Last time I wrote about my fiction writing, I promised I would share how I’m working on the novel, and a little more of what it’s about. Here you go…
William Brown sees dead people, talks to them, and they talk to him. But this ain’t Sixth Sense or Shaun of the Dead. And I wouldn’t call it a “ghost book.”
Part of the premise is that when we die, it’s only our bodies that die. Our spirits, our minds, go on living. And not in some sort of wispy, ethereal, somewhat-conscious-but-mostly-stupid way, but with perfect mental clarity and recall. Also, the spirit world is here. Here on earth. So someone dies, and I hesitate to say “they wake up” because there’s no sleep, and the next second they’re fully “alive” as a spirit in the spirit world, seeing everyone and everything around them, just as they saw them before they died (assuming they were conscious when they died, otherwise it would be like waking up to die).
And then what?
That’s the thing, there isn’t necessarily a greeting committee or instruction manual. So…what would you do if you died, you remain fully conscious, you realize you’re a spirit, but you’re still here, and you have no idea what you’re supposed to do now? And maybe you really want a Diet Coke while you sort through things, but you can’t hold the can? Those are the people William talks to (not just the Diet Coke addicts, but everyone else as well).
But a book isn’t very interesting if it’s just about random dead people talking to William, so we have to bring in the hero’s journey, ala The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, and that means William has to go on an adventure. In Book 1, that includes a Los Angeles gang leader with big plans, a forced expedition to the Amazon river to find Hitler’s lost submarine, a big snake (trust me, it will be better than the 1997 version of Anaconda…which, btw, was filmed in large part at the Arboretum in Arcadia, CA where I grew up and where my 85 yo mother was a volunteer docent until they fired her due to her views on covid masking…). But that’s just the start of things, in other books William will travel around the world and learn about ancient cultures and major world religions. The Ancient Tradition Podcast has been super helpful for my research (you should listen to it, it’s awesome).
There’s a little about the book, here’s a little about how I’m working on it.
The Parking Lot
For all my books (I also force my book coaching clients to do this), I start with a blank doc (a Google doc, in this case) I call “the [working title] parking lot.”
When I start my parking lot doc, I don’t “write” much of anything. I might create a rough outline. I might write a few snippets of dialogue. But mostly I’m collecting ideas. When any little idea occurs to me for my book, I put it in the parking lot. I may not know where it goes in my book. I may not be certain I’ll use it. But if I think there’s the slightest chance, I write it down.
I have a shortcut on my phone to the spirit world parking lot. At this point, I have an outline for the 7-volume series. The first book has a rough outline. I know in a general way what will go in each book. And whenever I hear something in a podcast, watch something in a video, or read something in a book, and I think, “Hey, this might relate to something in my spirit world books,” I copy and paste the content, type it up, or put the link in the doc. My spirit world parking lot doc is now around 200 pages long, and I add to it almost daily. I’ve been working on it for almost three years.
If I’m out trail running and a thought for the book comes to me, I stop (because trail running while not focusing on the trail is dangerous, I learned, see this), and I use voice dictation to enter that thought into the parking lot. Then I get back to running. Sometimes this happens once during a two-hour run. Sometimes it happens 10 times.
The great thing about the parking lot method is it’s low stress. I don’t have to worry about writing anything. Not a thought about punctuation, spelling, or grammar. No anxiety about “How will this sound to readers?” I’m so far away from that. I’m just taking notes. But then those notes start to organize themselves, and I start to write a little dialogue here, a scene there, and the first draft practically writes itself.
This works just as well for non-fiction as fiction.
Always wanted to write a book? Try the parking lot method. Open a Google doc or whatever you want, and start taking notes. That’s it. See how it grows. And let me know how it goes.
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