Lynn Buchanan is a fantasy writer based in the foothills of some impressive, chilly mountains in Utah. She’s a 2019 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and holds an MFA in fiction from Brigham Young University, where she taught creative writing. When she isn’t writing about monster-fighting dolls, moody painters, and mummified arms used as dancing props, she enjoys playing the oboe, buying houseplants, and watching Ghibli films. Her debut fantasy novel, The Dollmakers, comes out August 13, 2024 from HarperVoyager.
You graduated from Odyssey in 2019. Can you talk about your pre-Odyssey writing process? What kind of writing schedule, if any, did you keep?
Before Odyssey, I’d already made up my mind to be serious about writing; for me that translated to treating writing as much like a job as possible. To that end, I wrote for at least two hours every day, to hit a word count of 2,000 every day, with my writing happening first thing in the morning and before I did anything else. I didn’t outline much back then and was primarily a “pantser” writer, so my actual writing process was pretty much just sit down, open Microsoft Word, and write.
How do you feel your writing and writing process changed as a result of having attended Odyssey? What insights did you gain into your own work?
I revise now! And actually know how to plot and pace! Those three things (revising, plotting, and pacing) were actually why I wanted to attend Odyssey in the first place—historically speaking, I’ve always gotten good responses to my writing style and character development, but where my stories were consistently falling short before Odyssey was in their plots and pacing. At Odyssey, I was hoping I could learn how to properly approach those parts of storytelling and level-up my own stories into something other than character studies and pretty prose, and (thanks to Odyssey Director Jeanne Cavelos and my wonderful cohort) I did. The first project I tackled after the workshop was to revise a novella I’d written before Odyssey; taking all I’d learned about plotting and pacing and revision, I completely rewrote that story, keeping the core ideas in place but otherwise ripping the narrative up by the roots and shredding it down, piecing it back together while—for the first time—thinking as much about the plot as I did about the characters and prose as I wrote. The result was the book that got me an agent, which in turn paved the road for selling my debut novel, The Dollmakers, to Harper Voyager.
To speak more to how my actual writing process changed post-Odyssey, though, after I did that exercise in revision I started in on my next project (The Dollmakers, actually), and something interesting happened. This was the first book I’d written from scratch since Odyssey, coming off that high of success I’d felt with revising a project into the best thing I’d written to date. All of that compounded into quite a bit of pressure and self-doubt—as I wrote The Dollmakers, I found myself committing the cardinal sin of rewriting as I was writing, redoing scenes over and over until I was satisfied with them. Ever since I started writing I’ve been told not to write like that; rewriting while you’re trying to draft is a good way to get yourself stuck in an endless cycle, with your book never actually getting finished. But I knew so much more about plotting and pacing and revision that I found myself incapable of just forging on ahead like I used to. So I rewrote. Every scene. Over and over.
And you know what? That worked. It was painful at times. One scene took me an entire month to write (not hyperbole—every weekday for a month I rewrote that scene, deleting everything I did the day before and starting over every single day). But it worked. My writing process became (and remains to this day) an unholy mashup of drafting and revision, every scene going through multiple rewrites before I even fully finish a manuscript. It’s not a process I recommend to, well, anyone—it’s a frustrating way of doing things. But it’s A) how I function, and B) has the lovely perk of me ending up with a “first” draft that’s actually pretty polished. And it only takes about a gallon of frustrated tears to get there!
Your debut fantasy novel, The Dollmakers, comes out in the summer of 2024. How many stages did your novel go through before you sent it off to a publisher? How much of your time was spent writing the first draft, and how much time was spent in revision? What sort of revisions did you do?
The Dollmakers took me six months to draft. It was my MFA thesis project, and I made tweaks on it with feedback from my thesis committee, around the same time implementing notes from my writing group/beta readers—work that took me about another month or two. Then I did a pass through the manuscript in response to the feedback my agent gave me, which took a few weeks. So, overall, I’d guess I worked on The Dollmakers for about nine months before we went out on submission to publishers with it. Since my process is the aforementioned insane mixture of revision and drafting, it’s hard for me to pin down how much time I drafted versus revised; the division between those two steps is pretty blurry. I can say that most of my revisions (after my initial revision-draft fiasco) were tweaky—shifting my main character’s personality a degree in this direction, adding a scene here or fleshing out a scene there to drive home a theme or a plot point better. I didn’t have any major rewrites after drafting. The largest revision I did was adding two scenes, one at the beginning and one at the end of the book.
What is an outstanding novel or short story you read recently? What made it stand out to you?
The Penric and Desdemona novellas by Lois McMaster Bujold are ridiculously good. Bujold is a flat-out master of writing; I aspire to her character work, the clarity of her themes, the way she can present non-standard plots (or, at least, plots that don’t feel standard) and make me eat them up without protest. When I read her work I lose track of time. I get so immersed I start feeling like I’m actually in the story—a magic I haven’t felt with reading in a long time (yay for school-related reading burnout!). Bujold can make me care about every character in her stories, even the minor ones, even the villains—care doesn’t always mean “like,” after all.
What’s the biggest weakness in your writing these days, and how do you cope with it?
Plots are still an uphill climb for me. They’re just so darn twisty, and never as simple as I want them to be—my initial ideas tend to mutate before my eyes, laughing at me for thinking I understood the breadth and scope of any given story before getting into the thick of it. I honestly don’t think plotting will ever come easy to me, but that’s okay. I have to work hard to make the plots of my stories click in place, but once they do, well. That feeling is one of the reasons I write.
What’s next on the writing-related horizon? Are you starting any new projects?
I’m currently working on a book about ghosts, music, and the aching pain of growing apart from (or being left behind by) friends, that peculiar sadness and frustration and anger of paths diverging and people you thought you’d be with forever walking off in directions you aren’t going. It’s a story I tried to write about a year ago, when I was in the thick of some pretty heavy emotions, and right now feels like the time to actually get the narrative out. If nothing else, the plot’s finally (finally!) clicking for this one. Which feels great. The story is set in the same world as The Dollmakers, but in a different country with a new cast of characters, though one character carries over from The Dollmakers, making my ghost story a sequel of sorts. Though, more accurately, a prequel. I have a lot of stories planned in the world of The Dollmakers that I’m looking forward to getting down on paper—many, pesky plots just waiting to be twisted about and clicked into place!
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