Strange Journeys: What Writing The Line Between Taught Me By Tosca Lee
Strange Journeys: What Writing The Line Between Taught Me
By Tosca Lee
Writing a novel is always a journey—into history or the future, your beliefs or values, into fantastic worlds or the mystery of the everyday one around us. Into what fascinates and terrifies us.
It’s also a writing journey as well, each book doling its unique lessons in perseverance, craft, publishing, marketing, and connecting with readers.
The Line Between, my novel about 22 year-old Wynter Roth, who escapes a doomsday cult on the American Prairie just as a pandemic is sweeping across the nation (yup, I wrote a pandemic duology that released in 2019—more on that later), was my tenth published novel. It taught me more lessons than I wanted to learn… but exactly the ones I needed.
I’d gone to New York to meet with my publisher at Simon & Schuster the year before to talk ideas, and he’d loved the cult idea and the pandemic idea and wanted a mash-up of the two.
After momentarily questioning his sanity, but as I came home and got to work, the two storylines meshed surprisingly well.
But the result was a mess.
Not because of the storylines, or the alternating current and past timeline chapters, but because somewhere during the planning of the novel, I had this internal conversation with myself:
Okay. Time to outline. Let’s outline. Gosh, outlining hasn’t gotten any easier through the years, has it?
Hey. This is novel number 10. Eleven if you count the very first one in the basement with the skeletons. Twelve, if you count the one you never finished in the 90s.
I don’t think we can count those.
You learned from them, though.
This is true.
And from every novel since.
Very possible.
So isn’t outlining like, innate by now or something? Maybe you don’t really need to outline because you’ve done this so much you’ll know what the story needs when you come to it.
You mean, I’ve become a pantser like my friend Steven James?
Yup. You are now Steven James.
Steven James is a brilliant friend of mine and well-known “pantser” (an author who does not outline in favor of discovering the story as it comes—AKA “writing by the seat of one’s pants). So are many of my friends, all successful, highly-decorated, full-time authors who may not know whodunit or how the story ends until they reach the end of the novel.
So I wrote the novel. And the first lesson I learned when the editor sent it back with her editorial letter about all the things that didn’t work…
Is that I am not Steven James.
Also, that I should’ve known better. After all, I teach and speak on writing often. One thing I always—always—say is to know how you work best. I don’t believe in legislating process because what works for one author may or may not work for the next. And even if it does, it may not work exactly the same. What I do believe in and teach often is that every author needs to know how they work and write best—whether it’s during the day or at night, in a coffee shop or alone, with music or ambient noise or with regular feedback or in a vacuum until the work is finished. With an outline—however detailed that might be—or without one. With a faint idea of some major high points before freewheeling… or with a blank canvas and open mind ready for adventure.
The lesson delayed publication of The Line Between as I went back in and pulled the wires out of the story, hiring long-time editor friend Stephen Parolini to help me take stock of what I had and figure out what I needed. Putting everything in order. Shaping up the three-act structure.
As you might guess, it was more frustrating, and time-consuming than if I had taken the time to outline at the get-go. But I had cut corners rather than give myself the tools I knew I needed.
In addition to time, my error also cost me confidence. I didn’t know if this story was good anymore—or if it could be. I didn’t know if I was any good at this anymore. I was shaken by the results of my first draft, and wasn’t sure I had the wherewithal to get it together.
I spent four arduous months shaping the story into a fun, fraught journey of chasing sanity and survival. And then—already behind schedule—started the sequel, A Single Light.
With no time to spare, I dug into the outline. Sure, there were a few details I didn’t know. One thing I’ve learned about myself is I have to leave a little room for mystery, for the abrupt turns that just make sense when you’re boots-on-the-ground rather than mapping from 30,000 feet in the air. I leave room for these surprises and they never fail to show up.
But I know that to shape a story well—and in a timely fashion—I need to know where I’m going.
Back with an outline, I wrote A Single Light swiftly. And then something happened.
I realized I wasn’t stressing out so much.
That I was doing something I hadn’t done in a while:
I was having fun.
I spent that entire novel digging in, doing the work, giggling maniacally on more than one occasion, and generally getting my mojo back.
Why? Not because I had an outline. But because I was honoring the way I work best.
Four months after the release of A Single Light, Covid struck, bringing with it new lessons about creativity during lockdown, writing during chaos, surrendering the results (who would want to read a pandemic duology now?), and the importance of connection—enough new wisdom to fill another blog.
Post script:
The Line Between went on to win an International Book Award, Killer Nashville’s Silver Falchion, the Nebraska Book Award. It finaled for the High Plains Book Award, the Library of Virginia’s People’s Choice Award, and was a semi-finalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards. A Single Light also won an International Book Award and finaled for Killer Nashville’s Silver Falchion… but lost to The Line Between.
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Tosca Lee is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of eleven novels including A SINGLE LIGHT, THE LINE BETWEEN, THE PROGENY, THE LEGEND OF SHEBA, ISCARIOT, and the Books of Mortals series with New York Times bestseller Ted Dekker. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages and been optioned for TV and film. A notorious night-owl, she loves movies, playing football with her kids, and sending cheesy texts to her husband.
You can find Tosca on social media or hanging around the snack table. To learn more, please visit toscalee.com.
https://www.facebook.com/AuthorToscaLee
https://www.instagram.com/toscalee/
https://www.tiktok.com/@tosca_lee
THE LINE BETWEEN
In this frighteningly believable thriller from New York Times bestselling author Tosca Lee, an extinct disease re-emerges from the melting Alaskan permafrost to cause madness in its victims. For recent apocalyptic cult escapee Wynter Roth, it’s the end she’d always been told was coming.
When Wynter Roth is turned out of New Earth, a self-contained doomsday cult on the American prairie, she emerges into a world poised on the brink of madness as a mysterious outbreak of rapid early onset dementia spreads across the nation.
As Wynter struggles to start over in a world she’s been taught to regard as evil, she finds herself face-to-face with the apocalypse she’s feared all her life—until the night her sister shows up at her doorstep with a set of medical samples. That night, Wynter learns there’s something far more sinister at play and that these samples are key to understanding the disease.
Now, as the power grid fails and the nation descends into chaos, Wynter must find a way to get the samples to a lab in Colorado. Uncertain who to trust, she takes up with former military man Chase Miller, who has his own reasons for wanting to get close to the samples in her possession, and to Wynter herself.
Filled with action, conspiracy, romance, and questions of whom—and what—to believe, The Line Between is a high-octane story of survival and love in a world on the brink of madness.
BUY HERE
Category: Contemporary Women Writers
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