Hey, readers! Be forewarned. I’m about to get really honest.
Books are hard.
They’re hard to write, hard to edit, hard to pitch, and hard to release into the world. Did I revise my book so it’s the best it can be? Did I revise so much that I lost the essence? Am I ready? Am I marketing my work enough? Too much? Pushing too hard? Annoying all the people who know me? Annoying the people who don’t?
It’s really difficult to be in a mental space that simultaneously tells me I’m doing too much and not nearly enough all at once. And when things get overwhelming, it’s the most unexpected gesture that makes a difference.
I received an email the other day that quite nearly took my breath away. What was in it, you ask? Was it from an agent wanting to represent my work? Was it Hollywood banging on my door for a movie deal? Was it Publisher’s Clearing House telling me I wouldn’t ever have to work again?
No.
No.
And no.
It was…a request. A request from someone who doesn’t know me, has never met me, hasn’t yet read my book, but wants a signed copy of it and asked if I would be doing signings. And so, Shannon, if you happen to read this, know you made my day, my week, and maybe even my month.
It’s been a long time since I blogged. Then again, it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything, truth be told.
There’s a complete and utter exhaustion that comes with caring for someone with a long-term illness and until recently, I was really good at pretending it didn’t exist.
We are, I hope, at the end of this long medical journey (at least the immediate journey), but since I never seem to be able to say that with any degree of certainty, it’s really hard to believe it even now.
And after five months, I’m mentally depleted. So, no new rambling blogs, no new pages in my current manuscript, no edits on the last one, and no queries on my old one. I’ve been thinking (a *lot*) about writing and editing, but honestly, it just scares me right now. I’m 100% positive that it’s due to my mental state from playing home-care nurse for so long, but I’ve reached an awkward position as a writer that I haven’t been in for quite some time, the place where I begin to contemplate if it’s worth pursuing publishing at all. The stage where my brain whispers that I’m not good enough, that my stories aren’t interesting, that my plot lines are too predictable, that my characters aren’t worth following.
I know this voice in my head and I usually tell it to shut the hell up and sit in a corner to think about what it’s done. Then I tell it that it’s going to stay in that corner until it figures out how to play nicely with the other voices. (Okay, that just sounds creepy…but you get the point.)
But lately? Lately I don’t have the energy to police what my children are eating for dinner (Frozen packaged pierogies? Again? Sure, whatever keeps you alive, kids!), let alone to police my self-deprecating internal writer’s doubt.
I know this will pass. So in the mean time, hey—I wrote something. It’s a blog post about absolutely nothing, but it’s 365 more words than I’ve written in a very long time.
Revision can be painful. Digging into the words you put so much effort into writing, not to mention deciding which of them need to go, can overwhelm a writer with fear. Which words do I cut? Filter words? Entire paragraphs? Scenes, even? What if cutting this particular scene is wrong? What if it changes the entire dynamic of the story?
But slimming a novel down is a healthy part of the writing process. Writing a first draft is basically loading a bunch of paint on the palette and throwing it on the canvas. You know what colors you want for this piece and you might even know the general design, but you can’t begin to imagine the more delicate intricacies until you begin refining the work. The same goes for writing. A first draft gets the basic idea of a story onto paper, but it’s hardly more than an outline, and an outline is not a masterpiece on its own.
When I write a novel, there are entire sections that need to be scrapped before I’m ready to query. Some of these sections are minor, but many (okay, most) impact the story in a major way. Like ripples in a pond, one thing affects another. So if I make one small change in chapter 2, it’s likely that I’m going to have to go through the entire manuscript to make major changes the rest of the way through.
Case in point. I changed a major character’s ethnicity a couple of months ago in a novel that was 85% drafted. I went from having a short-haired blond with green eyes to a Rihanna look-alike. That meant changing a lot of visual cues, quite a bit of dialogue that referred to body image, and rewriting entire sections of her family background.
But revision isn’t always about rewriting what’s already there. Sometimes it’s about taking out what we don’t need. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve written sections that weren’t needed. Sometimes these segments must be written in order for me to get familiar enough to move forward with my characters, but in the end, there’s always a lot of chopping going on! During the revision process, I erase entire chunks of dialogue and sometimes whole scenes. If a scene isn’t moving the story forward in some way, it needs to go. If it doesn’t show, in some way, shape, or form, the character’s wants and desires, cut it. If it doesn’t present a conflict for the character in some way, delete.
It’s a painful process filled with uncertainty and doubt, but it’s a necessary evil and the sooner you convince yourself that each cut is the right move, the closer you’ll be to having a refined, polished, queryable novel.
Because, seriously…no one wants to read a 186,000 word debut novel. Certainly not an agent.
I made the horrible mistake of stepping on the bathroom scale today. Between the stress of spousal health issues (a cancer diagnosis adds a little stress to say the very least), running to constant doctor appointments, and driving back and forth to various kids’ activities, we’ve done a lot of running around over the last couple of months. Suffice it to say that my eating habits haven’t been the best. And to talk about eating habits, I have to talk about anxiety issues.
When I first began having issues with anxiety at twenty-one, I lost weight quickly. My stomach was upset nearly all of the time, I could hardly eat, and anything I did eat went through me pretty quickly. I easily dropped to 99 pounds, a weight I hadn’t seen since maybe freshman year in high school. Meds helped fix the issue, but throughout the years I learned to live and to cope with my anxiety without them.
I wonder now if I’m coping a little *too* well. When I’m in a situation that makes me anxious, my stomach immediately feels as though it’s about to rebel. Add in a stubborn streak and my determination to overcome anxiety, and it’s a recipe for disaster. I now view eating as a challenge, and instead of just eating a normal amount (or eating, say, decent foods), I’ll eat more junkjust to spite my anxiety. Go figure.
Needless to say, a few months of this results in pounds gained. Throw in the writer’s dilemma of working while sitting on your butt all day, and the problem is easily exacerbated.
So.
Starting today, I’m going to do something about it. Losing weight can’t be much different than revising chapters, right? A little work, a lot of pain, and in the end you’ve got a better version of what you started with. (Or at least a healthier version!)
Slimming down in more ways than one! Who’s with me?
It was…a request. A request from someone who doesn’t know me, has never met me, hasn’t yet read my book, but wants a signed copy of it and asked if I would be doing signings. And so, Shannon, if you happen to read this, know you made my day, my week, and maybe even my month.
L. Ryan Storms 