Take Character A, for example:

“So, I need you to be faster. We need to reduce touches, instead of, say, uh, whatever aisle you’re on, you’re grabbing a box. Pickles! You grab the jar with one hand, and you use your other hand to move the other jars, and then another touch to straighten them, and another to bring the box of jars closer. You’re wasting time. Bring the box of pickles close to the shelf and gently place the jar on the others. That’s one touch after bringing the box closer. We need time management. Ok? Do you understand?”

Then, we have another one (say, Character B) going about the exact situation like this:

“So our job is about time management, and to do that: we have to reduce touches. That means touching every product the least amount of times before it gets to the shelf. You watch Spider-Man? You know that octopus guy with the metal arms? Well, he can grab four things at once and place ‘em like that, real fast! But we only have the two, so we need to do everything as efficiently as possible. Bring the box close to where it goes. Find the best, quickest way to open it— they’re all different. Then, in one motion, grab from the box to the shelf.”

Both of those people are incredibly different; one is nervous and is desperately trying to communicate, but struggles to find the words. The other is experienced, knows what they want, and tries to find some common ground to connect with their employee. This is beautiful to me. These two people couldn’t be more different in how they were raised, their experiences, and the reasons they do what they do. As a horror novelist: for now, this is where the fun is. I love taking these beautifully crafted personalities and breaking them. Putting these people into the worst day of their life and seeing how they react to it is fun; their being, their whole life has led to this moment I have crafted for them… and everything they are comes out.

How do you think that first person (the nervous one) would react to an intrusion by a gunman, late at night, as they are shutting down their business? What about the second one? I bet you can already imagine the first screaming feverishly, while the second (though definitely still scared) is determined to get through it smoothly without violence. Those are just small examples of people and who we are: the dangers we face are the same, but how we go through them will always be different.

The post The Human Fears Beneath the Monster: A Peek into Character Psychology appeared first on Author Claytth.

After writing Agony (even after several drafts), I still didn’t feel that I scratched that itch; I don’t feel I got to say everything I wanted. Which is true— because my interests wouldn’t all fit into that book, and it would have been terrible. That said: I want to go deeper, I want to go harder, really reach into that gut-wrenching misery and pull out something far worse than what I wrote… However, that’s much easier said than done. Recently, I’ve been hit with an incredible writer’s block, one that has actually blocked every book I planned on writing. The other books in the pipeline are straightforward to produce, but this one comes first, and I can’t figure it out.

There are so many things I want to do… a plethora of characters I want to share with everyone in hopes that readers can find someone new to look up to or be inspired by. The problem is that sometimes those same characters are the ones stopping all progress. Currently, I have three little bastards that I feel might as well be my own kids with how in-depth I’ve been making them… and they are nagging me, incessantly begging for attention— I want to give it to them, but (like with all my friends and family) I don’t know how to do that. So every day, I fire my brain into the cosmos, trying to connect with the god of creativity. Trying to find some way to get these kids to the arcade so I can get on with being miserable!

Anyway, the convoluted point I’m trying to make (that probably doesn’t make sense with everything I just said) is that finding ways to evolve your creativity is important. This book I’m stuck on is due to my lack of creativity. I’ve come up with almost a dozen solutions, and then my editor slapped another on me that I hadn’t thought of. The freshness of that idea was astounding; it blew me away. The oldest question in the book (ha!) suddenly roused itself out of the sand: “Why didn’t I think of that?” That was a teaching moment, as it means I still have more to learn, and that means I need to read more and experience new things. The more I add to my repertoire, the more creativity I’ll have… and then I can get those kids to their concert, and then I can pour out the misery into another book of horror!

Into the Future We Go,

Clay Tarlton-Hensley

The post What is CTH Exploring Next? appeared first on Author Claytth.

That feeling doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of specific choices writers make— choices that prioritize depth over spectacle, psychology over plot convenience, and emotional truth over everything else.

