Book Talk

My Novel Takes Place in Bathrooms

One weird writing prompt got me where I was… going

I dedicated my first novel, Out of Order, to my sister:

For Dana, who told me where all the bathrooms were.

She has Crohn’s Disease and I have IBS, so we’ve both spent a fair bit of time in bathrooms over the years. Also — the book is set almost entirely in public bathrooms, so there’s that.

But let’s go back to the beginning.

Every novel starts with an idea. A spark, really. Sometimes it’s a character. Sometimes it’s a vivid setting, a snippet of dialogue, or a dynamic plot. (Let’s be honest. It’s rarely plot.)

Staring at a blank page can be really intimidating for a lot of writers. “Writer’s Block” will, at some point or another, plague us all. Luckily, when I was faced with that problem at the start of National Novel Writing Month in 2012, I had fellow writers to turn to for help.

The art of the Message Board has been somewhat lost in recent years. We’ve come to rely more on centralized platforms like Twitter, instead of niche micro-communities. In 2012, though, I was part of several large, active message boards, including the NaNoWriMo Forums. It took but a click to find dozens of writers to commiserate with.

A few days before November started, those of us without a kernel of an idea to start our novels from put our heads together. We started a thread that I think was literally called “The Dumbest Writing Prompts Ever” and went to town pitching the silliest ideas we could come up with.

A lot of these prompts were absolutely terrible. I wish I’d saved the thread for posterity. What came out of it, though, was the idea that would become my debut novel, Out of Order:

“A novel that takes place entirely in the bathroom.”

I’m not 100% sure how the prompt was phrased, but that was the gist of it. Every major scene had to take place in a bathroom.

I said something like, “That’s an easy one. Teenage girls go to the bathroom together and cause all sorts of drama.” My new friends double-dog dared me to write my NaNo novel based on that prompt.

So I did.

Well, I tried. I became a NaNo Rebel that year by writing a series of short stories rather than a novel-as-such. But every scene did take place in a bathroom! I called the project “Puzzle Pieces,” with the plan to connect a bunch of fragmented stories into some Winesburg, Ohio-esque meta-story about teenage girlhood.

The first scene I wrote was about a group of friends waiting for the results of a pregnancy test in a pharmacy bathroom. The next was about a girl who got her period at a school dance and bled through her dress. Two girls trying cocaine. Doing their makeup. Peeing. Gossiping. Crying. Kissing. Throwing up. Before the month was over, I’d hit 50,000 words comprised of these snippets.

I had written 50K words, but most of them were — if you’ll pardon the apt metaphor — crap. Despite “winning” NaNoWriMo, I felt my future writing career circling the drain. (Yes, I was a dramatic seventeen-year-old.) It was clearly time to throw in the towel.

I set the stories aside for a while and when I came back to them maybe a year later, I found my spark. Many scenes had to be completely scrapped, but there were some nuggets of gold to be excavated from the rubbish. The characters were good and the scenes themselves had a unique voice and connection — all they needed was a plot.

I changed the order of the stories and added some missing links, and what I found was that they fit together like puzzle pieces after all. I just had to answer the question: why are all these scenes in bathrooms? Rewriting the project brought me clarity.

Turns out, it was all about the creation of memory. A scene of Corey throwing up while on the phone to 911 seamlessly transitions into a scene when she had food poisoning on Valentine’s Day. What triggers a memory? A sound? A smell? A… location? Every scene had to have something familiar to connect to the one before it. The plot of the murder mystery fell neatly into place once I’d figured that out.

By the time I started sending the novel out to publishers in 2014, it had become something completely different from when I started, but one thing remained the same: the majority of scenes are set in bathrooms. Not every scene, mind you — some events in the “present tense” part of the story had to take place elsewhere. But every single flashback to Corey’s life before the murders starts beside a sink or toilet.

It’s a weird concept for a novel, I know. But perhaps that’s what makes the book unique. There are many YA thrillers about teen girls out there. How many of them can boast that they take place in toilets?

Prompts are an essential part of the process for many writers. When you’re struggling to come up with an idea, they can inspire you — or challenge you. If you’re looking for an endless supply of writing prompts, check out Ravyne Hawke’s publication Promptly Written. A good prompt can do wonders for curing Writer’s Block, but not always in the way you expect.

Maybe you want to write the opposite of what a prompt suggests; a story about a swindler sweet talking their way into Heaven? Nope! I’m going to write a story about a goody-two-shoes bargaining their way into Hell. A story about a turkey who plans a great escape just before Thanksgiving? Nope! He’ll do everything he can to end up on that dinner table.

The prompt that got me started was a stupid joke between some kids on a message board. But when I started to take it seriously and think about what it meant to have a story take place in an unusual location, magic happened. Somehow, I made a YA trilogy out of it. (And one with a surprising lack of potty humour, in the end.)

The takeaway here is that you never know where an idea will take you until you run with it. That, and that first drafts are meant to be crap. But what do we do with crap? We fertilize our gardens with it.

(Okay, maybe that’s taking the metaphor too far. Please don’t use human feces to grow tomatoes!)

My point is that you never know what will grow out of your crappy first draft. Unexpected prompts can be really helpful for finding your unique voice. Nurture them, and they can blossom into something beautiful.

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Buy My Book!

My debut novel, Out of Order, is available from JMS Books. The sequel, Order in the Court, is available for preorder for 20% off until June 24, 2023.