Megan Chance with Wendy Hinman

Megan Chance is the critically acclaimed author of historic fiction, young adult, and historic romance books as well as many short stories. Her best-selling novels have been translated into several different languages.
 Megan, I had the opportunity to sit in on your Write on the Sound session on editing and revision and found it to be clear, thoughtful, and thorough. Clearly you have a talent for sharing your writing techniques and we are grateful you’ve agreed to share some of your knowledge with our readers.
 
Will you please tell us about your early writing efforts? How did you evolve as a writer? What was your inspiration?
 
     I knew I wanted to be a writer from a very young age. I loved to read, and I can be obsessive, which meant that when I fell in love with something, I either read it over and over again, or I rewrote it in my own way, or both. In my early years, that meant reading 101 Dalmatians 101 times, and re-reading Laura Ingalls Wilder books, Caddie Woodlawn and The Witch of Blackbird Pond endlessly. Then, I wrote my own versions whenever I could—even in church, where I scrawled stories on the offering envelopes.
    Then came fantasy and Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, King Arthur and Merlin, and The Three Musketeers, Victoria Holt and Norah Lofts, Susan Howatch and John Jakes. I refashioned Anya Seton’s Katherine. Had fan fiction existed in those days, I would have been all over it. I have files and files of juvenilia. Poetry, short stories, novellas—in all genres. I am inspired constantly, and my influences range from Edith Wharton to gothics of the 70s to classic French literature to Star Wars.
     In high school, I had an English teacher who sent me to a Centrum poetry workshop, and also set me up to study monthly with a local published author. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t be a published writer, and I was lucky enough to have a great amount of support along the way, both from teachers and family. In college, I studied journalism, which was crucial in teaching me how to tell a story honestly, and in giving me insight into the way people think and behave.
 
What was your first big break?
 
     There wasn’t a “big break,” so much as a series of smaller ones, and they weren’t so much “breaks,” which I think assume is a kind of fortuitous luck (which granted, is often the case in publishing), as decisions. The first was when my grandmother told me I needed to join a group of writers, and I joined the local chapter of Romance Writers of America. Without taking that step, I would never have met the woman who has been my critique partner and best friend for thirty years. I wouldn’t have met the women in my critique group who have been my companions on this road for just as long, or the authors who were my teachers and became my friends and are now my biggest support group, or the editors and agents who guided me. I wouldn’t have met the students who teach me in their turn, or my agents, or the countless people who have given me teaching and networking opportunities. Though I no longer belong to the organization, joining RWA led directly to my first novel being published, and gave me the means to find opportunities outside of historical romance.
 
How do you come up with ideas? You’ve written in a variety of genres. How do you decide what genre and the right audience for a story?
 
     Coming up with ideas is the least of my problems. I have ideas every day. I find the world so fascinating, and as much as people sometimes irritate me, I find them interesting too. There are so many stories and experiences. Songs, TV shows, newspaper articles, movies, poetry, conversations, research … there is always something new to be interested in.
     The bigger problem is whittling those ideas into something workable. Sometimes an idea presents itself perfectly and completely. Sometimes it becomes part of something larger. And sometimes, it’s so big that it takes years of ruminating until I can wrap my mind around it.
     But knowing what a good idea is and how to use it is also about knowing the business, and knowing what is marketable. I am not always good at that, but I have a good agent and many other writer friends who point me in the right direction. Sometimes I know from the start that I want to write a particular thing, a fantasy or a young adult book. Sometimes an idea isn’t big enough to be a novel, and it gets to be a short story. The questions I generally ask myself are: How strong is the idea thematically? Who does it naturally speak to? Do I have a lot to say about this idea or only a little? How complex is it? For whom are the stakes highest? Those questions help me to determine the audience and the genre.
 
Who inspires your characters? What techniques do you use to make them believable?
 
     I’m generally a more character-driven writer, which means that I usually come up with a character before I come up with a plot. There is something in that person, or some specific circumstance that person is dealing with that I want to explore, and then I build a plot around that. Or it’s an emotional complexity or philosophical conundrum that I’m interested in: what happens when a person’s spirit is sublimated to what society believes is the greater good? What happens when the world you know changes just as you’re trying to decide who you are? What happens when you fall in love with someone who makes you a worse person? What are the boundaries of creativity? What are you willing to sacrifice to have what you want?
     Those are some of the questions that intrigue me—not plot questions so much as questions of consequence and character. Then I start reading and researching real situations and people who have been plunged into such situations. I try to really pay attention to the psychology of it all, because people are never quite doing/thinking what you think they’re doing/thinking, and I find that disparity a rich area for storytelling. I try to look at all the possibilities for a character, and then open or close the doors that would be open or closed for them, given the historical circumstance. Then I try to be them, to really understand where they are coming from, in all their foolishness and rigidity. Sometimes that takes some real mind-bending, but I enjoy the challenge.
        When I’m actually writing, I pick actors to represent my characters physically (my office looks like the bedroom of a 15-year old girl). I’ll print out pictures of those actors with their every conceivable expression, until they’re imprinted into the character I want them to be. It’s actually a very careful and very delicate task to choose the right person to fit my concept of the character.
 
