City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky begins so that each chapter is from the point of view of a character who appears, at least briefly, at the beginning of the next chapter. This creates a throughline that draws readers to each chapter and moves them forward to the next. Chapters are short with interesting names, including often the names or concerns of the characters they are narrated by in a close 3^rd person. Suspense results when, for example, an important object goes missing in one chapter. Who took it? It looks like the character who narrates the next chapter, but that ends up not being the case. Readers become at least as interested as the characters in the missing object and who has it.

But Tchaikovsky varies from this strategy later in the novel. In tension with the throughline is a less formal organization. The pattern created early in the novel is varied from later.  Varying from an established pattern reminded me of something Charlie Jane Anders wrote in Never Say You Can’t Survive: “The principle of variable reward teaches us that we’re more likely to get addicted to pushing a lever if we get a peanut only every other time, or every few times. If every time we push the lever, we might get a peanut, an electric shock, or nothing, we’ll keep pushing that lever until it breaks. The same is true for getting yourself hooked, as a reader or writer, on a character’s struggles.”

So, the lesson? Consider structures that begin with comforting consistency but continue with addictive variety.

Consider this description of a writing process at ashmash.com:

The sensationalist way to describe my drafting process is:

• I don’t complete a first draft
• I never draft in order
• I never draft from outline
• My work constantly surprises me
• …And, yet, I never get writer’s block

Now that you’re solidly not on my side, here’s what this actually means.

I encourage you to read the entire post. Descriptions of writing processes always fascinate me. Huang writes well about hers and that leads me to reflect on mine. Trying to capture what we do as we write is good because self-reflection makes improvement more likely and the history or evolution of a process is interesting in itself (at least for me).

Is there a collection of writers’ descriptions of their process or processes? Something like Daily Rituals: How Artists Work edited by Mason Currey but more focused?

I like this quotation from Tana French’s In the Woods: “What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this–two things: I crave truth. And I lie.”

This is an interesting character because, in part, he knows himself well enough to just state an internal tension. Other internal tensions that he might not be as aware of are certainly possible as are external tensions (he’s a police officer). I have not read the whole book yet, but it already suggests a way to complicate characters. The explicit can be as fascinating as the hidden.