How Save the Cat changed her craft

How can the Fast Drafting method help you finally finish your novel? And how do you make progress when you only have 30 minutes a day to write? Jessica Brody shares her tips for finishing first drafts after 20 years as an author.

In the intro, Clive Barker's Kickstarter, The Amazon Tax [Seth Godin]; Trad publisher announces “human-originated, AI-facilitated” book, The Everything Code [PanMacmillan; AI policy; CHAPTR]; Holy relics, churches, and memento mori in Bruges and Brussels.

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Jessica Brody is the best-selling author of over 20 novels across different genres and age groups, as well as writing for Disney Publishing. She's also the author of Save the Cat! Writes a Novel and other books and courses for writers at the Writing Mastery Academy. Her latest book is Page One to Done: Finish Your Novel in 30 Days with the Fast Drafting Method.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Why a small advance can set you up for long-term success
• Why 97% of first drafts are never finished
• How to finish a novel writing 30 minutes a day
• Why drafting and revising are two different jobs
• How a pre-writing ritual primes your brain for flow
• Writing a meta murder mystery after 20 years of teaching plot. You can pre-order How to Write a Murder with bonus extras at JessicaBrody.com/preorder

You can find Jessica at JessicaBrody.com and WritingMastery.com.

Transcript of the interview with Jessica Brody

Jo: Jessica Brody is the best-selling author of over 20 novels across different genres and age groups, as well as writing for Disney Publishing. She's also the author of Save the Cat! Writes a Novel and other books and courses for writers at the Writing Mastery Academy.

Her latest book is Page One to Done: Finish Your Novel in 30 Days with the Fast Drafting Method. So welcome to the show, Jessica.

Jessica: Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm so honoured to be here. My writing community speaks so highly of this podcast, so I'm excited.

Jo: Oh, well, thank you, and you were requested, so this is going to be a good one. First up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.

Jessica: Well, I started writing when I was seven. I like to put in air quotes, I wrote my first, quote, “novel” when I was seven. It was about three pages long. I got the bug very early.

I didn't realise it was an actual career choice that you could take seriously until way later in life, after I'd already graduated college with a degree in economics and I was working as a financial analyst, and I was just writing on the side for fun.

Then, as luck would have it, I got laid off from my job, and I ended up trying to take writing a little bit more seriously in that time.

That's when I found the Save the Cat method, which absolutely changed everything for me. Before that, I had loads of rejection letters, and I eventually sold my first novel to St. Martin's Press, and I've been writing and publishing ever since. That was 20 years ago now.

Jo: 20 years, wow. It's so interesting. So you were in economics, you were a financial analyst, and you got into writing.

Did you have any pushback from either your own brain that was like, “I cannot make money this way,” or your family?

Or how did you make that leap? Because we just hear that it's not a career, financially, really.

Jessica: I know, and I think I went into it very blindly, using television as my resource of this is how much money I can make writing. Like Sex and the City, she was selling books for lots of money. So I was like, oh, I just have to sell one book, and then I'll be set.

That was not the case. My first advance was so much lower than I expected, and what happened, though, was kind of interesting. I sold my first book, way lower advance than I was hoping for. I wasn't making any money anywhere else, so I was taking on all these odd jobs that I could do in my own time.

I was doing transcription work, and I was working at a school half the time. I mean, I just had so many really weird jobs. I think what happened was, because I didn't have another financial net to help me, it just pushed me really hard.

So once I sold one book, I was like, well, I need to sell another one and another one, and I ended up in this 20-year cycle, which I've slowed down thankfully, since, but of writing so obsessively, I should say.

I just kept selling books and selling books. My advances got higher and higher, and eventually I was able to support myself with my writing, but it was not instant at all.

Jo: Actually, that's a really good note there, because we often hear so much of these debuts that get paid a ton of money, and then they disappear, and they almost spiral down.

Whereas what you've done is spiral up.

Which is almost a better way to do it perhaps, with your reputation with traditional publishing.

