Episode 3 of Will I Ever Finish This F#@king Book? is live!

This week, in addition to renovating my haunted-house subplot that wasn’t nearly as haunted as I’d hoped, we’re meeting one of my inner parts whom I’ve affectionately nicknamed Fuck It, Let’s Quit.

This part likes to pop in and “help” whenever a writing and/or life problem feels unwieldy (meaning: all problems that can’t be addressed in 5 seconds or less).

We’ll also explore how a busted-up stove from my childhood became the key to figuring out seemingly unfigureoutable problems.

Listen here:

What did I learn since writing my first book?

Check out my 2025 Writing Lessons Roundup.

Episode 3 Transcript

[00:00:00] What if that feeling of revision overwhelm is hiding your personal creativity kryptonite, and staring it straight in the face is what finally makes you invincible? Or at least slightly less likely to delete your entire manuscript and take up goat herding.

[00:00:20] If you’ve ever devoted yourself to a creative project that ended up consuming your entire fucking life, this one’s for you. I’m Aven Winslow, romance writer and Jungian witch. Join me in the final stretch of writing my second romantasy novel. Craft breakthroughs, perfectionism spirals, and all the eerie little ways that fiction can start bleeding into real life.

[00:00:43] Welcome back, friends. We start, as always, with our fire segment, the element that asks, what’s our craft issue for the week?

[00:00:51] 

[00:00:53] The craft issue for this week is pretty simple. Well, not simple to fix, just simple enough to tell you about. After doing a full read-through of my second book, The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, prior to starting draft six, I realized that my haunting subplot wasn’t very haunted.

[00:01:12] But the deeper problem wasn’t just that the creepy scenes needed to be creepier. It was that the haunting was staying contained nicely, politely, inside the scenes where haunting stuff was obviously happening. But that’s not how dread works. Like, that shit leaks. It seeps behind the wallpaper and erupts into this black mold infestation that you can never fully root out.

[00:01:35] So the question I was really grappling with was, how do I make the haunting feel like this claustrophobic atmosphere, not an isolated event? I have a feeling that figuring out how to talk about this problem without giving you any spoilers for my book is going to be almost as tricky as fixing that subplot, but we’ll get through this together.

[00:01:57] So what did I do to dial up the creepiness? Let’s find out.

[00:02:01] 

[00:02:03] Air asks, “What tools did I bring to help solve this week’s craft issue?” So, in my work in progress, there are multiple ghosts. Technically, they’re not all ghost ghosts, but explaining more would be spoiler central, and it’s not really necessary to get into the craft angle. So, when I did my read-through and realized the haunting subplot was falling a bit flat, I had just so happened to listen to a podcast.

[00:02:29] It’s called On The Road with Penguin Classics, because I’ve been on this classics reading kick for the last six months or so. And there was an episode on The Haunting of Hill House. I couldn’t remember if I’d read that book in high school or if all of my memories were from the film adaptations, but I decided to give it another read, and specifically, to take notes on how Shirley Jackson built a sense of menace and foreboding.

[00:02:54] I actually have my journal right here with my notes, and I remember I was at my monthly Shut Up and Write meeting, which is held at the library, so it was really handy. I just ran upstairs, I grabbed the book, and I spent that writing hour reading and taking notes. So I’m not gonna read you pages and pages from my journal, but there are a few themes that jump out at me.

[00:03:15] For starters, I really loved how Jackson built up Hill House as an entity with malicious intent, not just your run-of-the-mill haunted house. There was something about the house itself having motive and agency being even creepier to me than there just being ghosts in the house. Part of it was the feeling of entering this entity, of being entirely contained within this malevolency.

[00:03:39] And while not all of that was relevant for my book’s plot, in draft six, as a result of these notes, I did try to elevate that sense of Ev, my main character, encountering Harrowfell Hall, which is the haunted castle where her book’s film adaptation is being shot. I tried to elevate her spidey sense of Harrowfell watching her, of the castle having certain rules regarding how she behaved, and conveying this uneasy pressure if she broke those rules.

