There's a particular quiet after a thing you've made comes to an end. I've been sitting in it this morning, a little unsure what to do with my hands. But I also find that it can be a space to mine new ideas from the dark.
For seven Sundays I sent you a lesson. Today I don't have one, but I do have a question... and maybe another craft note as a thank you for those who keep reading. And I hope that you do, because this may be the most important question I've asked you.
After seven lessons, free, you've got a real sense of two things: how this works, and whether it works for you. So here's my question, and I'll get right to it.
I want to build a paid version: a lesson in your inbox once or twice a week, taken at a pace you set, as a simple monthly subscription that carries you all the way to a finished first draft within a year. We'd start together in the new year. So, plainly: if that existed, would you sign up now to begin in January?
That's the heart of it. A few quick taps below, right here in the email, no wrong answers. "Keep the free letters coming and nothing else" is a real one, and I mean it. I'd rather know than guess.
And I'll be straight about why it matters more than usual: I started by guessing at what you want, and might be building something nobody asked for. I believe there's a community here and an approach that can work for everyone, one that doesn't require too much of a financial investment upfront but still has enough value that you'd like to engage with the lessons, and with me, as a part of your writing process. So think of this as the deciding vote. If enough of you tell me there's something here worth making, I'll go make it. If it's quiet, I'll take that as my answer. No hard feelings, and I'll turn my attention elsewhere (though hopefully keep in touch with those of you who I've been messaging back and forth with!). The only real wrong move is staying silent and letting someone else decide it for you. This is the moment. I'll keep the polls open through next Sunday and then make the call, but the best time to tap is right now, while it's in front of you.
So here they are. A handful of quick taps, right in this email, no forms and no links to chase. Start with the first and go as far as you like; even that first tap tells me what I most need to know.
If I built this paid version, starting in January, would you sign up?
If it launched at these prices, which would you pick?
Ideally, how often would you want a lesson?
Email is how I picture sending these. Right format for you?
Would you want optional 45-min 1:1 editorial sessions, and at what price?
And if you've got more to say, a "here's what would make it a yes," or anything at all, just hit reply and tell me in your own words. I read every one.
One more thing: the craft note I promised.
Seven weeks of lessons, so let me leave you with a bonus one, on the house. It's the simplest, most useful trick I know for an opening, and it's almost rude how plain it is: start on the person in trouble, not the room they're in.
Here's why it works, and why I think of it as a cheat code. The moment you put a person on the page, you've handed yourself a lens. Everything you describe after that can come through their eyes: how they see the room, the weather, the other people in it. Description stops being a list of stuff and starts telling us who's doing the looking. And it doesn't matter whether you write in first person or third. Once the character's there, the character is doing the describing.
Here's the plainest version I can show you. Same patch of woods, twice.
Before:
The woods were dark that day. The air crisp and cool, a canopy of gray overhead, broken up only by the gnarled branches of the bare trees. This is where Jai found himself searching for clues on a Sunday morning in autumn, when he should have been home, still in his pyjamas, nursing a strong coffee. But he had to be here. If he didn't find what he needed, the consequences could be deadly.
After:
Jai scanned the forest floor for a clue. It had to be here. It just had to be. But how was he going to find it? The ground was covered in dead leaves, as if they were designed to hide the very thing he was searching for. The sky was dark, too, even for pre-dawn Sunday. Like it was threatening rain. Jai laughed. Wouldn't that be nice, if rain were the only thing threatening him right now?
Same forest, both times. But in the second one you're behind Jai's eyes by the very first verb, so the dark sky stops being weather and becomes his. He even laughs at it. That laugh is character, and it's only on the page because Jai got there before the scenery did.
Now let me show you the same move in the thing I actually care about. Not Dan's chapter, but the novel I write when no one's watching, a darker thing than a cozy, narrated by a man named Aiden Hock. It opens on him at ten, in a police station, in well over his head:
Problem was I didn't know what a real criminal should look like. Best guess I had was from movies and TV. So I sat there watching this cop flip through his Rolodex of generic facial features and knew I was in for it. Coming at me with all these questions — That one? This one? Kinda like that? How 'bout this mouth? Those eyes? — but every question made my heart thump harder, so it just about leaped out of my chest and laughed at me.
Watch the lens do its work a few lines later, when I finally get around to describing the room:
This must be the same room where they interrogate the real crooks, I figured. Drab walls. Tight space. The smell of disinfectant and the hum of an A/C unit on its last legs. Just missing a phone book and liquor bottle and Charles Bronson getting ready to squeeze the truth out of a sweaty drug dealer.
That's not a description of a room. That's a scared kid who's seen too many cop movies, seeing a room, with the dread and the bravado smuggled in while I'm pretending to describe furniture. I only get to do that because he was on the page first. Put the room before the boy and it's just an inventory: drab walls, a dying A/C unit, a cheap metal chair, and nobody behind the eyes yet.
So before you file these letters away, try it on the opening you've built over these seven weeks. Find the first moment a person wants or fears something, and see how much of what comes before it you can move, shrink, or cut. Then let whatever's left be described the way they'd see it. If I'm wrong, you paste it back in ten seconds and lose nothing. If I'm right, you just found a stronger way in than the one you had.
And selfishly, one last reason to want a next step: I still don't know what happened to Merv. Neither does Dan. If enough of you want to keep going, maybe we find out together.
Thank you for spending seven Sundays writing with me. It has genuinely been the best part of my week, every week. I'm going to read everything you send, sit with it, and work out the shape of what comes next. Then I'll be back.
Until then,
— Patrick / Stone Lyon Society