Jessica: It's funny, I tell this story a lot to writers who are looking to get published, that the big advance is not necessarily the end-all be-all. Because I have heard that story before, someone gets a very big advance, and then it doesn't earn out, and they can't sell another book because the publisher's lost money.

I had the opposite experience. My advance was so low, and my publisher got worldwide rights. They bought worldwide rights. So they started selling foreign rights of my first book really early on, and I earned out before the book even came out, with just a few foreign sales.

That ended up setting me up for success, because I was making money for the publisher from day one, and I was able to sell more books, and so I sort of worked my way up. I really do credit a lot of that to how long I've been able to stay in this game.

Jo: No, it's a good way of thinking about it, because people forget the publisher isn't a charity. The publisher has to make money from your book. So it's nice that you make money, but they have to make money, or they're not going to bother, right?

Jessica: Yes, exactly.

Jo: So let's come back to Save the Cat, because you mentioned that the original method really changed how you write, and then of course you did Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. So I've got that. I imagine a lot of people listening have got that.

Tell us a bit about why that methodology made such a difference to you, and why you think it's so useful.

Jessica: Well, you'll sense a theme here. I went into this business, like I said, without knowing a lot, and I went into it the way I think a lot of writers do, which is, I had an idea, I sat down, and I tried to write it. I had no guidance, no map, no structure, and I just wrote.

I actually finished something, which is surprising, but then I started to get all these rejection letters that basically said similar things, which was, “You're a good writer, you have a good voice, but there's no story here.” I just didn't understand that feedback, because I had finished something.

I could print it out and stack it on my desk. Wasn't that a story? Apparently it was not.

Then a screenwriter friend of mine that I was talking to about how I was getting all of these rejection letters with the same note said, “You should read this book that recently came out.

It's called Save the Cat, and it's for screenwriters, but I think it could work for novels because it just seems to be all about structure and storytelling.” So I read the book cover to cover so quickly, because if anyone's read the original, it's just so readable, and everything started clicking in my mind.

I realised, wow, I really don't know how to tell a story. I could plot out everything I had done wrong, and I went back to my book and I started rewriting it from page one with this new structure in mind. When I finished that, I ended up getting an agent for that book, and the agent sold that book.

I've been using the method ever since. It just made so much sense to my brain. What I tell writers is, “Use the method that makes sense to your brain.”

All storytelling structure methods are basically telling the same story, just with different words, sliced and diced a little bit differently, but structure is structure, and a story is a story.

It has to have a beginning, middle, and end. It has to have conflict, it has to have a middle twist, and things like that. So this one worked for my brain, and I started to teach it to other novelists, because at the time there was still just the screenwriting guide.

So I started to teach how I was using it to other novelists, and that turned into the book, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. Then I wrote a young adult version of it as well. And I still use it to this day. It's just something that's always made sense to me.

Jo: So were you hired by the estate? Blake Snyder died, right?

So were you hired to write that, or is that something you arranged?

Jessica: It was kind of something that was arranged. I think Blake Snyder Enterprises is the name of the company. Blake Snyder died in 2009, sadly. When I started using the method, I was blogging about it on my blog, and I would share some of my beat sheets of the novels I was writing.

The people who had taken over his estate reached out to me and said, “Hey, can you blog for us? Because we don't have a lot of novel content on our blog. We just do screenplay stuff.” And I said, “Of course.”

I had a fangirl moment. Oh my gosh, they've reached out to me and this is so exciting. So I started blogging for them, and then that turned into the workshops that I started doing with them. Then we partnered up on the book.

I think it was one of those things that felt inevitable, like we were just working toward it. I was living in LA at the time. They're based in LA. And I remember having breakfast with them, and we all just looked at each other and said, “So we need to write a book, right? There has to be a book.”

So we ended up sharing the copyright, and, as you see from the title, it says based on the books by Blake Snyder. It's very much his method. Then I brought some of my novel flair and some of my own little tips and tricks that I had picked up over the years and applied it to his method.

Jo: I love that. We are going to come to your other book for writers in a minute, but just on that intellectual property sharing, writing in other markets, you also write for Disney Publishing. This is so fascinating to me. Now, there are lots of people who do write for other properties.