[00:04:07] I also did things like playing with how sound traveled within the castle, using it to make Ev feel much more isolated. For instance, she might be right down the hall from the rest of the film crew, but it’s totally silent. And I like the idea of Harrowfell doing that on purpose, the castle being able to muffle sound or otherwise control her surroundings because, like, she’s inside it.

[00:04:30] She’s trapped in its domain. She’s not at the top of the food chain in this place. The other big takeaway from The Haunting of Hill House was the page time Jackson devoted to Eleanor, her main character, and her journey to Hill House. We don’t start the book with Eleanor walking up to the front door. We tag along on her drive, and we get a strong sense of the frankly miserable life that she’s left behind, the recent death of her mother, whom she took care of, and her fraught relationship with her controlling sister.

[00:05:02] And we see her fantasies about how this stay at Hill House could change her life Before she sees the house for the first time, we even get a fantasy about, ooh, maybe there are secret tunnels on the grounds, and she’ll meet this handsome smuggler. And then this fantasy is rudely shattered the instant she lays eyes on the house, and her first reaction is, and I quote, “The house was vile.”

[00:05:27] Ugh, it’s so good. That’s so good. So in thinking about these elements in the context of my story, this led to revamping my character Ev’s journey from her ordinary world to Harrowfell Hall. In the previous draft, I didn’t just have her sitting in the car twiddling her thumbs, but after reading Hill House, I had specific ideas on how I could make that drive work a lot harder.

[00:05:51] And specifically, I revamped it so that not only are we getting teasers about the romance that will blossom over the course of the story, but relative to my haunting subplot, the drive serves much more effectively as a descent into the underworld. Interestingly, I had started reading a paranormal romance at the time.

[00:06:11] Actually, I don’t remember the name, but it just so happened that the main character of that book was also traveling to a haunted house, and I remember being so bored. The book had opened with this prologue that was actually pretty creepy, though it did come right out and show the ghost at the end of the prologue, which I felt wasn’t the most effective tactic.

[00:06:31] Sort of like a horror movie revealing the monster in the opening credits, and it’s just the neighbor in a handmade Bigfoot costume. But anyway, after that eerie prologue, we’re dumped into a car with a guy on his phone just trying to ignore the chatty Uber driver, and that’s basically it. And I knew that I didn’t wanna do that in my book.

[00:06:50] I wanted the drive to Harrowfell to build both romantic suspense and elevate the haunted vibe. So everything I’ve just talked about is one strategy that I used. I read Hill House, I took notes, and I used that material to help brainstorm ways to improve my own story. But let’s get into how I actually carried out these revisions.

[00:07:11] 

[00:07:14] So I am passionately in love with checklists, and if you’re not that way, everything I’m about to say might sound like your personal hell, and I apologize. But I love using either pen and paper or Google Docs, specifically with the checkbox style of list, so I have the intense satisfaction of checking things off it.

[00:07:33] I love it. So okay, what went on my list? I tackled this from two fronts, the haunting scenes themselves and the scenes in between the hauntings. So first, I listed out all of the haunting scenes, so I knew exactly what I was working with. This led to the realization that I actually needed to map out the progression of the villain.

[00:07:56] I’m using villain as a sort of placeholder here, because as I mentioned earlier, the haunting is more complicated than, “Oh, there’s this big, bad ghost, and they have to defeat the ghost to win the day.” There’s, there’s more going on. But to avoid spoilers, let’s just call the haunting elements altogether the villain.

[00:08:12] So I knew I needed to map a progression of the villain so that its presence was felt from the start, but there was a definite sense of that presence ramping up and reaching a climax. Once I had this progression mapped out, I could then go over my haunting scenes and figure out how to layer that progression in.

[00:08:32] As a side note, I’ve since read a book called Action by Robert McKee, and I’m so excited to take those principles to help me build an even better villain in my next book. But that will be a topic, who knows, maybe for the next season of this podcast. Okay, so that takes care of one of the two angles. The other angle was tackling the scenes in between the haunting events, and this is where in the previous draft I’d really let the haunting tension fall away, and this was a real missed opportunity to keep that string taut so the reader is wondering when it will be plucked again.

