Maass production

I have finally gotten brave enough to crack open Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel. I tiptoed around it for a while, because I’d heard so much about it. Scary things, like it comes with a workbook. It sounded an awful lot like there would be Rules and the kinds of systems I can’t apply involved and it would tell me I’m doing it all wrong.

Surprise, surprise. I loved it from the opening sentence. It validates what I have come to deeply believe, that the story is everything. Furthermore, it says…that I broke out when I wrote Dangerous Games. Yeah, it shocked me, too. There are many levels of breaking out, and it will be interesting to see how readers respond. But I understood exactly what he meant when he described breakout novels, how they are bigger, there is more at stake. That came out in Dangerous and in Love Spell, too. My earlier books are good, but these stories are at a different level and I felt it when I wrote them. I just didn’t know what exactly was different about them until I read Breakout.

I expect to learn a lot from this book and the workbook is probably a valuable resource, too. It focuses on the craft aspect of breaking out, and I came at it from the art aspect. (To find out how to get there from the art side of things, read Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer.) There’s an astounding set of tools in Writing the Breakout Novel for a writer to add to their bag of tricks.

Of course, I can’t develop an idea quite the way he describes because I’m a panster and my brain doesn’t work that way, but I plan to use the checklists at the end of the chapters after the first draft is complete to see what I need to strengthen or layer in. All part of being an organized panster.

I don’t want to make it sound like I’ve arrived and I know everything now, because that is so far from the truth. But I do understand my process and what matters in my writing now in a gestalt sort of way that I had no words for until I read Writing the Breakout Novel. And I’m looking forward to utilizing new tools that help me do more of it and better. One of the beautiful things about writing to me is the endless challenge. There is always room to grow and improve.