So how did that come about writing for other properties, and how does that fit into your portfolio of the things that you do?

Jessica: Yes, writing for other properties is really fun. It's probably not for everyone. You have to know what you're getting into before you pursue it, because it's very much not your IP.

You're writing under someone else's brand, you're in their canon, and there are certain rules you have to follow. So you have guidelines.

I found it to be really fun and kind of a break from some of my own stuff, because I didn't have to come up with everything. I didn't have to invent all the new worlds and all the new characters. A lot of them were just given to me, and I could play within the boundaries of that sandbox, and I really found that inspiring.

So what happened actually is I was on a writing retreat with a bunch of other writers, and there was a writer at the retreat who already wrote for Disney Press and was supposed to write this new series for them, based on their Descendants series.

She said to me, “I really can't do it, but I'd love to recommend someone else to them.” I think we had been talking about how big of a fan I was of Disney or something, and she said, “Do you want me to recommend you?” And I said, “Yes, absolutely.” Another big fangirl moment.

So the editor of that series reached out to my agent. They talked to me. They got writing samples from me through my agent, and then before I knew it, I was hired to write, I think the first contract was maybe for two or three of the books, and then we renewed for a few more. It was just really fun.

Then I formed a relationship with that editor. We ended up working on another series for younger kids, based on the Disney Princess LEGO series, which was much younger and new for me.

It had illustrations. That was a whole new challenge, but I found it really fun. As I said, it was a nice break from writing my own things, because I could write them fairly quickly.

They did have very fast turnarounds at the publisher too, but I could use my skills for structure and storytelling and apply it to a world that already existed, and it was a nice pairing.

Jo: I love this.

So much of what you've done seems to have come from relationships or just putting yourself out there in the world.

Jessica: Yes, good observation. I hadn't thought of that.

Jo: Whereas I think a lot of people think that it's all about cold pitching. It's not so much, from what you're saying.

Jessica: Yes, and I did another IP project with Simon & Schuster called Boys of Summer, which was a young adult novel.

That one specifically came from my agent. So a lot of times publishers will reach out to agents and say, “Here's what we're doing. Do you have authors who would fit?” And my agent will often reach out to me and say, “Here's the pitch I got from a publisher. Are you interested in submitting yourself for this?”

That's what happened with Boys of Summer. They actually sent out an outline to a bunch of writers who were interested, and I had to write sample chapters to the outline, or I think it was the first couple of chapters or something. I was very gratefully selected to write it.

That came about from having an agent, and a lot of times having an agent is a way into IP work. And then those connections can help too.

Jo: Fascinating. Right. Well, let's get into your book Page One to Done, which as I said, one of my listeners actually requested to have you on the show to talk about this book, because she said it was absolutely fantastic and helped her finish her book. So why finishing? What is the problem?

Why write a book on actually finishing? What are some of the common issues that people have?

Jessica: Well, thank you to that listener. I really appreciate it, and here I am because of you. Connections once again.

So Page One to Done came out of my own struggle with finishing, and not just finishing, but finishing efficiently and maintaining joy throughout the process of writing a novel.

As I said, I was writing very fast and furiously, and my deadlines were piling up, and I started to feel like writing a novel stopped being fun. It started to become a very frustrating process, and I realised that was a lot about how I was approaching the first draft, which, as most writers know, the first draft is very hard.

When I started to look further into it, I found this statistic online that's widely accepted in the writing community, which is that 97% of first drafts are not finished. Which is, wow, mind-blowing, but also not that hard to believe once you think about the challenges of writing a first draft.

Taking an idea from a seed, developing it into a full plot with character development and arcs and subplots and side characters and themes and all the things that you think a story should have, getting that all onto the page and actually reaching the end.

It's very, very difficult, and I never lie about how difficult it is. So I was struggling to finish things quickly, to enjoy the process, and I noticed that other writers were too. I felt like, well, I have this plotting guide that I love, this structure guide, Save the Cat! Shouldn't this be easier once I have an outline?