[00:09:06] I treated these haunting and in-between scenes as mini arcs. First, there’s building dread, the dread comes to a climax in the haunting, and then these mini arcs keep spilling over into the next one until the actual climax of the book. So this whole process has taken me, what? Like, four minutes to describe to you?

[00:09:24] Suffice it to say, it did not take me four minutes to carry it out, and this brings us to our next segment, where we paddle into the backwaters of my psyche and see what happens in my head when I’m faced with a messy pile of revisions.

[00:09:38] 

[00:09:40] So Water asks, “What do these craft insights reveal about me personally?”

[00:09:45] When I was preparing for this episode and I asked myself that question, something jumped out immediately. Like, in 1/10 of a second, the answer was fully formed. So you might say that my unconscious has some thoughts on the matter. When it comes to revisions, unless you’re dealing with typos or fairly simple line edits, the process is often a bit of a mess, but even still, there is a mess spectrum, if you will.

[00:10:11] Some messes might be contained within a single scene. Others, like my haunting subplot, reach their slimy little tentacles throughout your entire story, and it’s these types of revisions that can really get my inner parts twisted up in knots. And I’m using inner parts in internal family system sense, meaning parts of my psyche that behave a lot like independent characters in a story, with their own hopes and dreams and their own very strong opinions on how I should be living my life.

[00:10:39] So what happens in my inner system when faced with high-mess revisions is a feeling of overwhelm, which makes sense, but for a long time, I didn’t realize there was something hiding behind the overwhelm, something that was tripping me up in writing and in life It wasn’t just that the problem felt unwieldy or that I imagined it would take a lot of time and effort to fix.

[00:11:02] I mean, those were factors to be sure, but they were factors that felt figure-out-able. I could whip up one of my beloved checklists, develop a schedule, and just get to work. But it was the thing hiding behind the overwhelm that made all of my usual tools and strategies evaporate, and that was the more messy a problem was, the more it confronted me with the reality that this thing I’m creating will never, ever be perfect.

[00:11:29] When I’m just humming along, checking off my to-do list, I don’t often realize it, but this sort of everything according to plan level of awareness lulls one of my inner parts into thinking that it really is possible to s- do things perfectly. See? Everything’s unfolding to plan. It’s only when I’m staring down a hairy tangle of revisions that I’m reminded of how silly that is, that nothing can ever be perfect.

[00:11:53] Now, that realization in and of itself is not that life-shattering, but I have another inner part. Seriously, there’s like a whole city in my head with suburbs and new subdivisions under construction every week. But this other part, when faced with the knowledge that this thing can never be perfect, tries to convince me to just give up.

[00:12:13] Maybe it kicks up this urge to procrastinate, or it tries to send me down side trails where, instead of finishing my book, I’m picking out a new template for my website, even though the current one is just fine. In working with this part, a memory surfaced from childhood, or really a series of memories that are emblematic of a familiar dynamic for me growing up.

[00:12:35] So the stove in my grandparents’ house had a burner that stopped working when I was a kid, and for whatever reason, it was never fixed, and at some point later, a second burner went out. The oven door also wouldn’t stay shut, so there was this really thick wad of aluminum foil that we’d wedge into the door so it wouldn’t just, like, hinge open while you’re trying to bake cookies.

[00:12:58] And then a third burner went out, leaving only one working burner on the stove. This was a common occurrence growing up, a relatively simple problem, whether it was a stove burner or a conversation that needed to be had, was ignored until suddenly you have no way to cook your dinner. I have an inner part that thinks the safest thing I can do is survive on granola bars instead of fixing the stove, and you better believe that this part has no idea how to tackle messy revisions.

[00:13:28] So if I’m letting that part take charge, it makes more sense to just walk away from a project I’ve devoted a year of my life to, and not only that, but a project that fills me with toe-curling joy that I cannot wait to share with you. But this part would be just fine hitting delete on the whole damn thing.

[00:13:48] Just saying that out loud right now when I’m not merged with my fuck it, let’s quit part feels like a sword jab to the heart. Oh my God, I cannot imagine giving up on this book. This is why it’s very, very useful to start learning your own tells so you can spot, well before you do anything drastic like deleting your entire manuscript, when inner parts are getting activated and trying to wrestle away the steering wheel.