Here’s how to make those choices.

Give Your Characters Flaws That Actually Matter

We talk a lot about “flawed characters” in writing circles, but the bar has gotten low. A character who’s “too dedicated to their work” or “a little clumsy” isn’t flawed — they’re marketable.

Real flaws are the ones that cost something. Jealousy that poisons a relationship. Pride that keeps someone from asking for help when they desperately need it. A tendency to self-sabotage right when things start going well.

The most compelling characters carry a duality inside them: they’re capable of both great love and great harm (sometimes in the same scene). Think of the parent who would die for their child but emotionally abandons them anyway; the person who fights for justice but can’t forgive the people closest to them.

That tension is what makes a character feel alive. Strengths are easy to root for. Flaws are what make readers recognize themselves!

Dig Into the Why

Plot-driven writers tend to ask: “What does my character do?”
Character-driven writers ask: “Why do they do it?”
The difference is everything.

When a character’s actions are rooted in genuine psychology (their history, their fears, the story they tell themselves about who they are), every decision they make feels earned. You don’t need to explain it with exposition. Readers feel it.

Take a character who keeps people at a distance. On the surface, they might seem cold or difficult. But once you understand that they grew up in an environment where closeness always ended in loss… the behavior doesn’t just make sense— it becomes heartbreaking. The same action reads completely differently depending on the why underneath it.

This is why backstory matters: not as something you dump in chapter three, but as something that quietly shapes every scene your character appears in. You might write ten pages of backstory that never make it into the book. That’s fine. You’ll feel it in the writing, and so will your readers.

Choose Emotional Truth Over Plot Spectacle

Here’s a test: if you removed your character’s most dramatic scene (the big reveal, the confrontation, the climactic moment): would readers still feel something?

If the answer is no, your character’s emotional arc might be living in the set pieces rather than in the quieter moments between them. Emotional truth doesn’t require explosions or revelations. It lives in small, specific details: the way a character goes quiet when someone says something that cuts too close. The thing they almost say and then don’t. The habit they’ve carried since childhood that resurfaces when they’re scared. These moments do more work than almost any plot twist, because they bypass the reader’s logic and go straight to their gut. They create the sensation of knowing someone (which is ultimately what keeps readers turning pages past midnight)!

Plot spectacle has its place, obviously. But it earns its impact when the emotional groundwork has already been laid. The big moment lands because readers have already been quietly devastated a dozen times before it, right?

The Real Secret

When readers say they loved a character, they almost never cite the character’s greatest achievement. They cite the moment they recognized something true in them: a fear they share, a contradiction they’ve lived, a feeling they’ve never quite been able to name until now.

That recognition is what you’re writing toward.

Prioritize the flaws. Understand the why. Keep asking what’s emotionally true, even when the plot is pushing you somewhere louder. The characters readers can’t forget aren’t the ones who do the most impressive things. They’re the ones who feel the most real.

The post How to Write Characters that Readers Will Remember appeared first on Author Claytth.

That’s not a “horror” ending. That’s a “grief” ending. And somehow, it’s one of the most terrifying things committed to film! This is the open secret of horror: at its best, it was never really about the monster. It was about what the monster threatens to take, because fear is the inverse of care.

Fear Is Just Love With Nowhere to Go

Ask yourself: what fear do these characters actually tap into? It’s not simply spiders, not just the dark— dig deeper. The most primal fears aren’t about pain or death (in the abstract). They’re about losing a specific person. Watching someone you love become unrecognizable. Being unable to protect what you’ve built.

Stephen King, the genre’s most decorated practitioner, has been remarkably candid about this. “Pet Sematary” (which he reportedly found too disturbing to publish for years) is, at its core, about a father who loves his son so much that he violates the laws of nature. The horror doesn’t come from the reanimated dead. It comes from recognizing that you would do the exact. Same. Thing. You understand him completely. That understanding is where the dread lives.

