AKA I’m at that part of the process where this manuscript seems like the longest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. The more I work on it, the bigger it seems to get, like some time-morphing Alice in Wonderland bad dream.
I’m also at the point where finishing the first draft seems so far away I keep dragging my feet trying to find the time to work on it at all. Parts of the book seem like they’re going to take too much brain power than I can devote to it at that moment, and so I skip them in favour of lighter items. I try to do small bits and pieces here and there in the piecemeal moments I can find to work on it, but the amount of time I manage to find would be about enough for a brief sneeze.
This thing may never be finished at all at this rate, which leaves my chances of having it published at 0%.
I don’t like those odds, but I also have a family and have to work to pay the bills. I’m not by nature a time-waster, I already don’t watch TV or mindlessly scroll on my phone, and looking around for spare time I can convert to writing time leaves me finding not much at all. Houston, we have a problem.
At one point I challenged myself to write 1000 words a day just to get some momentum happening and make a dent in something… anything… and it was great for about a week. That was months ago.
There is a special kind of hell reserved for people who write in the hopes that someday it will be more than the sum of its parts. It’s a complete gamble to spend this much time, day after day, year after year on a book that just might not make it. So much love and passion and hope and self-discipline and sheer force of will could very possibly be resigned to a fate of receiving pleasant but firm rejections or never-ending months of nerve-unsettling dead silence. Is today the day? Let me refresh my inbox one more time! How about now? What are they doing on Twitter? Is anyone still alive? Did my email get to them? Are they ill? Was it something I said?
It’s telling that in the face of all of this, we stay the course. That we keep typing even though it doesn’t pay the bills. That these stories need to be told even if nobody ever reads them. That creatives gotta create, y’all.
I’m gonna write this shit or die trying.
And when its done I will read it x
You’re the best in the whole world
The stories need to be told and they won’t stay silent in our imaginations, will they? Even when it’s difficult and they actually refuse to come out properly… we still keep going. I hope you manage to tame that book of yours and, in a fabulously mixed metaphor, release it into the wild.
My brain Never. Shuts. UP
Oh, I hear you there. Mine’s all “oh hey, did you want to go to sleep? how about no”.
“Thou shalt not sleep”
writing is pouring out your very soul onto paper, and sometimes if feels that painful. Then at other times it just flows. I prefer the times when everything just flows.
I wish I wrote like that actually, but I’m too cynical to be earnest. I just write dumb jokes and even they’re hard some days!
Stace, ‘comment re Stacey writing post’ has been on my to-do list, staring at me accusingly, for weeks. But I really didn’t want to let that plan slip past, I really wanted to tell you how much your thoughts resonated. ‘YASSSS STAAAAACEE” I shouted internally. ‘YOU IS TRUE’. They are some very strange mental mathematics you go through trying to give birth to a brain baby like this. It’s a mammoth undertaking; so many woman-hours involved…and all the while, there is no guarantee that it will even be published, So every hour you spend on this stupid book is an hour that could be spent on something more visibly productive, like real work, or being with the children, or washing the fucking floor (!?!) It feels so indulgent. And yet, you must do it. You need to muster all your self-belief (I will crack on with this project that only I have commissioned!) while knowing that what you are producing might well be – and often is; hello, vomit draft from hell – terrible. Because YOU HAVE NEVER WRITTEN A BOOK BEFORE AND YOU HAVE TO TEACH YOURSELF HOW TO WRITE A BOOK. And this point that you are at, the middle point, is I think the hardest. Because you have put so much into it that there is no going back. BUt there is still so much to do to get it to a point where it’s a good thing, it’s overwhelming.
Anyway, my friend, I am here to tell you that the last bit is much easier. It’s all tinkering with stuff you have already written and editing and moving shit around. The next bit, where you do agent and publisher and actual-product-on-shelf – I can’t help you with that. Because I have finished my third draft and am just now embarking on that step. And actually, nobody may ever publish it. I don’t know. But I do know that the act of actually finishing the thing was tremendously, unexpectedly rewarding, and even if it does never hit a shelf, I made this thing; this book shaped object, and it’s a pretty cool gift for my children.
Also am now working on the second un-commissioned, possibly never-to-be-published manuscript. Because I did teach myself how to write a book and now I am writing another one.
Hang in there Stace! I , for one, am really, really excited to see what you make.
Love ya! Rach