S01E05: Novel Writing Under Pressure – Kiersten White
Author Kiersten White explains the process of writing The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein.
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KB: You are listening to the Failure Bites podcast, where successful people tell bite-size stories of failure, growth, and success. I’m your host Kristin Brynteson, and I failed at least six times today trying to write this opening. Anyone who has written anything will tell you that failure and writing go hand-in-hand. It’s all part of the process. Today’s guest is Kiersten White, New York Times’ Best Selling Author and all-around interesting person. She’s best known for her wildly popular YA fantasy books such as And I Darkenand SLAYER. One of her most recent works is The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein, a retelling of Frankenstein in honor of its 200thanniversary.
KW: So, one of the times that I failed was actually writing this book. It was a very tight deadline because we wanted to get it out in time for the 200thanniversary, and so, I had about four months to write it. And I spent about three months researching and writing my original idea, which was a much closer retelling. I wanted to do it in epistolary form, like the original novel—the original novel is written as a letter to some random dude’s sister. Victor’s telling him his story. Can you imagine if you got a 300-page letter from your brother, telling this random story about this dude he picked up in the Arctic. I’d be like, please just call next time. Just text me. Oh my gosh, just FaceTime. This is so awkward. So, I tried to write it as an epistolary novel, like in journal form, like you’d found Elizabeth’s journal. And… the thing about epistolary novels is we don’t write them anymore. And we don’t write them anymore because they’re very boring. It’s really hard to have any narrative tension when the person is telling their own story because guess what? They survived.
And so, I had about 30,000 words at that, which is a third of a novel, about a hundred pages, and again, I was three months into my four-month window of time. And I emailed my editor, and I was like, “So… I have 30,000 words, but it’s totally not working, and I need to throw them all away and start over at the beginning, but it’s going to be fine. Thanks! Bye!” So, I had to start over, and at this point, I had a month. But… all of those months of trying something and failing at it meant that I knew the characters, I knew the world, I knew what plot I wanted to use—which also was a little bit easier because Mary Shelley plotted it for me. She’s so generous. So, it was a much easier process at that point because I had three months of failed work to inform this new draft, and I actually wrote the new draft in six days because I had all of that material and all that time spent thinking about the characters and writing in the characters’ voices, so that—what could have been considered tremendous failure actually ended up making the process of writing the second draft, which is the version you can read, so much easier. And that’s happened to me several times, where I’ve spent a long time on a failed draft, and that failure then informs my ability to write a really clean, really fast, really fun draft.
Sometimes, my process is writing an entire book wrong in order to figure out that I wrote it wrong. It’s not an efficient process, and I don’t recommend it. If you can choose to write a book in six days without writing an entire failed draft before, definitely do that. I wish I could choose to do that. Like, if I could just turn that on and off, that would be amazing, but it doesn’t work like that.
KB: You just heard Kiersten White talking about failure and writing. In other words, revision. Writing is a process. You can’t have a finished work if you don’t draft something first. Sometimes that first draft, or second or third or fourth, might take you in the wrong direction, but every revision, no matter how wrong, is a valuable part of the journey. Don’t worry. You’ll get there. For more with Kiersten White, listen to our interview with her on the STEM Read Podcast. I’m Kristin Brynteson, and this was Failure Bites. Leave a review and subscribe for more. If you fail to do so, well, we can’t fault you for that. This podcast was produced by NIU STEAM at Northern Illinois University. Your future, our focus.