Fear, at its root, is the shadow cast by attachment. As I recently mentioned in a social media post: “We cannot dread losing what we don’t value”. The more we love something, the more we fear its absence— and horror fiction is ruthless about exploiting that arithmetic. It finds the thing you hold most carefully and asks: “What if..?”, and this exact concept is why horror is so frequently set inside a family home. The haunted house isn’t just a location— it’s a relationship. Something has gone wrong in the place that was supposed to be safe, among the people who were supposed to be permanent. That violation hits differently than any stranger-in-the-dark scenario, because it turns love itself into the source of danger.

The Vulnerability That Makes the Fear Real

Great horror fiction requires something that seems counterintuitive: it has to make you care before it makes you scared. A story that begins with a monster is just action. A story that begins with a person (their small routines, their private tenderness, the particular way they love the people around them) and then introduces the monster… that’s horror!

Shirley Jackson understood this better than almost anyone. “The Haunting of Hill House” opens not with a ghost, but with Eleanor Vance: a woman in her thirties who has spent her life caring for a sick mother; who has never had her own space; who is pathetically, heartbreakingly thrilled to be chosen for something… By the time Hill House begins its work on her, we’re not watching a victim. We’re watching someone we’ve come to recognize. Her dissolution is terrifying precisely because we’ve been let inside her inner life.

This is the emotional contract horror fiction makes with its reader: “I will show you someone worth caring about, and then I will put them in danger.” The writer has to hold up their end of that bargain first. The vulnerability has to be established before the threat arrives. Otherwise, there’s nothing at stake, and the reader is just watching chess pieces move! What separates literary horror from mere shock is this willingness to slow down: to spend time in the ordinary before the extraordinary arrives. For instance, Carmen Maria Machado’s “Her Body and Other Parties” is terrifying not because of its supernatural elements but because of how precisely it maps the interior of a person— her desires, her doubts, the texture of how she moves through the world. When things start going bottom-up, the chaos enters a life we feel we’ve actually inhabited.

Empathy Is the Architecture Under Every Scare

Here’s the strange alchemy: reading horror fiction is an exercise in radical empathy. To be frightened by a story, you have to agree (on some level) to inhabit the character’s position— to feel what they feel, want what they want, dread what they dread. The reader does this willingly, voluntarily stepping into a perspective not their own and letting it matter to them. If that’s true: horror writers, then, are in the business of building emotional architecture before they fill it with shadows. The careful work of establishing character (the habits, the relationships, the texture of a life) is not just set-up. It is the entire point. Every detail that makes a character feel real is a load-bearing beam in the structure of fear. This empathic work is also, quietly, a moral act. Horror that functions as pure brutality and offers no one to care about is just aggression dressed up in narrative clothes. Horror that asks you to feel something for its characters is doing something more demanding: it’s asking you to understand their love and their fear as extensions of the same impulse. It’s asking you to practice empathy under pressure, to stay present with someone else’s experience even when it becomes unbearable.

Paul Tremblay is a contemporary master of this. His novels are frequently described as slow-burns, and that’s accurate— but “slow” is doing a lot of work in that phrase. What he’s actually doing is building intimacy. He makes you know his characters the way you know people in your own life: imperfectly, affectionately, with a growing sense of what they stand to lose. When the horror arrives, it lands with the weight of something that’s happening to someone real.

In that light, the horror writer and the love poet are working the same quarry. Both are asking: “What does it mean to be this attached to the world? To people who can be taken from you? To a self that might not survive what’s coming?” The love poet writes toward that attachment. The horror writer writes from the terror of its loss.

What the Monster Is Always Standing In For

Look at the great horror works through this lens, and they reorganize themselves. “Hereditary” is about how grief deforms family bonds. “The Shining” is about the slow violence of a father’s self-destruction on the people who love him. “Mexican Gothic” is about the insidious ways that those who claim to love you can consume you instead. “Let the Right One In” is, improbably, one of the most tender love stories of the last twenty years!