Your stories are rich with thought-provoking themes. How do you use your stories and characters to explore bigger questions about life’s complexities? 
 
            It is an interesting paradox that the more specific you are with a character’s dilemmas, the more universal that character is. A woman speaking about the difficulties of being a woman in a certain era only comes off as dogmatic, boring and unrelatable. A woman actually dealing in intimate detail with the difficulties of starting her own business in a certain era is something women of every time can relate to.
For example, in An Inconvenient Wife, Lucy Carelton was a woman who felt imprisoned in her life, circumscribed, as it was by the expectations of society for upper class women in the late 19th C. In today’s world, most women don’t know what it’s like to be of the rich upper class, but every woman knows what it feels like to be trapped, to feel you cannot be the person you want to be because of societal expectations, and feel as if doors are closed to you.
            Writing about life’s complexities, especially in other times, is about finding commonalities. The questions we all ask are not new; they’ve been asked over and over again. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to create something? What does it cost to be who you want to be? What are you willing to pay? Researching so many primary sources has taught me a lot about how people think and feel. One thing I’ve learned is that essentially, nothing has changed psychologically or emotionally. People are the same today as they were two hundred years ago; the only thing that has changed are the doors that are open or closed to them, and the consequences they must pay for the decisions they make. Everything we deal with today has already been dealt with in the past, over and over again, in the past. Consequences may be different, but the emotions that come with them aren’t. As a writer, you have to find a way into those commonalities.
 
Will you tell us about your writing process and your daily writing routine? How do you go about doing research? How do you bring day-to-day life in history so it’s vivid?
 
            My daily routine: I write every day except Sunday, which is when I take care of all the vile tasks that I’ve ignored all week long. Essentially, I get up, eat something, exercise for about an hour (I do this first because I have a bad back, and this allows me to sit relatively pain free, and also because I hate exercise, and if I put it off, I’ll find a way not to do it), take a shower, read email, and then settle down to write for a few hours. I try to end the day either in the middle of a sentence, the middle of a scene, or when I know what’s coming next and I’m excited to write it. The next day, I usually start by editing what I’ve done the previous day, and then segue into new stuff. This seems to work very well for me in terms of both orienting me back into the story and creating a seamless and cohesive narrative.
            As far as a general process goes, I settle on an idea, and then I research. Research is a crucial stage for me—it tells me what’s possible and what’s not. It begins to narrow things down for me in terms of story and character. In researching, I’m looking not just for facts and timelines, but also for emotional responses and detail that bring a place/situation/character alive.
             For example, this note I took from Three Fearful Days, which is an account of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906: “with exploring party: ‘The first startling sight was a rose garden, with hundreds of huge roses glowing red in the light of the flames,” became, in my latest book, (Lake Union winter 2021 –Title TBA): The throbbing pulse of the city had stilled. A group of people wrapped in blankets and carpets slept on the sidewalk before a house that dipped and sagged. A rosebush twined about its porch, and how red those roses glowed in the strange bronze light. I’d never seen such a vibrant color. It did not look real. I was mesmerized by them, such beauty in the desolation, such an otherworldly hue.
            I stared at them for a long time.
            Similarly, from Inamorata: I opened my eyes and glanced down at the windowsill, at the little Murano glass dish the color of blood, the mound of white ash from a burned pastille within it. I stirred it with my finger, raising the noxious stink of camphor meant to keep off mosquitos, burned off now but still lingering. I was glad the summer was nearly over; there would be no need for pastilles for a time, or the nasty, heavy smoke that was nearly worse than the bites, nor for mosquito netting. I would soon be able to leave the lamps on with windows open to smell the city without being bedeviled.
            Which comes from this note, from a Baedeker’s Guide to Northern Italy: “Strangers are cautioned against sleeping with open windows on account of the gnats. Mosquito-curtains afford the best protection against these pertinacious intruders. Pastilles (fidibus contro le zanzare''), sold by the chemists are efficacious.”
            What I’m looking for are bits of real life—not only the things that stupefy and impress, but those that irritate, the little things we notice, the emotions that fill a life day by day.
            Research takes my baseline of an idea and refines it thematically. Once the research is done, I’ll brainstorm with my critique partner and agent, and then I’ll write an outline, pretty free-form, only for myself, and one that is just to give me place to start from, because it will change as I go along, though generally the theme I start with is the one I finish with.
            From there, I write about 200-300 pages, until something stops me, give it to my critique partner, and then—usually—throw it out and start again. Hopefully, the next time I’ll get a little farther. This process goes on and on (sometimes 7-8 times) until I finish the first draft, at which time it goes again to my critique partner, and from there the book is rewritten or just edited, depending. I have thrown out entire books at the end stage, and started over, and that is not rare, though it’s not an outcome I recommend. Sometimes a book just doesn’t come right and has to be radically rethought.
 