And it wasn't. And that, I think, is because we forget that there's another part of the process. It's not just about developing a compelling character. It's not just about having a well-paced plot. You have to be able to get ideas out of your head and onto the page in a way that doesn't make you want to quit.

I think one of the problems with the first draft is most of us write something down, it does not match what's in our head, and we start to get more and more frustrated. The process becomes overwhelming. We're holding too much of the story in our head.

We're going back to page one to revise with every new idea we have, so it starts to slow down. The farther we get into the book, the longer that back to page one process takes, and things start to spiral out of control.

I think that's essentially what happens to this 97% of first drafts. The writer quits because it's not good enough. It doesn't match what's in their mind, and there's too much to hold, and it starts to become overwhelming. So this is what was happening to me.

Even though I was finishing things, the process was still very overwhelming, and I started to experiment with different things. Different mindset shifts that I could make, different ways I could change my writing routine to really enhance the process, to get into flow faster, to stay in flow for longer, things like that.

It took me about five years, and I developed this collection of mindset shifts and strategies and routines that I could not only apply to myself, but I turned it into a system that was repeatable, and I started teaching it in my Writing Mastery Academy.

I called it the Fast Drafting method, and it's all about letting go of this idea that our first draft has to be perfect or even that good, and just focusing on getting ideas down as quickly as possible, even if that creates a big mess.

It's this freeing process of doing that in a way that we don't get in our own way. So I started teaching it to other writers. People were finishing things who had never finished things before. Writers who had taken two years to write a first draft were writing first drafts in weeks.

The biggest comment I was getting was, “This is so freeing. This is so liberating. This is so fun.” And it gave people the motivation that they needed to actually sit down and revise the book.

Before, either they never finished, so they never got to the revision process, or they were so overwhelmed and bogged down by the two years it took for them to write one draft, they didn't have the energy to revise and get it to the next level.

So anyway, all of this is to say it was working for me, it was working for other writers. I turned it into a book called Page One to Done, and it's my three-phase process, mindset, preparation, and drafting, which I equate to running a marathon.

You wouldn't run a marathon without proper training and proper nutrition and the right mindset, just like you wouldn't write a novel without the right mindset, the right preparation, and the right skills you need to get to the end.

Jo: That's fantastic. You mentioned training there and some of the routine changes. So I hear new writers say, “Oh, I can't write unless I maybe have two hours or three hours to write down stuff, and I never have three hours at a time, so I never have time to write.” I hear that a lot. So what would you say to those people?

What is a routine and a mindset shift that might help those people?

Jessica: That's great, and I hear that all the time too. I interviewed a handful of authors for this book who had gone through the fast drafting method with me, and I would say the majority of them wrote for 30 minutes to one hour a day and were able to finish their books in a matter of weeks to maybe two months.

That's because what I teach in the book is not about the amount of time you have. It's about how you use that time. When you really structure your day and your writing time with intentionality, you do whatever you can to block out distractions, get into flow, stay in flow.

I'll give you one amazing tip that basically solves all of these things in a second. But when you really bring intentionality to those 30 minutes, you can write more in 30 minutes than you can in three hours without bringing these kinds of intentional choices. So that's one of the things I teach. You don't need more time.

You actually just need to approach the time you have with the right mindsets and the right intentions.

So one of the biggest shifts I tell people is just don't write and revise at the same time.

For one, it pulls your brain in two different directions and creates the requirement of context switching, because essentially drafting and revising are two different jobs.

Drafting is getting ideas out of your head and onto the page. Revising is polishing those ideas. They require very different headspaces and very different skills. So when we try to do both of them at once, we're pulled in two different directions.

We're essentially trying to polish something we haven't even figured out yet, so we're polishing in the dark, if you will. It causes our brain to snap back and forth so many times.

The term context switching is very big in the zeitgeist today, and that's because it's eating up our brain capacity. So if you spend 30 minutes just getting ideas down without judging them as they're coming out, without trying to revise them as they're coming out, you will get a lot of words down.

A lot of that has to do with just what do you expect out of those 30 minutes? If you expect to write a chapter of absolutely brilliant polished prose, you're probably not going to do it, and you're going to feel like you wasted three hours.

