A Guest Post from Author Craig Hansen

How I Wrote MOST LIKELY … The First Time

By Craig Hansen

My first published novel, MOST LIKELY, was released in May on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords. When people ask me how I wrote the novel, and how long it took, I have to laugh because it makes me sound like the writing version of The Flash.

In preparing MOST LIKELY for ePublication, the whole process took me just under three months. What I sometimes don’t add, if I’m pressed to time, are two key words: This time.

You see, it is true that entering in the basic draft of MOST LIKELY took about three weeks. Not bad for a 63,000-word novel. Revisions took me another couple weeks. I then sent it to my beta readers, waited about a week or two, and revised some more based on that feedback. A couple weeks later, I sent the novel to my editor, who turned it around in an amazing ten-day time period. And then it took me a couple weeks to enter final changes and corrections, read over it one last time, and start the ePublishing process.

All in all, I began the process around the beginning of March and uploaded my novel to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords at a bleary-eyed 5:30 AM on May 24. After which I slept well past 2 PM, exhausted. By 9 PM that night, Most Likely went live … pretty much everywhere.

Yet that’s only half the story of MOST LIKELY’s journey to publication, because March to May 2011 is actually the second time I wrote the novel. My first crack at it happened back primarily in 1991, twenty years ago.

I was in my college writing program, working on my master’s degree back then. My mentor, graduate advisor and creative thesis advisor was young adult novelist Terry Davis, author of such books as VISION QUEST, MYSTERIOUS WAYS, and IF ROCK-N-ROLL WERE A MACHINE, IT WOULD BE A MOTORCYCLE.

I’d been studying the craft of novel writing under him since my undergraduate days; how the university then-known as Mankato State University, but now known as Minnesota State University-Mankato ever landed him is a mystery to me, to this day, but his presence pretty much guaranteed I had the kind of mentor I needed to develop as a writer in an academic setting.

Terry was not pretentious about writing. That’s a very rare quality in academia. He liked to keep things simple and admired clear, clean prose no matter what genre a student was writing in. While many college writing professors are hoping to mold their protégés into the next Norman Mailers or Harper Lees, Terry didn’t look down on genre writers. If a student wanted to write horror, science fiction, mysteries, or romances, he would help them hone their craft so that it was the best-written horror, science fiction, mystery or romance that student was capable of writing. And a lot of us admired him deeply for it. I imagine most of us still do. I know I do.

Even though Terry provided a safe haven for genre writers, I still felt pulled toward something more mainstream by my fellow students. I wanted to write something that would stretch and challenge me, not something safe.

One inspiration for me at that time was a story I’d read about Stephen King. He’d been having a hard time selling anything but short fiction in his early years, and one day a friend told him, “Steve, you’ll never be a great writer because you don’t understand women. You can’t write them. All your characters are too much like yourself.”

King being who he was apparently took this as a challenge, and worked on a story to prove his friend wrong. I’m sure he consulted with his wife Tabitha, but he immersed himself in the task of writing a believable female character. He produced something barely longer than a short novel, and at the last second chickened out from sending it out to publishing houses.

His wife Tabby rescued the manuscript from King’s circular file, read it, and convinced him it was good enough to send out. It became the novel we know today as CARRIE, his first published novel, and an iconic morality tale that has become the template for “the nightmare of all high school proms.” His career was born.

I’ve always been deeply inspired by King; both his writing and his career. So I became convinced I had to take myself out of my own head, and write a novel featuring a female character as the central protagonist. MOST LIKELY was what the project came to be called.

In the first year of my graduate program, I stumbled along in the task of writing MOST LIKELY. I was doing what I frequently did when working on a long fiction project; I wrote about fifty pages into the novel, and became so obsessed with revising and polishing and making those pages perfect, I stalled and couldn’t get any further.

In truth, I think some personal issues probably held me back as well. My dating life in college had been pretty disastrous, and I was trying to write this tale about a sympathetic female at a time in my life where I felt like women weren’t all that sympathetic and existed, basically, for the sole purpose of breaking men’s hearts.

Yeah, I grew out of it, but it’s where I was at the time. In some ways, writing that early version of MOST LIKELY was probably a little therapeutic in terms of getting over the bitterness following  a couple major romantic disappointments.

I chose the young adult category because I felt, at the time, that I needed to write about a period of life I’d already lived though and survived, to write about it with any real wisdom and authority. So I set the novel in high school, because that’s all I’d really lived through back then. At the time, I based the setting on my university town of Mankato, calling it River’s Bend. That would change twenty years later to Hope, Wisconsin, also a fictional setting, but that’s a tale for another time.

Anyway, as I entered the second fall of my master’s program, Terry let me know time was running short. I needed to get a version of MOST LIKELY submitted by the time second semester began, following the winter break. I knew I’d never get it done by then if I didn’t get it done before winter break began … largely because I was planning to spend winter break with my parents, and I had no computer at home. I was writing the novel on a Mac, and needed access to a Mac.

So I talked to a friend of mine, Tim, who was living up in the Twin Cities. He offered to let me come up for Thanksgiving break, attend church with him and such, but the main selling point was this: he had a Mac, and I could spend as much time on it as I needed while I was visiting, so that I could finish my novel. I had nearly a full week’s worth of time during that break, and about 150 pages left to write, minimum. Of course, I said yes.

While Tim was a gracious host, I wasn’t much of a guest. From the time I arrived, he encouraged me, “You’re here to write. Write.” And that’s pretty much what I did, from the time I woke up to the time I got too tired to continue. He’d come in once in a while and remind me when it was time to eat, but mostly he just gave me unlimited access to his Mac, and space to write.