[00:14:14] When my fuck it, let’s quit part is waking up, I start feeling this… It’s like a buzzing in my chest. I might be looking over my revision notes, and the buzzing gets louder until it feels like I have ants crawling under my skin. If I stay merged with that part, my impulse is to sit there and try to figure everything out while I’m in that ants crawling phase, which works about as well as you’d expect, and I get more and more frustrated until, guess what?

[00:14:45] I wanna give up. On the other hand, if I notice the buzzing and I step away from my computer and give myself time to just calm and center myself, I can just come back to my revision notes and start developing a plan. Sometimes I need to sleep on it, and other times, I just need a 10-minute reset. When I’m not blended with my fuck it part, I start to see messy revisions as an intriguing challenge, a fun and, yes, sometimes annoying puzzle that I, I get to solve, and I know that in solving it, I’ll learn so much about writing and about myself.

[00:15:23] I don’t wanna treat my books like a busted up stove. I want to treat them like an exciting puzzle that is guaranteed to reveal amazing things if I just slow down, pour myself a nice cup of tea, and settle in to put it together one piece at a time.

[00:15:40] 

[00:15:42] So Earth asks, how did the fix go? And what do these insights ask of me in real life? Honestly, I think it worked. I mean, not in a, “I have now solved fiction forever” kind of way, but as I read through my manuscript, the story now feels way more like the book I set out to write. The haunting no longer feels like a handful of random spooky incidents someone accidentally dropped on the floor.

[00:16:07] I can see more of a progression from Ev journeying to Harrowfaul Hall, to her first encounter with the castle, and to a building sense of pressure as we approach the book’s c- climax. So here in our Practical Earth segment of the show, this is where ideas either become real or they don’t, and when it comes to revisions, if you set out with a foggy umbrella task like, “Make the haunting better,” this is frankly not a great task.

[00:16:34] What actually are you going to do the next time you sit down to write? This umbrella task is only a vague notion of many, many things that you could do, but to actually get them done, you have to choose your next concrete step. In my case, that looked like listing the haunting scenes, mapping the progression for the villain, layering that onto the haunting scenes, looking at the scenes in between the hauntings, and figuring out ways to keep the dread alive.

[00:17:02] That’s when the problem stopped being a big old mess and became an actual path. Still a long path, still a very annoying path in places, but a path, and that, I think, is what this asks of me in real life. Because my busted stove part wants to treat problems as if looking at them too directly will make them worse.

[00:17:21] Don’t touch it. Don’t name it. Just keep working around that broken thing until your whole life is an obstacle course of avoidance. But actually revising, actually living asks for the opposite. It asks me to look at that broken burner and say, “Okay, that one, that’s the thing we’re fixing today.” Not the whole kitchen, not my entire childhood, not the fate of my writing career, just this burner, this scene, this one place where the dread goes slack, and weirdly, that’s where the joy comes back.

[00:17:54] Because when I’m merged with my fuck it, let’s quit part, the mess feels like proof that I’ve failed, but when I slow down enough to make the problem concrete, the mess becomes evidence that the book is alive. It’s pushing back. It’s asking for things. It’s saying, “Not here. Not like this. Try again.” Don’t let the mess stay foggy.

[00:18:14] Foggy problems become monsters under the bed. Specific problems become tasks, and tasks can be handled one scene, one tiny repair at a time. That’s how the haunting subplot got stronger, and unfortunately for my fuck it, let’s quit part, that’s also how books get finished.

[00:18:34] Thanks for listening to Will I Ever Finish This Fucking Book? If you enjoyed hearing me break down my revision process in exquisite detail, be sure to head over to my mailing list, because every year, I send out a series of essays exploring all the writing craft shit I learned since my last book. And if you’ve made it this far, something tells me you’ll love those roundups.[00:18:54] So head over to twinflames.life/freebies. No matter which freebie you sign up for, that’ll get you on my list, and you won’t miss a single lessons learned essay. Next week, I’ll share how a little old trip to Tacoma, Washington, ended up fixing my book. See you then.