What if finishing your book isn’t about having all the right answers? What if you need this magic ingredient instead?
In this episode, I share how a trip to Tacoma, WA accidentally changed my entire revision process—and the $3 item that became my new favorite revision tool.
I lovingly call out the part of my psyche that confuses “looking busy” with “quality work,” and I break down the most useful thing I did for my revision process (and why I’d refused to do it for years).
What did I learn since writing my first novel?
Check out my 2025 Writing Lessons Roundup.
Episode 4 Transcript
[00:00:00] What if finishing your book isn’t about having all the right answers? What if you need this magic ingredient instead?
[00:00:12] 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.
[00:00:33] Hello and welcome back, friends. It’s time for our fire segment where we ask, what’s this week’s craft problem?
[00:00:41]
[00:00:43] Just like last week, our craft problem for today is all about revisions, but this time with a Tacoma twist. During the three-year process of writing my first book, The Fool and the Threads of Time, in hindsight, something that tacked on a lot of time, and I mean a lot, when it came to revisions, was that I didn’t really know how to do revisions.
[00:01:06] I mean, in a general sense, I knew that they involved reading over stuff I’d written and trying to make it suck less, but how I was supposed to do that was a mystery. So I ended up wasting a ton of time, essentially shifting commas around and nitpicking over line edits when maybe that entire scene I was working on needed to be cut.
[00:01:25] I was, to quote Tyler Durden from Fight Club, “polishing the brass on the Titanic.” Now, things started to change with book two, which is my current work in progress, The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, and I’ve written about this on my blog in a series of essays detailing some of my lessons learned since writing my first book.
[00:01:45] I’ll put a link to that series in the show notes. But I really noticed a change in my process when I paid a little visit to Tacoma, Washington. Given that my vacation budget is currently zero dollars, I decided to tag along and turn my partner’s work-paid-for hotel room into a DIY writer’s retreat. Fun fact, this Tacoma trip took place in February of this year, and I started writing my first book in February of 2022, also in a hotel room while tagging along on one of my partner’s work trips.
[00:02:17] So note to self, always go along on these trips, at least in the month of February. They’re remarkably productive. Anyway, the week before the trip, I had just finished draft five and another read-through of the manuscript, so it was really tempting to turn my week in Tacoma into this mad race to the finish line, seeing how many draft six revisions I could cram into five days.
[00:02:40] And me of last year would have absolutely done this, but a tiny voice within, a voice that sounded very calm and maybe even a little bit wise, suggested that perhaps, just maybe, I might want to use this time in Tacoma for a different purpose. I had an entire week away from my normal routine, so what better chance to do something that at home I’d find it really, really difficult to give myself permission to do?
[00:03:07]
[00:03:09] So Air asks, what tools did I bring to help solve this week’s craft problem? The day before our Tacoma trip, I went to the grocery store and I bought a cheap three-subject notebook. I didn’t fully know what that tiny voice wanted from me, but I had a sense that I’d need plenty of paper. I also brought two books for the plane, one of which was a sexy novel that I’d already read and loved, but I wanted to do a close reading of.
[00:03:35] So maybe my notebook was for that. I wasn’t sure. But I packed all three books in my carry-on with two fresh pens just in case. As it turns out, the first of these books, which I’ll reveal the title of next week when we do a big old deep dive, that book ended up taking up my entire flight. I read that thing cover to cover.
[00:03:54] And as a result, I was thinking a lot about what characters really want in a scene, what they want but are hiding from other characters, and what they want but are hiding even from themselves. So all of this was brewing away in my mind as we arrowed through the skies from Missouri to Washington. The next morning, I had my notebook and all my pens all arranged on the hotel desk just the way I wanted them.
[00:04:20] It was still dark out, so I had yet to learn that our room actually had a view of Mount Rainier. Nor did I know that this mountain would become an arresting touch point that I return to every time the gears of my mind ground to a halt. But for now, there was nothing but pre-dawn rain outside the windows and my notebook.
