Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Mindy Friddle writes about Her Best Self from Regal House Publishing.

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The Novelist’s Journal

When I begin writing a novel, I start a journal to document the arc of the novel’s creation. My journals run parallel with the novels, from the first glimmer of an idea, through baggy drafts and bouts of discouragement, until the last page of a polished revision. In the course of writing three novels, I’ve discovered these “working journals” are vital to my creative process. They keep me on track and hold me accountable, and they allow me to witness the architecture of a novel as it’s built sentence by sentence. The working journal is the novelist in conversation with herself about what works and what doesn’t, a repository of audacious ideas and disappointing dead-ends, a space for unfiltered musings, a rich, loamy soil for the subconscious to bloom. 

When I wrote my latest novel, Her Best Self, my journal filled seven notebooks over three years. My first entry began after I’d written three pages about an image I felt compelled to explore: A woman at a hotel bar. She is flirting with a younger man. She thinks about the scars on her body from an accident, then wonders about her husband. That day, I began a rough draft and a new journal, where I cracked the whip. I aim to write this draft in four months, a goal of 2000 words each session, five sessions a week. Each morning, I’d start with my journal, noting the date and time. At the end of each session, I recorded the word count and posed one question: is this a good story? I galloped freely as I typed the first draft in Scrivener, withholding judgment and editing. My journal kept me on schedule and tethered me to the work in progress. On days I didn’t work on the novel, I wrote in the journal, jotting down ideas, inspiring quotes, and scheduling reading as well as writing time. And because writing a novel takes physical stamina as well as mental discipline, I noted when I felt energetic or tired, clear-headed or distracted. I pinpointed my most productive days, paying attention to what had inspired me— a stroll through an art museum, a good night’s sleep, kayaking along a tidal creek.

Nearly five months later, I had a ragged, ninety-thousand-word draft. Now, I needed to find the “diamonds of the dustheap” as Virginia Woolf put it. I had an array of characters and glittering shards of scenes, like a kaleidoscope. How do I get my arms around this? I wrote in my journal. How do I find the connections? To distill and wring out the essential story, every day for two weeks I wrote synopsis after synopsis in my journal. Like book jacket copy, I was left with the heart of the novel in about 250 words. With this winnowed version as my guide, I prepared to write the second draft. In my journal, I listed, discarded, and chose names for characters, then wrote short biographies for each. I noted what I needed to research: the machinations behind the family business (a temporary staffing agency), traumatic brain injuries, firearms, the history of the fictitious southern town in the Piedmont of South Carolina I named Haven, and its gentrification in present day, as well as the seasonal flora and fauna, what bloomed in June, when blue ghost fireflies filled the Appalachian forest. I drew maps and sketched house and floor plans. I spent a few weeks constructing a timeline, using different colors for each plot thread. My journal was my sounding board; I summarized my thoughts as the story expanded, as characters emerged.

I’d built an armature, now it was time to create the sculpture. When I began the second draft, I focused not on word count, but time. My new goal was to write for three hours at least five days a week. I started my mornings freewriting in my journal, taking deep dives into characters, fleshing out scenes, before jumping to the draft. After each writing session, I would note progress for the day as well as missteps and discouraging impasses. Then I would walk my dog, mull over these problems until solutions would come, and I would add an addendum to the day’s entry so I knew what to focus on the next day. Some mornings, to remind myself why novels matter, I would read a few pages of Louise Erdrich, Carol Shields, Toni Morrison—the masters—and jot down an entry about the transcendent beauty of their words. Other days, when I craved condensed, lyrical language to infuse the perspective of my protagonist as she struggled to find words for her troubling memories, I read poetry. When I wanted to juice up dialogue, tease out subtext from a prickly family conversation, focus on emotional beats, or leaven dark scenes with humor, I’d read a few pages from the novels of Elmore Leonard, Richard Russo, and Tom Perrotta for a hit of inspiration, noting in my journal how I might apply their accomplished techniques to my own work. Every ten chapters or so, I would get the itch to view the topography of my novel before I continued writing scene by scene, which often felt like I was walking an arduous, narrow path in the dark. I’d spend a few days reading the entire draft, listing summaries of scenes in my journal, finding new connections. Through the journal, and this separate practice of writing about writing, I identified two “ticking clocks” to increase tension: plans for a wedding, and a buried secret that threatened to disrupt the lives of the characters. This occasional bird’s eye view kept me on course. 

After eleven months, I had a cohesive second draft. Now for revisions. I scheduled a few weeks off, temporal distance that I hoped would help me see the manuscript more objectively, as a reader. A month later, I printed out the manuscript and read it aloud, penciling edits on the pages, journaling about recurring patterns and motifs, lags in pacing, chapter hooks to sharpen, plot threads to unsnarl, sentences to cut and clarify. After another round of revisions, I sent the manuscript to three beta readers: a fellow novelist who would be gentle, and two lacerating, pull-no-punches editors. I turned to my journal to off-load anxiety as I waited for their responses, wondering if I’d missed glaring errors, deep flaws that couldn’t be fixed. Three weeks later, an elated journal entry. My readers’ notes were positive and included specific suggestions that made sense to me, that I could address. I pasted copies of their emails in my journal and annotated them with colored pencils—I loved this tactile task, physically cutting and pasting as I steeped on how to proceed. I combined all three readers’ suggestions into one list then made a plan in my journal to revise. A few months later, when I learned my novel would be published, I opened a bottle of Prosecco to celebrate and wrote my last journal entry. I was grateful Her Best Self would soon make its way into the world. I was grateful, too, my journal had documented the incremental, mysterious process of writing another novel.

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Mindy Friddle’s novel, Secret Keepers (St. Martin’s Press), won the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. The Garden Angel (St. Martin’s Press), her first novel, was selected for Barnes and Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program. Mindy’s short fiction has appeared in Hard to Find: An Anthology of New Southern Gothic, storySouth, Orca, LitMag, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southern Humanities Review, and many other journals. Her third novel, Her Best Self (Regal House), will be published in May. Mindy holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson. She lives on Edisto Island, South Carolina.