Then the next time you have three hours, you're like, “Well, no, I'm not going to do that. It's too frustrating, and I don't have three hours to begin with.”

But if you sit down with the idea of, “I'm going to get all my ideas down. I'm going to just enjoy this process and live in my story for these 30 minutes,” you will be amazed at how much will come out onto the page. And you can absolutely finish a book that way.

So intentionality is how you set up your workspace. Making sure that your phone is on do not disturb, making sure there are no pop-ups on your screen, making sure there are not even windows open behind your document. Every time your mind thinks about something else, you have to bring it back, and that eats brain power.

So it's things like that. I have a whole chapter on how to set up a writing routine. One of the biggest tips I give people is to do what I call a pre-writing ritual. This is based in neuroscience, and there are all of these studies that back this up, that our brain does something where it associates an activity with another activity.

So let's say right before we sit down to write, every time we do that, we do 10 jumping jacks, just as an example. But we only do 10 jumping jacks before we write.

We don't do 10 jumping jacks before we sit down to do our taxes or answer emails. It's just before we write. Your brain starts to create this associative link with jumping jacks and writing.

These are ways that we can prime our brain to get into the writing mode, and after doing that a handful of times, you do your jumping jacks, and your brain is literally already in your story before you sit down.

It starts to soften that resistance that happens when we think, “Oh, I have to go write now,” or, “I've got to go write a certain amount of words,” or, “I have to work with my story.”

It softens that, where it just becomes, “Oh, this is what I'm doing now.” Setting up these pre-writing rituals, which could include jumping jacks, could include something else, a lot of examples we can explore if you want, creates that associative link and allows us to get into the writing zone even faster.

So by the time we sit down, we're already primed to go. We're not wasting a lot of that time going, “Oh, should I do it now? Should I do it later? I've got to open my document. Oh, my coffee's a little low.” All the things that we do to delay writing. They start to fall away.

Jo: Yes, I mean, I always tell people, you and I turned up on time. We arranged this. We respect each other. We turn up, and we're doing this within a time slot.

So I always say to people, “Look, make a calendar entry for your writing,” and do you respect your writing enough to turn up on time and do the work? We had a few minutes of saying hi or whatever, and then we got on with our work, which was this interview.

So if you've arranged to start writing for that half an hour, then it is work still, right? You need to turn up and honour that.

Jessica: Yes, and actually I have the same tip in the book. I say put it on your calendar, block it off. For the reasons you said, it creates in your brain the idea that this is a serious thing.

It's not just a, “Oh, I'll get to it when I get to it,” like folding the laundry. It's like, no, this is what I've decided to do, I'm serious about it, I respect it. Just like any other appointment that you would respect, like lunch with a friend or an important business meeting, you show up for it.

You don't go, “I think I'll show up to that business meeting in a few hours when I feel like it.” Also it keeps the routine consistent, because one of the tips I give is to always write at the same time every day if you can, because again, that associative link created in your brain, that habitual routine.

So if you put it in your calendar for the days that you're going to write, you won't schedule over it by accident, which is just another logistical thing.

I say something similar to what you just said, Joanna, in the book, which is basically, if you booked a massage for an hour, you would stay for the hour, right? Because you paid for this massage.

Jo: Hell yes.

Jessica: It's important to you. You're not going to get up in the middle and start texting your friends. You want your massage. If you treat your writing like any other thing that's important to you and show up for it consistently, it will show up for you, too.

Jo: Yes, and I think the other misconception is that, okay, so that person has made it, and they're at the desk. I listen to rain and thunderstorms in my headphones. That's kind of, I guess, my routine. But that doesn't mean that I can just stream something wonderful.

You talked about separating the writing and the editing, but sometimes it really is pretty basic, right? Morgan walked into the room. That will often be my thing, and then I'll be like, “Okay, well, why?” And what was the room like? Or was it even a room?

So sometimes you just have to start writing something rather than wait for a perfect sentence.

Jessica: Oh, yes, absolutely. Waiting for the perfect sentence, you'll be waiting for a long time. I say waiting for inspiration, you'll be waiting for a long time.

