Hello! I hope you enjoyed my little book! Okay, sure, it's not that little, and it definitely wasn't just a simple romance story I thought I was going to write. This story forced me to grow as an author – and a little bit as an individual – over the six years I spent writing it, and I'm sure it will forever be the book that taught me more about storytelling than any other work I'll create.
How Counting Minutes Came to Be
The story started as a very simple idea I one day came up with. A friend of mine and I were talking about homeschooling. Since my imagination is constantly on the lookout for new ideas, I had this tiny little thought about a character who was being homeschooled. I didn't know the reason yet, and all I really had was this short flash of a scene where he was sitting behind his computer in his home, and someone else was peering in through the window.
I still remember this image clearly, even after so many years have passed. Now it's fascinating to think that this one second of an image then turned into a six-year project which would take about sixteen hours to read once finished, according to Wattpad. Especially since most of the time I simply disregard these tiny ideas.
But not this one. I didn't take the idea seriously right away, but I let it float about for a while. I was mostly focused on the question, why was he homeschooled, and one of the answers I came up with was, maybe he can't leave his house. But why?
Maybe he has some kind of illness? I played with this thought for a bit. Maybe he had one of those illnesses that even a simple flu could kill him. I wasn't really into the idea, mostly because it would make it hard to introduce the love interest, and even harder to write their romance. And I want romance. I doubt I'll ever write a book without it. Besides, a theme like this sounded like a lot of heartache and even death, which were not the themes I wanted to have in the book.
Maybe his parents are the reason? Maybe they are forcing him to stay indoors all the time? I considered having a mother who was obsessively overprotective of her kid. There is a Finnish song about a mother like that. She had two daughters, one of which was already dead. The other daughter was not allowed to leave the house, but she finally escapes, only to end up dead as well. A pretty cool idea, but since I'd already had several sets of bad parents in my books, I wanted to go with something completely else.
Maybe he can leave his house and has another reason to be homeschooled? I mean, homeschooling is a pretty common thing. It doesn't have to be a big deal. But I really liked the idea that he can't leave his house at all. Like Rapunzel, locked in her tower, and the love interest was on his way to save her.
At this point, I was also trying to decide how I was going to introduce the love interest. They obviously had to meet online because there just was not a way for them to meet otherwise. But that image I had. That little fleeting moment about the main character sitting behind his computer while someone else is peering in. Choosing to make them meet online was a simple answer, but I didn't want a simple answer. I wanted the love interest to meet him by looking through the window just like in the flash I had.
So how could I make that happen? A neighbor kid who happens to pass by his window? Or someone who's just curious to see if the rumors are true and there's a guy his age living in that house, but no one has ever seen him?
Or... a thief?
Yes.
But if the guy is a thief and breaks into people's houses... We were talking about a high school kid, after all. There were a lot of stories like that, and they weren't really enjoying a good reputation. Besides, if I wanted to have any kind of mature themes in the book, I was safer with having adult characters.
So Blake became a criminal. I wanted him to be homeless because Jordan was unable to leave his house – to make his life the complete opposite. It also gave me liberties and interesting ideas that having him have a family and a home of his own wouldn't have. I didn't actually know why he was homeless and without a family until much later in the story. In the beginning, I figured he was just a runaway or simply had lost his home in an unfortunate event. As the story advanced, I wanted to give him a more exciting background, something personal for him to figure out instead of him just existing to help Jordan.
With the love interest in mind, I was now circling back to my original problem. Why would the main character have to stay inside his house? Well, especially now that the guy was an adult, and I already knew what I didn't want, the answer was quite simple: he was too scared to step outside. But why?
He obviously couldn't be afraid just because, so something must've happened to him. A very common trope in male x male books is, unfortunately, sexual abuse. Even I had it in my very first book, so that wasn't an option. An assault sounded like a better option. Maybe he was robbed or beaten up in a bar or something? Maybe not. As serious as it is to get beaten up, people usually don't become deadly afraid of going outside after that. Besides, I wanted to honor the homeschooling theme I originally had, therefore I wanted him to have been unable to step outside ever since he was a kid.
The reason had to be much more elaborate than simply getting beaten up. A terror-filled accident in his early childhood that nearly killed him, followed by mental health problems that went on unnoticed, followed by unhealthy coping mechanisms, followed by family and surroundings that enabled his deteriorating mental health, followed by complete shutdown.
It was a big process, but I do admit that I didn't plan all of that knowingly. I made some of the decisions knowing what I was doing, but some things I got right by accident. I hadn't even considered how big of a negative impact his family, and especially his mom, would have on Jordan and his process. I didn't realize that until much later in the story, but since I had accidentally written it in, I could easily pretend that yeah, I knew what I was doing all along. Yeah, I did not...
So now I knew what had happened to him. An accident after a football game that would haunt him for the rest of his life. A long night full of true terror and fear that left him fight for his life against drowning in a ditch with his tiny broken body.
Now I can't really remember at what point I came up with the idea of him having OCD. It wasn't the original premise of the story, but I had already decided on it before I started writing. I was fascinated by obsessive compulsive disorder and how it impacted people in their everyday lives. I also felt like my reason for Jordan to be able to leave his house – fear of people – was still not good enough. I wanted to write something more challenging, but also have a clear theme in the story. I chose time as Jordan's biggest issue.