The monster is almost always standing in for something: loss, illness, failure. The parts of ourselves we’re afraid to look at directly. Horror gives these things a shape so that we can face them on the page in a way we sometimes cannot face them in life. We face them as teeth, as shadow, as a face in the window. And when the story is working, when the writer has done their job, what you feel at the end isn’t just relief that the story is over. It’s grief… Because you cared. Because the horror worked the way it was supposed to: by making you love something first, and then showing you how easily it can be threatened.

That’s the open secret. The horror writers were writing about love all along. The monsters just helped them say it.

The post How Horror Writers Are Actually Writing About Love appeared first on Author Claytth.

You’ve written several drafts, your readers say it’s good, your editor gives you the go-ahead: it’s TIME. What do you do? What are your options?

Right now, we have 2 choices: begin fishing for literary agents or self-publish (which in itself has a multitude of options but ultimately means DIY). I’m about to go over both and what my experiences have been with them to help you choose what’s right for you, because depending on your goal or situation, one could be better than the other.

First, let’s go with traditional publishing: fishing for those literary agents. Now, finding a literary agent is just like applying for a job… so I hope you’re not like me and absolutely hate that, because that’s what this is. You’ll need to write a letter for your application— your best foot forward, this is your one SINGULAR CHANCE to impress that agent. Everyone has their own rules and what they like to see: if you’re writing romance, then look for agents that read romance. If you’re writing horror, then look for someone who enjoys that. That’s easy enough. But that’s not enough. Do they like YOUR romance? Is it gay, is it contemporary, is it fantasy, or historical? Does your book focus on all-white characters, but the agent you selected specifically only wants POC? That’s another layer you need to research because if you don’t know what they like, then you wasted their (and your) time and lost an opportunity. Agents are picky, I’ve said this before in previous posts, and they have every right to be picky… but it is your job to find the one who would like your book.

Trying to find an agent for your novel is like finding your soul mate, except finding an agent is easier because you can actually find their interests and pick them out on a page. Now this is where my experience with traditional publishing ends. The lesson from this is do your research, DO YOUR RESEARCH. Follow their rules as if God itself wrote them.

Next up, we have self-publishing. My first question before we get into it, however, is simple at its face: how much money you got? Like, right now. Check your account and check your savings. You got at least $10k?

That’s not enough.

Self-publishing requires money. Now, I count paying your editor as finances that go into self-publishing (though you do need to do this regardless of which method of publishing you utilize, because your book has to look its best… but I’m still counting it). Some authors have spent $2k alone on their editors— then you need to pay an artist for the cover of your book; then you need a website (which means paying for the domain and servers for your website, social media accounts, etc.). Are you going to manage your own socials, or have someone do them for you? One option is free. Have you noticed I haven’t actually talked about publishing your book yet? Yeah… we’re not there yet, and you’re still spending money.

Publishing your book is easy… getting readers is the hard part, aside from needing all that money to invest. Managing your socials, spreading your brand awareness, those make-or-break the release of your book. If no one knows who you are or what you’re doing, then you have no customers! This is the reality of self-publishing. If you can’t network, then you have nothing.

Writing a book is hard work. Publishing a book is easy. Finding readers is difficult. No matter what option you choose, you have a lot of work ahead… and the amount of frustration and depression you get from it will hopefully be worth it in the end. Because if it isn’t, then why are you even doing this?

At first, I planned to approach an agent.
When that failed, I tried self-publishing… and then that failed due to the incompetence of the team I had hired, so I got another one (and they’re much better).
The new plan is that if my book Agony can succeed with self-publishing, then that would help convince an agent to help with my next book. Agents want money. They want results. If they know you’re good, then it’ll be easier to like your work and represent you. That is the third option, which really isn’t any better… but it does exist.

 I hope you find this useful. I wish you luck in your writing ventures.

The post The Emotional Realities of Different Publishing Paths appeared first on Author Claytth.

