I've been working on a book that I started writing in (no joke) 1996. Back then, I was the under-thirty mom of a baby, stuck at home with a man-eating dog while my husband finished law school. The book started with a writing exercise, an assignment from a book I got from the local bookstore.
Things went on from there, both in my writing life and in my real life. I moved house a couple of times. My husband moved to another law school. I had another baby. I kept writing.
Eventually I finished the book. I sent it to some friends, they sent me comments. I revised it. I went to some writing conferences. I revised it again.
I then sent it out to agents, and got some great nibbles. A couple requested the full manuscript and read it. I was gratified by the positive comments. No one had a problem with the story, but they suggested that it was too long and needed more editing.
I got busy. I put the book away. I moved to a couple of foreign countries and back, and had two more kids. I started homeschooling. The kids had hobbies that they were really good at, and those took time. I started a photography business, because I was taking lots of photos of kids and sports anyway.
When things calmed down I pulled the book out again. I took a great writing class online and started work again, but I was having a really difficult time. I couldn't seem to get into the “why” of my character. It was perplexing, because I still had those positive agent comments in my mind. I knew the book wasn't terrible, but I wasn't doing a good job at revising it.
I finally figured it out. It's not, as Elizabeth Gilbert suggests, that the idea has come and gone and found greener pastures elsewhere:
Gilbert believes that ideas have agency. “Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will,” she writes. When this idea “finally realizes that you’re oblivious to its message, it will move on to someone else,” but sometimes, “the idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work on you.”
I worried about this after I read Big Magic. I thought that maybe my idea was angry that I had abandoned it, and had gone to find a more receptive vessel.
What solved the mystery was the decision to go back into my email from that phase of my life when I decided to focus on other things and leave the writing to a “less busy” phase of my life. Even as I write these words, I have to laugh, because that decision would leave my writing idle for over fifteen years, even as I started a business, homeschooled my kids, and moved overseas and back.
Obviously it wasn't true that I couldn't write because I was “too busy.” When I stopped writing, I invented new things to take its place.
The problem was not that I was too busy. The problem was that I had changed. I no longer was the person who had written the beginning of that book. That person was a lot younger, a lot more innocent and naive than I am now. What's more, as often happens when you are a grownup and facing Real Life, I had a crisis. I didn't know at the time that it was The Crisis. It just seemed like a series of sucky events, but as I scanned my 2001 email, I realized that I have now officially lived enough of life to know that the events of 2001 were my personal All is Lost moment, on my personal Hero's Journey.
What happened was that I did what all heroes do. I made a decision, creating my Climax. And now, in my fifties, I am living the Resolution of that decision.
I really am a historian at heart. I looked at the documents, and they showed me the truth. In some ways I am still the person I was in my twenties when I was in grad school. I was always a documentary historian, reading medieval documents in order to figure out what was really going on. But the way I interpret things has changed.
So I'm rewriting that beginning again, but I have to do it with full realization that my character is a person without my lessons in life. I'll have to make sure I don't tread on her optimism and naïveté. If this book takes a little longer for me to write, there's a reason. But I promise, it'll be better for it.
Leave a Reply