S5 E78 Jasmine Guillory: The Art of the Messy First Draft
No Write Way with V. E. Schwab
V.E. Schwab interviews bestselling romance author Jasmine Guillory about her creative process, focusing on the value of messy first drafts and
Key takeaways
- Jasmine Guillory handwrote an entire first draft in a notebook during the 2020 pandemic to bypass digital distractions and perfectionism.
- Guillory attributes the pipeline of lawyers becoming successful romance authors to childhood encouragement toward law over creative writing, combined with legal discipline.
Main topics
- messy first drafts
- outlining vs drafting
Notable quotes
But nobody says to you, you should be a writer. No, that would be a bad idea.
Conclusion
Listeners gain actionable frameworks for overcoming drafting paralysis
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) But also when you're a little kid and you're smart and you read a lot of books and you talk a lot, maybe you should be a writer. But nobody says to you, you should be a writer. No, that would be a bad idea. Speaker 2 (0:16) Hello, hello, I'm V.E. Schwab, and welcome to No Right Way, a podcast in which I convince other writers to confide in me about their own creative process in the hopes of proving that there is, in fact, no right way to write. Speaker 2 (0:31) Today's guest is a romance staple who's just as charming as her work, which is really saying something. As Entertainment Weekly puts it, she writes with the fizzy effervescence of a glass of champagne, and I couldn't agree more. Reading her work feels like a fancy drink at the end of a long day. She's known for turning movie-worthy meet-cutes into delightful stories of life making room for love. From Alexa and Drew's elevator-born agreement in The Wedding Date, to Nicole and Carlos' fraught first interactions at a baseball game in The Proposal, to Maddie and Theo's proof that hatred is just another kind of passion. Her ability to take familiar tropes and infuse them with fresh energy is wonderful. But perhaps what I love most about her work is that her love interests never feel like two halves searching for their missing piece, but like whole people, independent of the journeys they find themselves on. Her 10th novel, It's Only Dancing, hits shelves October 6th, the same day as Victorious, and I cannot wait to pick it up. But in the meantime, I will settle for picking her brain to learn a little bit more about how she creates the stories that so many of us love. Jasmine Guillory, welcome to No Right Way. Speaker 1 (1:34) Oh my goodness, that's the most lovely intro. Thank you so much. And thank you for having me. Speaker 2 (1:41) You're so welcome. Because I get to see your gorgeous face, but everyone else is just listening. Can you just give us a sense of where you are, when you are, and how you are today? Speaker 1 (1:50) Yes. I am in Oakland, California. It is early in the morning. My little dog is right here next to me. She's actually not little. She's a 45-pound shepherd mix, but I think of her as little. And I am in the midst of... you know, essentially where I am creatively, right? I have a book coming out in October, but then I just finished a first draft for another book and then just started revision on it. So I'm sort of all over the place in my mind. Speaker 2 (2:22) Well, that's the thing we talk about so often on this podcast, but for those who aren't writers, it can be easy to forget or to not know in the first place that like time works very strangely for published authors because we are. Getting ready to promote something that is not out yet, promoting things which are already out and preparing to write things which will one day be out. And we are very rarely in the now. Yeah. Speaker 1 (2:45) Yeah. Very rarely. Speaker 2 (2:46) And Speaker 1 (2:47) also because of how publishing works, like you're always talking about years far away. And so I constantly forget what year it is. Oh. Speaker 2 (2:57) I haven't known what year it is since probably about 2018 for multiple reasons. But one of those is genuinely that like, I'm just, I don't know when now is. Yeah. I know when my next releases are. And I know when my last releases were. I can measure most of my adult Speaker 1 (3:12) life in the times that books came out. Speaker 2 (3:14) Right. Yeah. Speaker 1 (3:15) Yeah. Speaker 2 (3:16) How is it like, we're going to get into the process of it, but like, I just, I mean, do you have a difficult time or because you write kind of in, in. within the category of Jasmine Guillory, right? I write kind of all over the board. So sometimes I have a harder time, but do you find it easy to pick up and put down projects that are at multiple stages to let those coexist for you? Or is it a little bit like juggling plates? Speaker 1 (3:37) Oh yeah. I do not have an easy time picking up, putting things down. Like I have to, like, for example, this spring was really busy for me, like travel wise. You know, it's doing a bunch of events and going to festivals, et cetera. I was supposed to be working on a book and I was doing a little working on a book, but it is really hard for me to do. Like there's so many different kinds of work we have in this job. Right. And it's really hard for me to do the like outward facing work at the same time as doing the writing. Yeah. They're different jobs. So I, I basically put like told, told my whole publishing team, like, okay, I'm not going anywhere or doing anything in July and August because I got to write a book. And so I had like, I had, you know, a start on stuff and I had a little bit, but I really devoted most of the summer to actual writing because I also know this fall is going to be busy and I'm not going to be able to get into it. So for me, it's really where I can, where I can carve out the time because I. it is hard for me to kind of do the juggling. Speaker 2 (4:52) Yeah, I've been going through a little bit of an existential crisis about it, right? Because I love seeing readers and I love doing the actual events. I don't love getting to the events. I mean, people don't realize that like 22 hours of the day is travel. But I also know how much work I get done when I'm allowed to sit still at home. And it's really hard, right? Because if we're not writing new books, then we won't have something new. to promote. And it can sometimes feel like the promotion cannibalizes the creative time. And so I think I started doing a similar thing as you of trying to block really specific windows. August was supposed to be a blocked