[00:04:40] The very first thing I wrote on the very first page was, and I quote, “Notes on receiving love.” This is underlined, by the way. This feels like a pretty great way to start a notebook, doesn’t it? Looking back, it’s almost prophetic. Like, whatever comes after that is destined to be juicy. And as it turns out, it was.
[00:05:02]
[00:05:04] What this heading was getting at, my quote unquote, “Notes on receiving love,” was something I’d been mulling over in the weeks leading up to this trip. Something that I had a lot of time to think about in the airport and on the plane. Two planes. We had a connecting flight at O’Hare. And that is, I feel like a major part of reading romance, a major part of the fantasy of those stories, is not seeing the couple or throuple or whoever fall in love.
[00:05:29] I mean, yes, that’s a big part of it for sure. But I wonder if for many of us, an equally big part is getting to vicariously experience being someone who can receive that love. In real life, even though we might want love, so many things can get in the way of feeling safe enough to receive it, to let it really sink in, to relish the experience of being loved.
[00:05:52] Maybe it feels selfish, so we snap ourselves out of receiving and figure out how we can hurry up and give instead. Or maybe past wounding has created emotional scar tissue, and no matter how many times someone says or shows that they care, we just can’t feel it, or at least not as fully as we’d like. But in romance, we get to see flawed characters who initially suck at receiving love, getting their happily ever after with a cherry on top.
[00:06:21] But back to my notebook. I began to free write, musing on how my main character, Ev, struggles to receive love and what it would look like for her to break through that block. I wrote down, quote, “Specific experiences that challenge Ev’s intimacy norms,” end quote. And underneath that, I started listing things like being pursued and cherished even when she doesn’t, quote, “have it all together” and being met when she’s emotionally vulnerable.
[00:06:47] I drew an arrow from that last one and asked the question, how can I show Peyton, that’s Ev’s boyfriend, not doing that? This went on for pages, and what slowly emerged was a form of call and response, question and answer, a process that I use in my regular journaling, but for some reason had never thought to use for revisions.
[00:07:06] And I slowly began to develop a consistent format. Questions would be surrounded in these large brackets, followed by rambling answers, often bulleted lists of them, which would then lead to deeper questions. Here are some more notes pulled at random. “Over the course of the book, we should first see Ev defending against and not risking intimacy, and then we see her sometimes risking intimacy, and finally she’s initiating it.”
[00:07:30] A couple of pages later, I clarified that her biggest fear is becoming a burden, and I asked myself all kinds of questions like, “What is she afraid will happen if people see her as a burden? And how does she defend against feeling like a burden?” The latter of which I answered with a long bulleted list that included things like not asking for help and being really supportive of others, but not expecting reciprocation.
[00:07:55] Something magical was happening in this notebook. I wasn’t trying to force the book to give me actionable answers right away. I was asking better and better questions until the answers started surfacing on their own, and that, I think, was the real breakthrough. I stopped treating revision like a command, fix this scene, fix this arc, make it better, and I started treating it like a conversation with a lived-in world.
[00:08:21] Since that trip to Tacoma, this has become my absolute favorite revision tool, the ratty scribbled-in notebook. I’ve since added a fancy set of colored pens, so I can underline key points in different colors. For instance, like one color for plot mechanics, another for character arc, and another for the haunting subplot.
[00:08:40] But let’s look at what comes next. Once I’d mapped out Ev’s interior terrain over pages and pages of messy notes, I took the sections I’d underlined with my colored pens, and I figured out how to layer them into my draft six revision checklist. For instance, knowing that Ev was arcing from avoiding intimacy to initiating it, I looked over her interactions with other characters, and especially with the love interest, Matt, and I fine-tuned her progression from avoidance to initiating.
[00:09:11] My revision checklist divides tasks by scene, so I’d find a relevant scene, and I’d add a specific note so I knew precisely what to change during my revision process. I have to be a little vague here to avoid spoilers, but in the opening chapter, for instance, when Ev is stressing about her finances, I tied that in with her fear of being a burden and her avoidance of intimacy by not letting her talk openly about her stress.