And thus, we were ready to start Counting Minutes.
The Challenges of Writing Counting Minutes and What I Learned from It
I did not know where I was getting myself into when I started writing this story. I wanted a challenge, and I sure got one, but I didn't know that when I started writing. The story was supposed to be a simple love story where the help of the love interest finally makes everything right.
It didn't quite go like that. Well, it did, but I guess we can forget the word "simple".
As I mentioned, it took me 6 years to finish this story. I took a long break in the middle of writing this book while I focused on other things, but if my memory serves me right, I spent at least 4 years actively writing it. The book has about 210 000 words, making it the biggest single book I have ever written.
I also mentioned that this story is the one that has taught me the most about storytelling. The planning process alone was more thorough than what I'd done before, and usually don't have to do. It was the first time I was trying to avoid taking the easy way out, and instead push my imagination to create something unique with unique details and characters. It was a great exercise on its own, and I ended up feeling very accomplished and proud of what I created. I still keep this lesson in mind and try to stay away from "easy answers" while planning my stories.
I spent a long time blissfully unaware of how challenging the plot I chose actually was, even while writing it.
The biggest challenge was that Jordan had to do everything the same way every day. In the beginning, it was easy to change things up a bit and keep things interesting while the story was still new and fresh, but after the first half or so, I was slowly running out of ideas. There was no way I could've even ended the story so soon because Jordan's healing journey was still far away from the point I wanted it to be by the end of the book. I could've skipped a lot, but Jordan's healing process, the tiny steps he took toward recovery, was the whole idea of the book.
Not only was Jordan's schedule and slow-paced improvement very limiting to work with, but what made things even more difficult for me was that basically the entire story happens in one place, in one part of the house. I didn't have the luxury to write about them going on dates or see new places or even have a walk in the nearby park. No, all I had was that small apartment to work with. I thankfully decided to include Julia's point of view, so it gave me a little bit of a breather between writing the same old scene. I'm also grateful for choosing to have Jordan's sisters in the story, and Blake's mysterious past.
It was this challenge that grew me as an author. I had to put my imagination into overdrive to come up with new ways to write the same scene over and over again. Because that this story was all about: writing the same scene again and again, but making it new every time. There are chapters when I feel like I failed with making them fresh, but more often I think I succeeded in it.
The struggle to come up with new ideas followed me through most of the story, which is why it took me so long to actually finish it, but this story is also one of the few that forced me to stop midway and really think about what I was doing and where I was taking the plot.
I obviously didn't know everything about OCD in the beginning of the story, and I still have a lot to learn. I had done research, I'd watched documentaries, I'd met people with OCD. I tried my best to treat the topic with respect and keep it realistic, but after a few years of growing as a person, I understood I was not doing enough. Until that moment, I'd been suffering from the thought of "well it's just a story, it's not that big of a deal, I think I'm doing okay, it doesn't have to be perfect". But it's not just a story. It's someone's life. There are so many people who live with OCD that I couldn't just shrug and say, "I think I'm doing okay". The people living with OCD deserve more, so I stopped to put actual thought into what I was doing.
I didn't have to make any big changes in the story, but I spent a lot more time doing more research and just as long to make sure my story followed actual logic. I put a lot more thought into how everything happened to Jordan, how things turned out the way they did – at this time I realized how big of an impact Jordan's family and their enabling behavior had on him – and what was the best way to move forward. The story still isn't perfect, but it was me who needed to change the most, anyway. I learned that I can't treat something so serious as a simple plot device. Things like these can't be taken lightly because they're not just my simple little stories.
The third biggest issue and challenge I ran into was ending the story. Jordan is never going to be fully healed. He will live with his trauma and OCD most likely for the rest of his life, and that healing journey is the whole plot of the story. So, where do I end it? I simply can't keep writing the story until the end of times, no matter how much I wanted to.
I had to pick the ending point. It was a long, hard process to finally figure out where was the good place to stop, and I kept adding more and more chapters every time I thought "only a few more, then it's done". I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out if I had left any plot holes behind. I hope I didn't.
At least Blake's ending was very easy. He finally found out who he was, spoke with his biological parents, and got excited over the lawnmower. There were a few things I could've added to the story, like him meeting up with his parents in person, but it really was time to end the story.
And finally, I found the good spot to end: the first dinner with Jordan and his entire family. That was, after all, one of his biggest dreams ever since the beginning of the story, to be able to sit with them. At this point, Jordan was way on his way to have a normal life. He now had the tools to pursue his dream of living like any other person, without his schedule or fear of people. It felt a natural spot to finish their tale.
A good ending.
Well, you know, for the novel. I didn't say anything about possible short stories. I mean, there still are quite a lot of happenings everyone wanted to read about. And no, I was not able to leave these two boys just yet, but I figured their story works better as a collection of short stories from this point onward. We all saw the little steps, but we didn't really get to witness the bigger steps, after all, and I agree we need to see those special moments of their future.
Again, thank you for reading my little big story, and thank you for reading this little story behind the story! This has been a wild ride, and I'm secretly glad that it's still not quite over yet.