window for me. And then somehow, you know, events start populating or like little asks become big asks. And suddenly you're like, wait, I don't have more than three days to string together wherein I'm not doing something that's not writing. Yeah. You know, it's tricky. Well, look, before we dive into process of which this is kind of the bulk of the podcast, I like to back up and talk a little bit about your creative origin story because no two of us get to publishing the same way. And so I'm wondering if you could just rewind for us and talk about young you and how young you got to be where you are now. Speaker 1 (6:07) Well, so young me was like, I loved books. I read a ton. I started reading when I was very little. My parents were both in grad school when I was little and like would just bring me to school with them. And so I would hang out in the library. Luckily, both of my parents were getting to recent psychology. And so there were lots of kids books. So I would just like hang out and read all the time. But I never thought of becoming a writer until I was like a real grown adult. I like wanted to be a lawyer. I became a lawyer. Then at one point I had been a lawyer for about 10 years, I think. And I came to this realization in a job that I was in where I was like, I'm not. Number one, I'm not really learning anything new. Like I'm sort of doing the same things over and over again. And number two, I miss having some sort of creative outlet in my life. I don't really have that. And this was after, this was partly because I had been working at a job where I was working all the time. And so I had no space for anything else. I couldn't even think of anything else. And then once I started like. working at a job where I would get home at like, you know, six o'clock, 630. I was like, well, what do I do now? Like what? There's, there's gotta be more for me to do than just like, make dinner and watch TV and go to bed, you know? And so I had some friends who are writers and I had some very like, tentative conversations with them about if they thought I could write. Um, and they were very encouraging. But the funny thing is now when we talk about those conversations, they were like, yeah, I didn't know that's what we were talking about. Speaker 1 (7:56) Were you Speaker 2 (7:57) creative in school? Speaker 1 (7:58) I mean, I think it was, you know, I used to like I used to dance. I used to like do the things that kids do like and draw and like do all of that. But I think also as you become an adult, that kind of gets pushed out of you. Right. You're supposed to do like grown up stuff. You're not supposed to do like fun things anymore. Speaker 2 (8:19) Yeah. Speaker 1 (8:19) And so at that point, I was really thinking of writing as just. something that could be fun for me to do after work, right? Like something that I could exercise my brain about. And then I just loved it. And I just kept going. And so, you know, I first, like many people kind of start with fiction with like short stories or something. I just dove right into a novel. And I eventually like tried to get an agent with that one and got a lot of like very warm rejections and then stopped writing for a while and then like had an idea that became The Wedding Date. And I just kind of dove into that. And that was the book that got me my agent and my first publishing deal. Speaker 2 (9:12) Was the novel that you finished, was that the first fiction that you had ever finished as well as started? Speaker 1 (9:19) I mean, other than like, like in high school, you know, we would have like write short stories and stuff. But other than that, yeah, that first novel was the first fiction I ever really wrote. Speaker 2 (9:28) I mean, that's amazing because so many writers will start so many things before they ever finish one. And I think that there's, there are two different powers, right? Just as we talk about the two different, you know, multiple different roles as being an author, the writing and the promoting, I feel like starting, like ideating and starting and finishing are completely different skill sets. Well, Speaker 1 (9:48) and I also think starting is so hard. Like every single time I am like, I'm about to start a new book, there feels like a barrier. Like, oh gosh, I have to write the first few actual words, you know, because I've always done an outline and this and that and whatever. there's a difference between that and like really starting. Oh yeah. Speaker 2 (10:10) I'm going through that right now. I'm in the first draft, like early chapters, like chapters one, two, three of two different projects. And so I'm like getting hit on both fronts by the existential dread of like knowing that the opening chapters will take me as long as the rest of the book. Right. Yeah. You know? Okay. Well, let's just dive into process because I have so many, so many questions. So you said you're an outliner. Have you always been an outliner? Speaker 1 (10:35) I have, I think partly because like I was a history major, I was a lawyer. I'm used to that. Right. And I actually tried, you know, after I wrote my first book, I like the first book that never got published. I did an outline for that one. Speaker 2 (10:51) And Speaker 1 (10:52) then I saw like, you know, at that point I was like following a bunch of writers online and seeing what they had to say about writing. Right. And I saw people saying like, oh, I don't have an outline. I just start with an idea and go with it. And I was like, okay, well, real writers do that. Maybe I'll try that. So I had an idea and I just tried to go with it. And I wrote the first half of that book three times. And then never finished it because I didn't know where it was going. And like, I, but that was a really good exercise for me. Like, I'm glad I did it so that now I know I can't do that. Speaker 2 (11:26) It also, you know, that the outlining is you thrive under that, that that's a part of your system that you need. How long, like, okay, first of all, sidebar, I feel like there is quite a high ratio of. authors who used to be lawyers. Do you have any theory as to why? Speaker 1 (11:45) Okay. It's so funny because I didn't for a long time. And then someone asked me this question at an event a few years ago, and I suddenly had an idea, which is that I feel like when you're a little kid, especially when you're a little girl and you're smart and you read a lot of books and you talk a lot, people say to you, you should be a lawyer. And so then you get that in your head. But also when