My joke is, if I waited to write only when I felt inspired, I'd finish a book about every 20 years, if that. I think that's very important, and I teach a lot of tips and tricks in the book on how to get past that resistance, because of course, we don't want to just sit down and write something that we don't like.

We don't want to just write down, “Oh, she stared at her computer for 10 minutes.” But sometimes we have to write that down to get to the next sentence or the next plot point or whatever barrier is in our mind.

So one tip I'll tell people is put things you don't like in brackets, the square brackets. It's a really simple tip, and it's one of the tips I share in the book. Just put it in brackets and move on.

What the brackets do, at least for people who use it, is it's like scaffolding. It's a reminder to your brain, this isn't permanent. This isn't going to stay. I'm going to come back to this later and fix it once I figure out what the story is and what she's actually doing in the room at this moment.

For now, it's there. It's on the page. I can move past it. For me at least, the brackets are just this really nice reminder of the scaffolding. Nope, nope, nope, not perfect, not permanent, moving on. Then you can come back later and flesh it all out.

I share a lot of anecdotes from my 20 years of writing novels, and one that I particularly like is I was working on a novel, and I had this scene that was just so awful, where all of my characters were sitting in a room.

I had no idea what room it was or what it looked like, and they were talking about their feelings. It was just so awful and boring, but I had to get through this scene because I had to establish certain things that came later.

I was complaining and complaining about this scene. I was on a writing retreat at the time, and my writer friends were like, “Let's just do a writing sprint, and we'll all write really fast, and we'll all get through our bad scenes, and we'll move on.” So I did that. I moved past the boring scene.

It was still boring all the way to the end, but here's the thing, I couldn't figure out what happened in that scene until I'd figured out the whole story.

So I wrote the bad version, and then in the next draft I came back and I was like, “Oh, this scene should take place on this bridge that I wrote in the finale that I didn't even know I needed, and it's this very symbolic bridge, and they can be standing on the bridge, and then they should be talking about this because that's going to pay off in the third act,” and I hadn't even thought of that yet.

So all the things were coming together, but I could never have come up with that at the time. If I had just sat there and tried and tried, I probably would have gotten stuck at that scene and quit. So I had to just write the bad version, move past it, and come back later.

Jo: Yes, and I think maybe because you're famous for structure, people think that maybe you wouldn't have to do that, because you already came up with that in the plotting.

It sounds like you're also putting in those elements and foreshadowing and deepening things in the edit.

So that's quite comforting for me as a discovery writer, because I end up doing so much more of that kind of thing in the edits.

Jessica: Well, something I like to say is that we're all discovery writers, just different degrees. Because the writing process, no matter how much you plot in advance, is always going to be a discovery process.

There are always going to be things you didn't think of. There's always going to be a way to tie things together that you never could have thought of before you started writing.

So much of the story evolves and gets processed on the page and in your mind as it's coming out onto the page, and it's delusional to think you can think of all that before you start engaging with the characters.

You can come close. I've known writers who have come very close, but almost all writers will discover something that they didn't know in the outline. I would argue that that's actually the fun part of writing. It's not the days when writing goes exactly to plan. They're nice, but they're not necessarily the fun parts.

The fun parts are when you sit down to write the scene you thought was going to be the scene, and suddenly this new detail appears, and you go, “Oh my gosh, this totally unlocks everything, and I never even thought of it.”

It could be in a text message. It could be on a billboard. It could be something the character just blurts out that you weren't expecting, and suddenly your whole story comes together in that moment, or maybe just the scene comes together. It's those moments, I think, that we write for.

So even just expecting the book to come out exactly as you plotted is one of those mindset shifts. If you shift it and think, “This is really fun. I get to discover new things about my story that I wasn't expecting,” that, again, just makes the process a little more fun.

So instead of, “Oh, this isn't what I thought it was going to be,” or, “This isn't what I outlined,” which is focusing on what's wrong with the book, it becomes, “Oh, wow, this is teaching me something I never expected about my story, and that's pretty cool.”