How long does it take for you to complete a book so it’s ready to share with others? How do you juggle bringing multiple writing projects to completion?
 
            Generally, a book, from idea through research through the point where I send it to my agent, is about 18 months. 6 months to research, 8-12 months to write and rewrite. Once the book is close to where I want it, I give it to my husband and my agent, and then do their edits. At that point, I do my final polishing, and then it’s ready to go out to my editor, where the whole editing process starts again. For me, writing is rewriting, and I actually love to edit. As frustrating as the process can be, it’s so rewarding to see all the threads finally coming together, to see that the thing you didn’t realize you were doing on page 26 come to fruition on page 350, to see the story become clearer and more effective with every pass.
            I rarely do multiple projects at the same time, but when I do, I generally have a main project that takes up the majority of the day, and then I’ll stop at a certain time and go to the other one. Or I’ll work on the second project when the first one is with my critique partner or with my agent. In the most extreme cases, I’ll work on the second project at night, but honestly the older I get, the less energy I have for that. It helps that I am a fairly driven individual; it’s hard for me to not be doing something.
 
Have you suffered from writer’s block? What measures do you take to push past it?
 
     I rarely have a day where depression or anxiety stops me. Mostly writing is my solace—it’s where I hide from everything that upsets me. I guess I’m lucky that way. I have a rule for myself: I don’t stop writing for the day until I’ve written five pages. A long time ago I realized that if I was going to hit “flow”—that moment when the words just keep coming, it wasn’t going to be until I was about five pages in. Sometimes “flow” never happened, but if I stopped before five pages, it was never going to happen. There are some days when I just don’t feel like writing, or when “flow” never hits, and I quit after five pages and do something else. But that’s not writer’s block. I’ve discovered that for me (and I think everyone is different), writer’s block happens when my subconscious is telling me that I’ve done something wrong somewhere—a character has made a wrong decision, or I’ve got the wrong conflict, or no conflict, or I’ve taken a step in plot or character that isn’t working.
            So I go back. Sometimes I have a feeling of where I’ve gone wrong, because the book has started to drag at that point, or I’ve started to have trouble. Sometimes I don’t know, so I go back to the beginning. I map out the book and ask myself questions—what’s the goal of the character here? What’s the goal of the scene? How does it lead to a new conflict and a new consequence? How does it up the ante? I fall back on Aristotle: conflict leads to consequences that lead to greater conflict. By doing this, I almost always find out where I’ve gone wrong and end the block.
            Also, Dwight Swain’s Scene and Sequel techniques, which are an extension of Aristotle’s paradigm, can be extremely helpful with this. (Techniques of the Selling Writer, or Jack Bickham’s Scene and Structure)
            If I can’t figure it out, I give it to my genius critique partner, who will.                                                         
 
 
 
Is there something you wish you’d realized sooner in your writing career that
could have saved you heartache?
 
     That publishing is a business. It pretends to be an art, and it pretends to be ennobling
and culturally enriching and for the greater good, and sometimes it is those things, but
really it’s a business, and as a business, marketing matters. Selling matters. Making
money matters. If you insist that it be otherwise, you will always be disappointed.
I’m not sure that realizing this would have saved me heartbreak. I’m not sure it saves me heartbreak now that I do realize it. It’s a frustrating business. The only cure is to love what you do. The only thing you can really control is the book itself, so love your process, love your part in it, and do your best to let the rest go. It’s actually impossible, but I try.
 
What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
 
     Join a group of writers (see question 1). The point here is finding a community of like-minded people with whom you can explore questions, career paths, networking, and your own unpredictable, freaky psyche. Take workshops, go to conferences, hobnob with other writers until you find a tribe to which you feel you belong. Writing is a lonely profession, and it can be heartbreaking, and it is always hard. It helps to have people who understand in your corner.
     Secondly, realize that it is hard, and that you have to keep going, despite everything that gets in your way. Write. Keep writing. As Nora Roberts once famously said (I’m paraphrasing here), you can’t fix a blank page. With every word you write, you get better. If you don’t write, there’s no one who will do it for you.
            If it were easy, everyone would do it.
 
Thank you, Megan!  For more information, please visit www.meganchance.com