How I Wrote "City of Orange"

My wife forced me to do it.

Book cookies. Bookies!

My fourth book, City of Orange, comes out today. Grab a copy!

Before we start, let me welcome all the new subscribers to DYSEHK! ❤️ Thanks for signing up and joining in the book giveaway fun.

It might take me a while to send books out since the next couple weeks will be especially busy. I’ll send them as soon as I can!

Tools used in creating “City of Orange”

• Macbook Air (2013)

• Macbook Pro 15 inch (2015)

• iPad Pro 11 inch (2020)

• Macbook Pro 14 inch (2021)

• Pages for Mac and iOS

• NaNoWriMo

I began way back in 2013

City of Orange is actually my first novel. I wrote it before Frankly In Love, before Super Fake Love Song or Version Zero. You could say this dang book took almost eight years to write, and you’d be right.

It spent years sleeping in a drawer because I was too terrified to have anyone read it. It was only after I became a published author that I had the confidence to do major revision work.

Inspiration

I’d always wanted to write a different kind of apocalyptic story, with particular emphasis on character, lots of heart, and spritzes of humor. I wanted to explore how a person would manage to survive if their entire world suddenly became totally unfamiliar. Apocalyptic stories are really about obliterating all social context, and then seeing how characters cope.

My writing prompts for myself was: What would you do if your world ended?

Early outlines, and homemade cover art. Remind me to never be a book designer.

What’s up with the title?

The title comes from a funny rubric I did in elementary school. Rubrics were these simple five-paragraph templates designed to teach kids how to write. They always had the same format: a prompt, three questions, and a conclusion.

One rubric I never forgot went like this:

• Paragraph 1: What If The World Became Orange?

• Paragraph 2: What would you do?

• Paragraph 3: Who would you take with you?

• Paragraph 4: Why would it be fun?

• Paragraph 5: In Conclusion

It was a weird rubric, because if the world suddenly had only one color, it would not be fun. It would be terrifying. All contrast and context would be stripped away. It would be like living in a memory of the world, not the world itself.

I figured city of orange would be a good metaphor for annihilation. (The world doesn’t actually go all one color in the book.)

My wife forced me to write

My wife Nicola knew I was scared to death of writing a novel. I’d only written short stories and screenplays up until then. She knew that if I were left to my devices, I would just make nothing but outlines and treatments and beat sheets but never actually sit down to write a manuscript.

So when National Write A Novel Month (NaNoWriMo) came around, she said she would do all the childcare for the whole month of November. In exchange, she expected me to hit that 55,000 word target.

So I made a word count schedule and stuck to it. I wrote in the early mornings, went to my job, came home, ate dinner, and kept writing until bedtime. And I did it—I hit the 55,000 word target! I remember my heart pounding as if I’d just run a marathon.

I highly recommend NaNoWriMo. What a brilliant idea.

My writing rules

I love to make up rules for myself whenever making anything, because I’m way more creative when I have limitations to work against.

My rules for COO were pretty simple:

• Short chapters

• Simple language only

• It’s okay to make the apocalypse funny, because comedy and tragedy are roommates

• But also: make the reader cry

The agony of feedback

I let an editor of a friend read the first draft of the book. They said it was a strong start, but that it should have crime action like Breaking Bad. I took the note.

I let a writer friend’s agent read it, and she said it was too short, by about 10,000-20,000 words. I took that note, too.

I let another agent read it, and she basically didn’t like it and said in so many words that Station Eleven was already out and was way better, so maybe think of a different story? I had a hard time taking that note. I took a shot instead.

Then something like five years went by. Whoosh! I felt pretty bad about the book. I felt like I’d written something boring and confusing and stupid. It was easier to put it away and not look at it. Fortunately, during this time Nicola’s writing (Everything, Everything, The Sun Is Also A Star) was taking off, and I was having a blast writing Frankly In Love. So it wasn’t all bad.

COO finds a champion

After the publication of my adult debut Version Zero (the thriller about the internet), someone (Nicola, again?) let slip to my new editor at Putnam (the one and only Mark Tavani) that I had another adult book up my sleeve called City of Orange.

Mark read it, and loved it.

It’s taken me a while to learn this simple fact: not every book is for everyone. Sounds super obvious, doesn’t it? But listen—when you’re writing a book, you have this little fantasy that all seven billion people on the planet will love it equally. Ridiculous but kinda true.

So when I’d been getting tough feedback in the past, I thought I’d just written a crappy book. Turns out that wasn’t true. I just hadn’t found my audience yet. Mark was that audience, and knew that others would be, too.

The ecstasy of feedback

So Mark loved the book but of course he had notes. His notes were amazing. His notes were so good that they pointed out things I was trying to do, but didn’t realize it myself. Notes like:

“The crows in the book are like messengers from the MC’s (main character) past, struggling to convey forgiveness and love. But the MC is in such denial and pain that he literally attacks them. I think that’s powerful and could be sharpened even further.”

My reply was like:

“Dude huh I had no idea that’s what I meant by the crows I just thought they were cool but now that you say it like that you’re totally right do you have mind reading capability?”

Another favorite bit of Mark’s feedback was:

“Change the whole book to present tense.”

And:

“Maybe ease up on the f-bombs. I counted 202.”

Two hefty revisions later, the book was 5,000% better. (I was pretty good at revisions by this point.)

City of Orange was real.

The rest has been pure fun. Cover design reviews, copyedits, getting blurbs from amazing authors (and one famous actor). The book comes out today, May 24. I go on tour in person for the first time in two years. Zawesome!

City of Orange book tour schedule.

It’s easy now in May 2022 to forget that I was miserable about this book circa 2015. Time flies. Whoosh!

It’s so tempting to give up sometimes…

I think I’m writing this newsletter not just to give you guys the usual writing tips and inspiration, but to remind myself that I did not give up on City of Orange even though I totally could have. To remind myself that a) it’s okay to want to give up, but b) often better to persevere.

Most people don’t persevere. If any of you have ever actually written all the way to the end of a short story, or poem, or novel—even “just” a first draft—then you’ve accomplished what 99.9999% of humans have not: created a complete, free-standing work of art. You have finished something. Most people don’t finish things.

Huh, that’s one of the themes in City of Orange, come to think of it. The main character is pushed to the brink of despair. Poor guy wants to give up and let the ruined world consume him. Will he? Or will he be okay?

…but please do not give up!

One thing I learned early on during writing school at Emerson College was that nothing you make goes to waste. Even if you write a story that never gets published, you’re still developing your voice. You’re playing with ideas that might later get refined in a bigger, better work. Or, like my book, you’re crafting something that will find its readers when the time is just right.

Everything you create will come back to you, in good but unexpected ways. I promise!

Anyway that’s it for this issue of DYSEHK. Order City of Orange on my site, or hit a bookstore tomorrow and grab it off the bookshelf.

Thanks as always for being the best readers a guy could ask for. 🖤

—Dave