I have always been a person who makes plans.
Before I was a novelist, I spent a career in public service — election campaigns, budgets, community projects, and eventually a city. When I ran for mayor, I was asking voters to do something they had never done before: elect a woman, and a decidedly left-of-centre one at that. The landslide that followed had nothing to do with waking up lucky on election day. It came from months of planning — coalition-building, contingency plans, and contingency plans for the contingency plans. You plan the message. You plan the room. You plan for what happens when things go wrong, because if you don’t, they generally do.
Planning has never felt restrictive to me. It has always felt like freedom. The more thoroughly I’ve thought a thing through, the more confidently I can step forward into it.
So when I came to writing, late, in my fifties, I came to it the way I’d come to everything else: with a plan. I am an outliner. Not a loose, few-bullet-points outliner — a deep, detailed, know-the-whole-house-before-you-pour-the-foundation outliner. I like to see the shape of a story before I let myself write a single word of it. The outline is where I do all my worrying, so that the writing can be something closer to joy. For book after book, it worked exactly as I intended.
And then I tried to write The Promise Trilogy, and my method came apart in my hands.
I’ve told the story elsewhere of how Lucie Santoro began — a side character, a foil, a young teacher I invented to stand opposite a hard, solitary woman in another series. (you can check out Why Would She Leave and Moonshiner Mysteries to learn more). What I haven’t said is what it cost me to follow her. Because the moment I sat down to outline her story, I hit a question I could not answer from the safety of a plan.
Why would she leave?
Why would a first-generation Italian daughter walk away from her family, her neighborhood, everything she was raised to be, and cross a continent alone? I could not outline my way to that answer. Believe me, I tried. I built outline after outline, and every one of them rang false, because I was trying to chart the route to a place I hadn’t found yet. The real answer — the only one that could carry Lucie’s weight — couldn’t be reasoned out in advance from the comfort of a planning document. It had to be discovered, in the writing, the slow and graceless way.
So I wrote in the dark. For the first time in my life, I wrote toward a question instead of away from one.
It took more than twenty drafts.
Not twenty drafts because I love revision. Twenty drafts because every time I was sure I’d finally found the book, the book informed me otherwise.
It was never a dramatic collapse. It was exhaustion — the particular exhaustion of repeatedly losing faith and then sitting back down anyway. I’d solve a problem and discover the solution had broken something deeper. I’d fall for a version, spend weeks on it, and slowly realize it wasn’t the book. I wasn’t fighting the work. I was grieving versions of the work.
There was a version where Lucie’s story bent toward romance. I loved parts of that one. Gone. There was a version that wandered happily through the beautiful side streets of the neighborhood — the Giglio festival, the family traditions, all that rich texture. Gone. There was even a fourth book waiting beyond the trilogy, carrying consequences I thought I understood. Gone too. Again and again I’d spend weeks, sometimes months, building a road, only to find it led somewhere Lucie would never have gone. Then I’d tear it up and start again.
There were evenings when shelving the whole thing seemed like the sensible choice. Maybe I wasn’t the writer for this book. Maybe I didn’t know enough yet. Maybe the story needed another decade and another author. But the doubt ran deeper than that, into stranger territory. Some stretches, I wasn’t revising a book at all — I was trying to work out whether the book existed. Was it three books? One? The four I’d once been so sure of? Or not a book yet at all, just a question I’d mistaken for a story? And then the question would come back. Why would she leave? Not louder than before. Just still there. Waiting. So I’d sit back down and try again.
Looking back, I don’t think it was confidence that kept me going — confidence would have quit much sooner. It was stubbornness, and curiosity, and the increasingly uncomfortable suspicion that the answer was in there somewhere, buried in the wreckage of all the versions that hadn’t worked.
What I finally had to accept was that I couldn’t think my way to this book in advance. I had to surrender my certainty about what it should be, in order to find out what it actually was.
Which is, of course, exactly what I was asking of Lucie.
I didn’t see that at first; I was too far down inside the frustration. But somewhere in the middle of all that wreckage, it landed on me that the very thing making this book so hard to write was the thing the book was about. Lucie has to give up the safety of the known path to become herself. I had to give up the safety of the outline to find her. The process and the subject had quietly become the same act. I was writing a story about the cost of becoming, and the price it charged me was my own certainty.
I’ve come to believe something about questions and plans that I didn’t know before this trilogy.
A plan tells you what you already know. It’s a map of territory you’ve at least imagined. That’s its comfort — and it’s a real one; I have no intention of giving up outlining altogether, I’m not so reformed as all that. But a plan can only ever carry you as far as your own foresight reaches, and there are stories — the ones most worth writing — that begin just past the edge of what you can foresee.
A question doesn’t behave that way. A good one — a real one, the kind that won’t leave you alone — refuses to tell you anything. It pulls instead. It draws you somewhere you couldn’t have planned to go, because if you could have planned your way there, you’d never have needed the question at all. Every tidy answer I reached for, the book refused, and every refusal taught me a little more about who Lucie actually was. The question kept turning down my plans until the only answer left standing was the true one.
That may be the most useful thing I know now — about writing, and maybe about more than writing. The plan is where you put what you’re sure of. A question is how you find what you’re not.
I still outline. I expect I always will; it’s how I’m built. But beside every outline now sits a question with no answer yet — the kind that pulls. I’ve learned to trust those questions. They usually know where a story is going long before I do.
Lucie’s story is one story told in three parts — Book One, Book Two, and Book Three. Jump right in at the beginning with Book One, or read about the whole trilogy .