things which are heavy, environmentally sensitive, and very difficult to move. (If this sounds familiar, you’ve heard me sing this tune before.)
The hardest part of moving, though, is that the rest of life and the rest of work don’t stop in the meantime. When you’re the only person in the house to do the packing and the only wage-earner keeping the lights on, that becomes a tricky balancing act, fast. Add to that a real gauntlet of book events (I’m in conversation the 14th, 18th, 20th, and juggling two different festivals on the 21/22nd — more about those events here) and it’s hard to find time for rest, never mind writing.
But of course that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. For some reasons I can and some reasons I can’t get into later, I find myself in the unenviable position of having to come up with sample chapters of something completely new, which are due before Hot Wax paperback tour (more about that here, too) kicks off on September 15. Far more often than I’d like, publishing is like this.
As you probably know from my newsletter, this is not how my process works. Generally I have a months-long incubation period of exploring and shaping and deeply researching all the angles of an idea before I even try to put a draft on paper, which then tends to move fairly quickly. Not so this time, because time is exactly what I don’t have. I’m writing what I already know out of absolute necessity, but I’m also leaning a lot more on reflex and intuition about character and story structure, all the “soft work” that sharpens your instincts through decades of reading and writing and literary analysis.
But pantsing completely is not in my nature. Simply can’t do it. So the question became—rather fucking urgently!—how to cannibalize my own process and reduce it down to something I can do at a breakneck pace. I spent most of one day sketching a story arc and a loose collection of chapters. A handful of characters, a couple of key settings, some general themes, a slipshod pile of source texts to consult, and into the breach we went.
Do I enjoy writing this way? No. Do I even want to write what I’m writing? Also no. Far more often than I’d like, publishing is like this. I talked about it once already, way back in December 2023:
How to do it when you hate it
A confession: some days I hate writing. Some days I hate writing in general—putting words on a page, trying to render anything intelligible in prose. Some days I hate my writing specifically—everything I have to say seems insipid, the whole idea suddenly sounds insane, the characters are being difficult and the prose devolves into senseless word salad. …
Even this post assumes you’ve got more time than I do now, though (the more fool I), so I’ve had to find another way through. And when I have to do that, I fall back on my first language, which is theatre — what one of my mentors, Joe Roach, has described as “the science of acting.”1 I haven’t trod the boards in many years, but drama taught me the arts of storytelling and what the early moderns called “personation,” or performing personhood. Andrew Gurr puts it like this in The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642:
…what the players were presenting on the stage became distinctive enough to require a wholly new term to describe it. This term, the noun ‘personation’, suggests that a relatively new art of individual characterisation had begun to develop, an art distinct from the orator’s display of passions or the academic actor’s portrayal of the character-types described by Jonson in Cynthia’s Revels… Heywood’s Apology for Actors specifies that the good actor should ‘qualifie everything according to the nature of the person personated (C4r). Even the author of a puritanical reply to Heywood (I. G., A Refutation of the Apology for Actors (1615)) told a story in which a ‘jesting-Plaier… so truely counterfeited every thing, that it seemed to bee the very persons whom he acted’ (E3v).2
This task of “personation” is inextricably bound up with plot and story, at least for the contemporary actor. At some point in the process of “table work” — the weeks before blocking when you just spend time with the text — most actors are asked to mark “beats” in their scripts. You do this not to identify plot points but to mark motivational shifts for the character you’re “personating,” usually in the form of an infinitive: to demean, to intrigue, to distract, etc. What is Lady Macbeth actually trying to do when she asks her husband, “Was the hope drunk / Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since? / And wakes it now, to look so green and pale / At what it did so freely” (1.7.39-42)?3 Depends how you play the role. There are the obvious ones: to shame, or to emasculate. But what if it’s to motivate? To energize? Even to drive? Those are actionable desires a good actor can personate.
Writing can work the same way. When I don’t have time for the kind deep work I’m used to, I fall back on the basics. This idea of “beats” is as basic as it gets.
Part of the reason I’m a plotter rather than a pantser is that it’s much easier to get into a flow with writing when I know where the story is going. I can get lost in the prose without worrying too much about veering off course or getting stuck on a blank page with no idea what comes next. Anything that helps reduce the friction between me and the story is invaluable. So ordinarily I work from an outline so thorough that I if I died before finishing the book my agent could probably piece the rest of it together pretty easily. But when it’s case of “ain’t nobody got time for that,” a scene summary might just be this:
E interviews with P, meets J, accepts job
Not a lot to go on, but seven days and seven thousand words later it’s a semi-coherent opening chapter, mostly thanks to using beats to flesh out the “movements” of the scene, as well as the the emotional content of the moment and the space it’s happening in. Which might look a little like this:
E arrives for meeting, overhears history from passing tour group — uneasy about location/local culture, cost of living, etc.
E asks for directions to P’s office from V, whose jokes make her more anxious; first glimpse of building & distracted by ‘Mystery’ panels/bad memories
E surprised by P in hallway, embarrassed to be overheard but P deflects (runs through methodology, policy, pivots to E’s CV, then enlarges on history); does a little love-bombing which doesn’t quite work
P takes E to meet J — tonal/spatial shift from admin/office to RR vaults; where money ==> mission; E still mistrustful of flattery
E realizes past connection to J; gets BG MS backstory — immediately intrigued; accepts offer despite lingering misgivings
Running through this again, I might fill in snatches of dialogue and prop/setting/character details which need to be attached to each beat; these three conversations have to build on each other and drive up the tension until E has all information to make a decision and the decision has stakes enough for the reader to care and keep reading. As unromantic as this approach is, it works the way a road map works by breaking it down to directions: how do we get from point A to point B, and which landmarks do we pass along the way?
When I have to write like this — that is to say, against my own instincts — the easiest way to beat the Blank Page Blues is to have that set of directions, that list of narrative and affective “beats.” I type them directly into the document, and then just follow the breadcrumbs from one to another until, eventually, the scene gets done. What’s been working best for me for this particular project so far is to write out these “beat scripts” for the next day’s work once I reach a stopping place with prose but the ideas, the place, and the people are still fresh in my head. It makes it easier to sit down and resume the next day. The task is that much less daunting. I don’t have to write the first chapter of a whole new book I didn’t have time to research — I just have to fill in the blanks, flesh out the beats.
Sexy? Not very. High art? Not that either. But a lot of the writer’s work, much like the actor’s, is workaday craftsmanship: showing up, finding your marks, putting one word in front of the other. Far more often than I’d like, publishing is like this. But it gets a little easier if you can break it down, beat by beat.
Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985)
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage: 1574-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 118.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, Rebecca Niles, eds (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, n.d.), accessed 12 August 2026, https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/macbeth/read/1/7/.
i am always so amazed at how similar writing and acting processes are...i've thought it abstractly for a while but you illustrated it so beautifully here!
This is such an interesting way of doing things. Even though each of those beats is so minimal, it really gives you everything you need to get the idea of that moment. I find myself sometimes putting a lot of detail into my outline that doesn’t necessarily move the story forward, so I’m going to try this!