now I'm curious, can you tell us more about writing Flourish out of order? what made you decide to try writing it that way? what was agonizing about it??
I think honestly I decided to do it that way as an experiment, because so many other writers say it works for them, and on paper it does seem like a good strategy for keeping your interest focused over a long project. It's something I'd been interested in experimenting with for a while, and Flourish seemed like the right story for it because of the structure.
If your memory is good or you've read the author's notes recently, you'll know that Flourish began life kind of as a stunt -- a bunch of people on Tumblr were laughing at Rudy Giuliani, as one does, and saying that "landscaper next to the dildo store" should become the new fandom trope to replace "flower shop next to the tattoo parlor." I often get ideas by hearing something stupid and thinking, okay, but if you did want to do that for real, how would you? And I got really hooked on this idea of Quentin running this super nerdy, Ivy League sex shop, and Eliot, who comes from this canonically working-class background, struggling to find some kind of balance between his origin story and his artistic temperament in a way that was more complex than just fucking off and pretending to be someone else.
But that was really all I had, going in! There was absolutely nothing like a plot involved. I knew it would have to take place over a year or more, so I kind of broke it out seasonally and did a bunch of research about gardening in Pennsylvania specifically and the landscaping industry generally (my Kindle Unlimited algorithms were bonkers for a while). I noodled around with the concept of plants and blooming where you're planted. I came up with a huge, detailed backstory for the Waugh family, since I knew it was going to have to be his connection to his family that drew Eliot there at all, and I knew I really liked the idea that Eliot and Ted became garden buddies before Eliot and Quentin were really a thing. I had a general sense that there was going to be a culminating conflict between Julia wanting to leave the business and Q feeling betrayed by that. And at the point where I signed up for the Big Bang, that was more or less all I knew, and I thought, okay, maybe what I do is just put these characters in rooms and let them bounce off each other until I figure out what I really want the story to look like.
And honestly, that part wasn't too disastrous. I wrote a lot of the Eliot stuff first, since I had a stronger sense of his conflict, and I let Quentin's Whole Deal emerge gradually -- which is why I think his arc is a little more messy, but you can get away with messy in Quentin's case, it's Quentin.
I got to the point where I had about 30k of fiction and I was like, okay, I get this story, I can explain it to myself. I wrote an outline. And that's where I fucked up, because what I should have done is backed up to the beginning and wrote like I always do, filling in the gaps chronologically and editing completed scenes where necessary. But I was still into this idea that I was Letting the Story Lead Me or some fucking thing, who knows, and I started just tackling scenes from my outline whenever I thought of something cool to do with them.
And that was a disaster, because what I should have realized about myself is that for me, the pleasure of writing is in the momentum of it. When I write, I do generally have a sense of what the third act will contain, but the fun of it is kind of -- building the deck or laying out the game board. I spend a lot of time setting up People With Problems, and then as I'm actually writing, I'm solving their problems, and the biggest component of that is letting them talk long enough to figure out what they think their problems are, which is rarely what I think their problems are, but to me the most interesting thing about any human being is where they're wrong about themselves. So as I write, I'm always using the things these characters say and think to build the conflict, I'm basically starting out with my story and learning as I go why they're not already doing what I think they should do -- what I will eventually get them to do.
This may all seem a little abstract, but trust me, there's a click that happens when the story shifts gears and I'm no longer setting things up, but now I'm writing to address what's in motion, not to Create Problems On Purpose anymore, but to drive those problems to a head and then solve them. And with Flourish, I never felt that click, I was never able to Win the Story, because big chunks of the first act still weren't in place until very late in the process.
And on a practical level, it meant that certain late things were supposed to be a bigger deal, but I wrote it so slowly and with such frustration that I just didn't have time to set them up as much as I imagined I would -- Quentin's contentious relationship with Marina was supposed to be a thread, and when I wrote the later scenes it was theoretically resonant that Julia says "you both made me carry this as a secret from the people I love, you both let me down." But then the way the story evolved, that just got squeezed out because there wasn't an organic spot for it and I didn't have time to create new scenes for it. So stuff like that, where if I'd been writing Act Three with complete knowledge of what actually had and hadn't happened earlier, I'd have approached it differently. And that was super frustrating and made me feel like I was fucking it up.
In retrospect, I do like Flourish a lot. I think I made the story work, mostly just through brute force. But when I look at it, I can definitely see the seams, where the transitions seem abrupt and random, where certain things still look to me like responses to events that never actually happened in the story. It's fine, it worked out mostly. But I truly never enjoyed writing it in the way I usually enjoy writing, and I absolutely think it's because I didn't have a strong, completed first act pushing me through to an ending that felt like a justified payoff to Page One.
Anyway, thanks for the ask, this was cathartic! And, uh, people should read Flourish, which I think is a pretty decent little novel about taking the hand you're dealt in life and trying to turn it into something you're proud of. It's so AU that I think even if you've never seen a Magicians in your life, it's completely readable.