Other than meals, a church service, and watching some football that included a Vikings game (naturally) and one of the weirdest pro football games I’d ever seen … a show put on by the Jerry Glanville-coached Atlanta Falcons, quarterbacked at the time by Chris Miller … I pretty much did nothing but sit in front of that Mac and write.

The early version of MOST LIKELY was about 210 pages long and consisted of six uber-long chapters. When I went up to visit Tim, I had about 60 pages written. When I left about a week later, the novel was, at least in rough form, complete. Now I had pages to show Terry. Now I had more than just the first two chapters to revise. Now I had the makings of a creative thesis.

After revisions and the whole process of getting a few required copies printed up per university standards and going through the thesis approval process, which included a public reading of a portion of the novel, I began submitting the novel to first-novel contests, young adult publishers, and agents.

And a couple years later, I got tired of long waits and form rejections and MOST LIKELY went into an 18-year hibernation. When it emerged a few months ago, it was become someone asked me what was stopping me from self-publishing my old college thesis.

Well, for one, I didn’t have an electronic copy of it anymore. MOST LIKELY had been written in an era when you could fit the Mac OS, MacWord, and a load of fonts all onto a single 1.4 MB, 3.5-inch floppy disk, and still have room for many, many novels. These days I own a Windows 7 desktop PC and a laptop, and neither of them would accept any form of 3.5-inch floppy, let alone a Mac-formatted one. And I was pretty sure I didn’t even have that disc anymore. So it would mean re-entering the entire thing from scratch. But that, I supposed, was do-able.

My next main objection was, “I’m not even sure I have a copy of my thesis around anymore!” I had moved so many times in the last 18 years, I’d lost many old possessions. Yet I found it in my closet, stuffed into a green plastic storage basket, surrounded by several volumes of BLOOM COUNTY collections. I loved that old 1980s comic strip, and miss it deeply.

Then I started re-reading it for the first time in 18 years. I expected it to be horrid and unsalvageable, an embarrassing reminder of how good I wasn’t back then. As embarrassing as old high school graduation photos, when I sported, of all things, a white-man’s-Afro because it helped hide the reality of my thinning hair.

But an amazing thing happened as I re-read MOST LIKELY, Version 1. I realized it wasn’t half bad. Sure, it needed work. There was a lot of telling in the early going that needed cleaning up, and things like dated cultural references to cassette decks needed to be updated to the 2010s technology like iPods. Calling family house phones and speaking to parents to see if a classmate was home needed to be tossed in favor of texting, Facebooking, and sending emails.

Yet the most important thing was this: the core of the story was still good. That meant it was salvageable. That meant it was worth the time updating it would take away from a newer project I was working on, EMBER.

So I did the footwork necessary. I solicited beta-readers and an editor and with their help, I brought my early 90s novel into the early 2010s. So yeah, that took me just under three months. Not counting the couple years it took writing it the first time, and the 20 years that had passed in the meantime.

Certain aspects of MOST LIKELY may still seem dated. Not many kids had old-fashioned parents like Becky’s in the early 90s. Even fewer kids seem to have them today.

But it’s not unheard of. And it provides a fascinating aspect to the challenges Becky faces in the novel; how to be someone who says no to certain things, in a time and culture where very few of her peers even think that way.

My biggest fear in releasing MOST LIKELY has been its religious content. It was a struggle for me to label it a book with “light Christian themes,” because I wasn’t sure I wanted the “religious fiction author” label attached to me. After all, many Christian fiction novelists include entire sermons that interrupt the narrative flow, or even outright “how to be saved” salvation messages within the book.

MOST LIKELY isn’t like that.

Becky is a believer, but it’s just an aspect of who she is. Sure, she does things believers do, like attend church and read the Bible. But we don’t read those passages or hear those sermons with her; we only see how they affect her.

And MOST LIKELY doesn’t even offer up a nice, tidy, everything works out for believers message. I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone, but let’s just say that it’s darker than that. Or at least leaves one more uncertain about how Becky’s life will work out. And that certainly isn’t typical of most Christian novels.

You see, MOST LIKELY ultimately is a coming of age story. Most coming of age novels focus on a character’s first sexual experience. But I’ve always felt growing up, coming of age, is about a lot more than having sex.

It’s about realizing that the good guys don’t always win, that doing the right thing doesn’t always get rewarded, that you can do everything you’re told and still end up disappointed and broken, that life doesn’t always work out the way you expect it. Growing up is about learning to deal with the less-than-ideal, uncertainty, and the general unfairness of life.

That covers so much more ground than just a first sexual experience. And it’s interesting ground to cover.

When I first wrote MOST LIKELY, most young adult fiction was written by folks like Terry Davis and his contemporaries, such as Chris Crutcher. Their novels, and the novels of others, focused on kids facing real-world challenges and real-world problems. MOST LIKELY fit into that crowd, but perhaps didn’t really stand out as it was originally written. (I’ve improved it while updating it, hopefully.)

In the last 20 years, the young adult market has changed. Dark fantasy has replaced dark realities. While I find the escapism of paranormal novels quite a bit of fun, and plan to enter that playground myself soon, with EMBER, the fact of the matter is that the biggest problem most teenage girls face in young adult novels of today is which hot, sparkly vampire brother she is going to let bite her neck and turn her into a creature of the night.

While that works on a symbolic level, perhaps, the truth is that these are not the real-world issues teen girls face these days. In the 1990s, there was a plethora of “problem novels” in the young adult field. It was a thriving genre.

Now, 20 years later, it’s not a type of novel that reaches print very often anymore. So perhaps this is the right time for a novel like MOST LIKELY. It’s now a unique voice compared to most young adult novels of today. There are plenty of novels offering escapism; perhaps there’s room for one novel, as a change of pace from all the vampire boyfriend stuff, which tackles some real-world issues.

You can find Most Likely here.