You have options at the start, presuming you have relatives or siblings, a friend, or even your favorite teacher. I gave a copy of one of my stories to my English teacher once. Teachers want you to succeed and become a bona fide, responsible adult with a thriving career. So, if they see you have talent: they will tell you (and likewise, they will admit if something in your work is off). My first beta reader ever was my dad. He helped me self-publish my first book, and for years, he read every several pages of a story I never finished to help me. He’d guide me if I was doing well, or straying too far. 

If you have the funding for it, I suggest going to Fiverr and looking for someone there. Some need an entire manuscript before accepting your work, while others are fine with several chapters. Their prices vary by word count. If looking for a professional, MAKE SURE they are a professional and check their reviews. Who are the reviewers, and what are they saying? Does this person have any educational background in the area, any degrees? These aren’t necessary, but they do add credibility, and that’s what you need before hiring a professional. 

So finding a beta reader can be intimidating, but it is easier than it sounds. Find people who care about you and tell yourself, remind yourself, that you need their help, and you have to let go and ask for it for that to happen.

The post How to Find Beta Readers Without Losing Your Confidence appeared first on Author Claytth.

Anyway, when editing your book: the biggest thing you’re looking for (in my opinion) is, “Does it make sense?” An example of this is my favorite character, Chiyo, in my book Agony. She was always meant to be the sensitive character of the group… She wasn’t like the others, she was fearful, couldn’t stand up for herself— but because she was so different from everyone. She gave them an outside perspective and a heart. At least to me, that’s who she is supposed to be— In the first draft, however, that was not the case. Chiyo was basically a toxic girlfriend by complete accident in the first draft. She gaslit Claire, blamed things on her, wouldn’t hear her out, and when she would vent her side of the story: it always sounded like Claire’s didn’t matter. 

Another example is that in the first two drafts, Claire was unnecessarily mean towards her best friend. Somehow, I had created this strange thing between them where Rachel had done something that made Claire permanently pissed off at Rachel and untrusting toward her. I’m not sure how I did that, but these two examples are clear reasons for the mandatory process of editing your book. You need to read through everything you wrote and check if the conversations line up, if the undertone is correct, “Does it make sense?” 

When working with someone else and getting help to edit, I would say: check what they’ve done before to get an idea of what they’ve worked with. I have only ever truly worked with one editor, as the others only helped proofread, so my editor is easy to work with because we know each other. She understands what I’m going for and doesn’t take the wheel, just completely changing things willy-nilly regardless of my vision for the story. She helps find what I’m looking for. So, getting to know your editor (I would say) is essential. Find someone who has experience, see if you can find examples of their work, and then talk to them. Try to explain what your work is about. The more they know about you and what you enjoy doing, the easier it’ll be to get on the same wavelength!

The post Tips For New Authors: Editing Lessons I Learned The Hard Way appeared first on Author Claytth.

This is how I write, but not necessarily how others should. Everyone has their own method, but it’s important to stay flexible and willing to accept change since you may find a better way that suits you more.

Every idea starts with a song. The radio at work, some mysterious tune I hear in the background of a video, a boss theme in a game… That initial beat steals my attention and calls me to listen. Music is my muse! It’s never the same song, but one can sprout multiple ideas. My point is that every book starts with a song, and therefore, when I write: I must either listen to that same one, or something similar.

When I was writing Agony, my playlist consisted of a genre called “Traumacore”— and that may sound disturbing to someone unfamiliar with it, but it’s actually very comforting. The genre is full of music that’s not technically sad, but it feels like it could be. It’s hard to describe. It’s like when I listen to it, I find comfort in this misery. It’s a pain that I’ve accepted, and who I am. That’s not bad, it’s just life, and listening to this playlist made me feel alive and not so alone. These feelings are what I needed to write “Agony”, as Claire is dealing with wanting to live but seeing no other choice but to die. Matching the songs, the tone, and (sometimes) their messages to the book I am writing is mandatory. Sure, I could listen K-Pop while writing a tank battling a convoy of mercenaries in the desert, despite it sounding ludicrous and off genre… but it’s a case-by-case basis, and what could seem like the wrong song for a book may actually be the most important.

