People ask me all the time how I write. It’s not just aspiring writers either. Story craft seems to mystify the average Joe too. “How do you do that?” they ask.

Well, I can’t speak for other writers, but today I’m going to tell you how I do it. Kind of.

But first, imagine for a moment that I am not Jaye Wells, author and bon vivant. Instead, picture me in an kicky fedora and wielding a spade (the shovel, not the playing card). That’s right, my friends, today I am Jaye Wells, international archeologist of mystery. If this were a movie, it’d be titled  Indiana Jaye and the Book of Doom.

I’m standing in a desert, a vast wasteland. Let’s pretend I’m working on a hot tip that under all this sand, there’s artifacts from a mysterious and fascinating civilization. I don’t know much about it, but I have a feeling there’s a potentially huge discovery somewhere under my feet.

Buzzards fly overhead, waiting for me to stumble so they can swoop in and eat me alive. But I’m a woman on a mission, so I put the buzzards out of my mind and start digging. After a while, I find a pottery fragment. After examining it for identifying marks, I grab my trusty notebook and jot down everything I know about this shard–shape, colors, size, etc. More digging. Another shard. This one is different. At first I can’t figure out if it’s part of the same pot as the last one. They don’t seem to fit together, but, hey, it’s another discovery. Like before, I jot down what I know about this piece.

I continue digging and jotting until I can’t dig anymore. By now, I’m sweaty and sunburned and dying for a drink. For all this work, I have maybe 10 to 20 shards. I still have no idea how they fit together. But I gather them up and take them back to my workshop.

After I’ve rested and liberally applied aloe (aloe naturally representing alcohol in this metaphor), I carefully lay each shard out on a table. Looking at them all laid out, I’m discouraged. Some of the pieces are really cool, they’re crazy shapes and have splashes of interesting colors. Some pieces, though, don’t look they they belong at all. Maybe they belong to another pot. Or maybe they’re really just petrified fecal matter. Either way, I set those aside and focus on the interesting stuff.

Much shuffling ensues. Eventually, after playing for a while, a picture starts to take shape. It’s still incomplete, but now I can see how some pieces work together. I can also see the holes. Lots and lots of gaping holes. More shuffling. Some head scratching. I grab the aloe and reapply.

Usually, I end up going back to the sand to look for more shards. Sometimes I find the exact piece I was missing–the one that makes all the other piece make sense. Other times all I find is the shriveled mummy of the last author who dug there. (Which is cool because, hey, who doesn’t like mummies?) Sometimes I curl up in the fetal position under a cactus clutching my trusty bottle of aloe.

Eventually, though, I end up with enough pieces–found or created–to cobble together a urn-like structure. Now that I know enough, I start gluing it all together. It’s not easy work. Some shards don’t make the cut. They crumble like dust or turn out to be buzzard droppings. Some have to be twisted to fit. After all this work, I have a messy pot with ugly seams. But it’s definitely an urn. I carefully polish the seams until they’re invisible.

The next step, of course, is to send it to the curator who gets final say about whether my urn is ready for display.  She sends me several pages of detailed notes pointing out every hole I missed in excruciating detail. Or she tells me to get my ass back to the desert.

But that’s a story best told over several bottles of delicious aloe.