[00:09:37] At that early stage, she’s not gonna come out and ask for help. That would feel way too vulnerable for her, and this avoidance creates all sorts of opportunities for zingy subtext and juicy conflict.
[00:09:50]
[00:09:52] Our water segment asks the question: What does this craft lesson reveal about me personally? Well, aside from pretty much everything I wrote about my character Ev being something I’ve struggled with, aside from that, you mean? What this reveals is that it took traveling 2,453 miles to give myself permission to do something that didn’t immediately feel productive.
[00:10:15] I had this thing, or I should say I did have this thing before my Tacoma, Washington trip, where unless I’m directly working on my manuscript, as in drafting new pages or revising already existing pages, then whatever I’m doing doesn’t count in a writing sense. Before Tacoma, taking time to open a notebook and journal on, quote, “notes on receiving love” would not count, and so I didn’t let myself do it.
[00:10:42] Now, after a week of filling an entire notebook with stupendously useful insights to my story and my characters, I realize how bonkers that restriction was. My work in progress is unquestionably better after spending a week with that beat-up purple notebook. And not only did I solve problems for my current manuscript, I learned a new strategy for solving craft problems in general.
[00:11:05] But guess what? What I’ve learned here isn’t just relevant to my writing, but for that, we need to move on to the earth segment.
[00:11:12]
[00:11:14] Earth asks, “How did the fix go? And what do these craft insights ask of me in real life?” The answer to the first question is, the fix was rad. See the rest of this episode for details. But as for the second question, well, there are two things actually that this craft discovery asks of me in real life. The first is, I’m a grown-ass adult.
[00:11:35] Doing quality work is not about looking busy. This isn’t my after-school video store job where there was often fuck all nothing to do, but my boss wasn’t paying me to just stand there, so I’d better find something. I have an inner part though that acts like my video store boss, checking to make sure I’m, quote-unquote, “being productive,” even if all that frenetic activity really just amounts to moving some commas around.
[00:11:58] But my time and energy are finite, and they are precious. I want to use them on things that actually make a difference. If that means taking a week away from revisions to ask myself a million questions in a notebook, then damn it, that’s what I’m gonna do. The second thing is, I have to find what works for me.
[00:12:16] This journaling technique is like chocolate cake to my brain, but it might be a heap of Brussels sprouts to yours. Actually, I love Brussels sprouts, so that’s maybe not the best analogy. But the point is, you have to find what works for you, and it might not be a thing you’ll ever see in a writing craft book.
[00:12:32] Those character questionnaires where you fill out worksheet after worksheet with what’s your character’s favorite color, what’s in their fridge, what are their hobbies, ugh, those are to my brain like a heap of Brussels sprouts that a troll just shat out. I hate them so much. But asking myself questions that poke into all the nooks and crannies of my unique story, sign me up.
[00:12:56] Side note, I don’t just use this journaling technique on budget writer’s retreats, by the way. I now use it for any revision problem that I can’t immediately solve sitting at my computer. I’ll just pop into the living room to simulate flying to Tacoma, and I ask questions about the problem and answer them until I’ve figured it out.
[00:13:14] For my brain, this time is infinitely more productive than staring at my screen or writing out 10 false attempts without a clear idea of what I’m aiming for. Also, can we just take a moment to appreciate how satisfying it will be to look back, I don’t know, maybe 10 years from now, on all of these color-coded notebooks?
[00:13:32] They’re basically like a spiral-bound time capsule of my creative life. And maybe that’s part of what finishing a book requires, not just the finished pages, but a record of all the strange little questions that helped you find your way there
[00:13:47]
[00:13:55] 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 do 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.[00:14:13] So head on 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 essay. Next week, I’ll share how doing a close reading of a smutty novel triggered the biggest craft breakthrough I’ve had in three years. See you next time.