So before I sit down to write, it’s crucial to pick an appropriate playlist for my book or the current scene I am writing. Next, I read a little bit of what I have written previously (to get me fully immersed in the world I’m creating), and then I begin to see what comes next. I turn into a drooling, possessed creature just spasming out words onto the page for several hours.

For those of you stuck on the first page— that white, unbreakable wall that stares you down— I do have some advice. Break it. Dominate it. Make it your bitch. That wall doesn’t own you: this is your world, and it needs to take it.

In other words, just start writing. Tell yourself that whatever you put down isn’t the beginning. It’s not the first chapter, and it’s not permanent. That first page of Agony was, indeed, agonizing! I could not figure out how to start the book, and in fact, I didn’t find out what the start of the book was until the second draft. I SKIPPED the beginning and went straight to the part where Claire arrives at the ghost town. I knew I needed a beginning, but wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be… so I decided to reevaluate upon completion, and I knew that when I had finished: my awesome beta reader would tell me what was missing. Yes, a beta reader— Never write without one. I had two!
My first draft of Agony was trash. A little peek of what the first draft was like is that the ghost (Zelde, in the bar scene towards the middle of the book) was a secret secondary antagonist, and the creature was her drummer boyfriend.

So in summary, find a method that works for you… and find a beta reader to help you fill in the blanks. Everything you write can be edited or replaced. Nothing is permanent, so don’t feel scared putting something terrible on the page. Because if it’s bad, then you now know what ISN’T going in the book!

May Your Pen Never Run Dry,

Clay Tarlton-Hensley

The post My Writing Process: What Works for Me appeared first on Author Claytth.

Horror has always been the genre people use to express their problems, the negative emotions they deal with, or to shed light on tough subjects. In a way, horror has always felt more real than other genres. When I browse for horror films or books: I always picture myself as if looking for an interesting documentary, one that has something special to say. This isn’t always the case, as 90% of what I find is (in my opinion) “gutter trash”… but now and then, I find a movie that actually hits that spot I want to itch.

But my writing draws inspiration from other forms of media, too, such as video games. Once again, I’m gonna talk about Silent Hill 2— a big inspiration for Agony. This game was incredible from my very first play-through, and somehow I got the “Maria” ending for my first run (without knowing there were alternate endings). This may sound impossible, given how difficult that ending is to achieve on purpose— I know— but I think the reason I got it was because of who I was during that time in my life. I was a very lonely teenager. A hopeless romantic chasing the perfect girlfriend, the idealized partner. To get that ending in SH2 is essentially doing the same thing. James (the MC of SH2) has to ignore any and every artifact of his sick wife, Mary (who died), and chase after Maria. Maria is his idealized version of Mary. James accepted his sins… and his reward for that was Maria. Years later, when I played the remake: I assumed I would effortlessly get the same ending on my first try. However, I got the “Leave” ending. I was floored, shocked, and confused! I had never seen that ending before. As a kid, I either got “In Water” or “Maria”— but now, in my thirties: I finally got “Leave”, the easiest ending to get! I would like to think it means I have grown as a person… but it could just be the easiest ending to get.