Jo: Yes, I think that moment, Carl Jung called it, I guess, synchronicity, the moment when these things come together and it feels just incredible, that's the moment we all look for. It does seem to happen on every book. Everything clicks into place, and I look forward to that moment with every book.

I did want to ask you about a novel that you have coming out soon as we record this, called How to Write a Murder. Now, this is a new genre for you, and it's quite meta because it's about writers as well. So talk about writing a brand new genre now at this point in your career.

What are the challenges of trying to reach a new audience? Why do this book now?

Jessica: Wow, great question. I love challenging myself to do something new. I wrote contemporary for many years and then thought, “I'm going to try a sci-fi.” Or, “I'm going to try middle grade now.”

I think I go where the story wants, where I'm inspired to go when it comes to story ideas. However, with mystery, it's been one of those things that's always been on the back of my mind, like a wish list, a bucket list. I want to write a murder mystery. I just never had the right idea. Or I never had the time, or I never had the space.

Then I finished my last novel contract, and I took a break, because I had been writing on deadlines for years. I took a very, very much needed break from deadlines. For the first time in I think 15 years, I did not have a book deadline.

I just asked myself, “Jessica, what do you want to write?” As opposed to, what's the next book that's due? And the answer was very clear. I want to write that murder mystery.

I toyed with a few ideas, and then I started to think about, okay, so I wrote this book on plot that a lot of people know and use. What if someone used that book to plot a literal murder? What would that look like?

This meta explosion came to mind, which is that I wanted to write a murder mystery that's structured like a plotting guide for murder mysteries. The characters in the book are all writers who are familiar with this plotting guide, and the events of the story are unfolding like the plot of a murder mystery according to this book.

You have no idea which one of them is actually using the book to plot the murder, because they all know the book. So one of the taglines is, “One dead body, seven mystery writers, and they all know how to get away with murder.”

It was sort of my culmination of everything I'd done in my career. All the plotting workshops I'd taught, all the revision courses I'd taught, and of course this plotting structure method I'd been teaching for years, and I put it into this book.

It's a fictional version of Save the Cat! It's called The Bestseller Formula. The premise of this book is that someone is using a murder mystery plotting guide to plot a literal murder. So the reader is learning how to write a murder as they're reading about the murder on the page.

Jo: I love it. I know lots of people are going to want that. It does bring the business side of things into more difficulty, because of course you have readers, like you mentioned middle grade, you've got YA books, and obviously, I guess, the writers that you teach will be interested.

How is this going to work for your book marketing and your business?

Because it also sounds like this might be a standalone.

Jessica: It is a standalone as of now. I have some sequel ideas, but we're not pursuing them yet.

It is a different market for me, for sure, and that's become a challenge as I'm marketing, because I'm not in the thriller mystery space yet.

I haven't written a novel for adults since the very, very beginning of my career. I've been mostly writing for teens and middle grade. The good news is most of my teen readers are now adults, because it's been so long since I wrote for teens. So there's that.

I think the book will appeal to mystery readers just because it's a fun mystery, and there's a fun meta element to it. I think it's going to appeal to writers as well. So I'm very much leaning on that, at least for the launch. I hope my writer community will get behind this book, because it's very much an ode to storytelling.

It's an ode to writers. I dedicated it to writers. As a writer, you will understand this book on a level that a reader never will. You will get so many of the little inside jokes that a reader might just skim past. So I did very much write it for writers, with the hope that readers will also enjoy it.

I had the most fun writing it I've had, I think, of writing any book. Partly I think that was because I wasn't writing it under deadline. I was just writing it for me, but also just because it felt like the book I'd been destined to write for so long.

Jo: Fantastic. So we're out of time.

So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?

Jessica: How is that possible? I feel like we just started. JessicaBrody.com is the best place to find everything. If you're interested in my writing courses, you can check out WritingMastery.com as well.

Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, Jessica. That was brilliant.

Jessica: Thank you, Joanna. I had so much fun.

The post From Page One To Done: Fast Drafting Your Novel With Jessica Brody first appeared on The Creative Penn.