Guest Post by Allison Winn Scotch

As readers, we know a ton of work goes into producing a book… we just don’t usually get to see it. How many rounds of edits did our favorite reads go through? Where did the characters we love begin their journey? What does an original idea evolve to become after months (or years) of changing?

In this segment of “Behind the Book” we get a first-hand BTS peek into the process of New York Times bestselling author, Allison Winn Scotch’s latest book Take Two, Birdie Maxwell.

Take Two Birdie Maxwell

Take Two, Birdie Maxwell by Allison Winn Scotch

Birdie Robinson is fleeing her A-list career as a rom-com actress after an on-set feud goes viral. When she returns to her hometown she finds an unsigned letter from an ex and decides to create her own romantic comedy/redemption story. Elliot O’Brien is a journalist whose career is on the rocks and when his childhood crush returns home and begins a search for a lost love, he decides to chronicle it. As the two hit the road in search of Birdie’s second chance, sparks fly and a happily ever after starts to feel less and less like fiction.

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On about my seventh draft of my new book, Take Two, Birdie Maxwell, I finally figured out what I wanted to write about and how I wanted to write it. Seven drafts just to get there. Really. The version of the book that is hitting stores and shelves is so dissimilar from my initial draft that it’s hard to even think they are at all related. Maybe distant cousins, long lost siblings at best.

Birdie Maxwell is my tenth book. Tenth! It could be argued that I should know how to write a first draft or at least a decent initial manuscript. Sometimes, I do. Sometimes, I really really don’t. And I think it’s just as important to share the missteps of a journey as it is to share the triumphs because ultimately, it’s not the first draft that makes a book shine, it’s the work that goes into all the revisions and edits. And wow, was there a lot of work on this one.

The version that is being published (and a version, I should say clearly and loudly, that I love) is about a Hollywood star who suffers public humiliation and slinks back to her hometown where she finds an anonymous love letter from one of her exes and decides to stage her own romcom to rehabilitate her career. Fun! Sexy! A little bit of mystery thrown in! Woohoo! Exactly what I love to read when I slip under my duvet at night.

The version that I initially started with was about a world-famous romance writer who didn’t believe in love herself, did indeed find an anonymous love letter, but set out to prove that she was destined for the ex she believed had written it.

That version wasn’t working.

Sometimes, we writers know when their work is bad, and sometimes, we just have voices in our head telling us our work is bad when it really is actually pretty decent. But trust me when I tell you that this was…bad.

All writers have different processes, but one thing I know about mine: I need to have a bolt of inspiration to really dive into a book with confidence and gusto. Because I was under contract, I pressured myself to come up with an idea rather than letting the idea come to me (a luxury, I know), and I am not really someone who comes up with ideas on the daily like some other writer friends of whom I am envious. It takes me a long, long time, and once I have that idea, it possesses me, and I write very quickly, but when that idea will strike isn’t really on a schedule. All of which is to say that I conceived my initial idea lukewarmly, I started writing, and the story fizzled out much like my enthusiasm did.

My wonderful editor stuck with me. I axed pages and pages, and we would tinker with one aspect, then I’d axe pages and pages more, then tinker with another aspect. I had to keep my ego in check and my humility tempered because ultimately, getting to a final publishable book had to be the goal. I’m not, nor have I ever been a writer who is okay with publishing something I’m not absolutely wild about. (Actually, this is not true – I have one book I do not love, and the feeling churned my gut so much that I will try never to replicate it again.) So the only choice here was to roll up my sleeves, start again, then start again, then start again. I restarted this entire book probably at least five times.

Earlier in my career, I have no doubt I would have abandoned it; in fact, my hard drive is littered with half-written manuscripts that I lost interest in (or knew that they just were flat-out bad) halfway through. But with my editor’s encouragement and my previous twenty years (egad!) of experience, I pushed myself to keep going even when I had to restart yet again.

Writing is a non-linear process. Some books have poured out of me as if they were part of my DNA, and others have felt like tooth extractions. All of that is ok. I’ve long maintained that the editing process is my favorite part of writing because that’s when it becomes a team effort; that’s when my editor points out weaknesses that I’ve been blind to. In my first seven drafts, I had so many weaknesses that I nearly buckled. And that’s entirely fine too, even when, at the time, I thought I might never crack the code to making this book stand on its own two feet.

On the seventh revision, the manuscript started to hum. On the eighth, it started to sing. I stopped second-guessing myself, and trusted my editor because we were a team and her goals were my goals, and my goals were hers.
Writing books, I sometimes forget, is not meant to be easy or else the world would be filled with novelists on every corner. Sometimes you have to burn everything down, stare at the foundation, and rebuild. Nine, ten, who even knows how many drafts later, I did just that.