I explained all that because SH2 is a horror game— an incredibly emotional, thought-provoking horror game about real issues. Hence why I write horror. There is so much to be said within the genre of horror that feels out of place in others! There can be this grand comedy of trying to reclaim a great treasure and all the hilarious highjinks that go with it. But then the comedy stops just long enough to develop a more serious tone for a moment of reflection… before the fun begins again and stays until the end. To me, that is a childish way of talking about something serious! The true meaning and the weight of that serious moment are easily forgotten, evaporating in the laughs afterwards. The “action” genre holds a lot of great, thought-provoking moments as well… but that’s not why people gravitate towards that genre—  so it’s never the core experience. With horror books: the entire experience is everything you try to ignore, and it chases you relentlessly until you face it. You expect bad things to happen in horror! For example: you may enter willingly into an uncomfortable talk about your addiction, that you can’t control yourself anymore, and the fact that you need help. In horror, this would be a pièce de résistance scene. Or you may enter the lion’s den knowing the danger, so you’re only mildly surprised when your ex bursts out of its chest whilst yelling “You need to wake up; it’s been three years!”. A grand reveal coupled with some good-old-fashioned metaphorical gore! 

I do plan to write other genres, I’m just starting with horror as it’s my go-to when I want to relax with a bowl of popcorn or a cup of coffee.

Horror Enthusiast At Heart,

Clay Tarlton-Hensley

The post Why I Write Horror Stories appeared first on Author Claytth.

Writing a book is difficult; everyone knows that. However, that difficulty falls within a completely different scope for those who do write than for those who don’t. I’ve known (and still know) many who wanted to write and had amazing ideas, but never got to start their journey. My Uncle Carl led a rich and incredible life that only he will ever know. I have fragments of what he said happened to him in ‘Nam, his incredible encounters and memories of his time in Key West— but the world will never know what truly happened to him before he passed away from cancer. He wanted to write a book; however, too many obstacles prevented him from doing so. I thought he could overcome them (or at least, I could help)… but life got in the way.

Years later, I met an elderly woman through my sister. We were helping her get rid of a few things in her house. While there, I sensed she was like me: a creative person with a burning passion. We talked about how she wanted to write a book, but like many others, she was stuck in the plotting phase. She needed to know every detail before starting. A month-or-so after, she passed away. Another tragic loss for this world! To never know what words she could have shared, who she might have inspired, or helped… It’s a true tragedy.

Those are two people who always stay with me when I think of my writing. I needed to write this book, and what’s more: I needed to publish it and share it with as many people as I could. Agony is just the beginning; it was always meant to be only the beginning. However, it was written as a one-off. Just in case destiny decided I, too, couldn’t share my dreams with everyone.

I wrote this book in a year (all drafts included), but I had planned everything for much longer than that. Originally, Agony had been written in 1st person/present tense. Anyone who writes (or avid book readers) might recognize that’s not a popular style… and for very good reason! It feels alien, despite the fact that it’s exactly how we live. I wanted to write it this way because I felt it was the best way for people to experience Claire’s struggle with depression. Everything would be in the moment, and all her thoughts were on every page. However, once I got to the third draft, I said, “Nah, I’m good.”

The biggest problem for me with the first two drafts was describing, well, everything. I do not like 1st person POV stories, I REALLY don’t like them. They feel limiting to me in the scope of how a story can be told. Ironic, then, that I thought it was the best way to tell her story. So once I got to the third draft, I rewrote all of Claire’s scenes because she was the only character with a 1st person POV. Everyone else was in 3rd.

Experienced writers would say that right there was also a problem, but I— ever the nonconformist— felt I could do what others couldn’t (or wouldn’t).

Anyway, that was the biggest hurdle I had to get over in writing the book. As for publishing, well, it’s gonna be a bit before I have an answer for that. What I can say is this: If you want to write, then just do it.

Get over yourself. Find whatever is stopping you and fight back. If you don’t have time, make time. If you need to plot everything out first, then at least write something— anything! I guarantee you will find more answers to your problems by actually writing than just thinking about it. In fact, I find more problems on top of the ones I already have just by writing… BUT, those same fresh problems provide answers for the old ones. Just as in everything else, you need to practice.

Don’t let your dreams wither away with you! Share them, please, so that the world can be a better place.

Yours in Inking and Thinking,

Clay Tarlton-Hensley

The post The Messy, Scary, and Amazing Journey of Publishing My First Book appeared first on Author Claytth.