The Writing Lesson I Learned the Hard Way

Despite a series of recent discouragements in my writing career, back in March I talked myself into starting a new chapter book, tentatively titled The Angel Tree. 

But I couldn’t get into the story. It was hard to get to know the characters. They felt like mannequins manipulated by me rather than real, live kids driving the action. My notes to myself (a representative few quoted verbatim here) went like this: “Maybe I no longer know how to write a book. Maybe I will never write a book again” – “I am not feeling good about this book! I think it’s b/c I am not believing in the story” – “I am just moving pieces on a chessboard” – “I can’t believe any kids today would like this book.” Frowny face emojis abounded. 

My favorite part of writing a longer work is the momentum you get partway through, where each event precipitates the next in a way both surprising and inevitable, where you finally know where the story is going (even if with only a vague idea of how it will get there) – the stage of the process where you wake up each morning eager to be swept away by the swirling waters carrying your story through dizzying rapids to the satisfying safety of shore.

This time, I wasn’t feeling any momentum on this project. None at all.

Was my book DOOMED?!

 Then I realized that, thanks to my current state of discouragement, my writing process had become as follows. Write a short chapter, convince myself it wasn’t very good, put the book aside for a week or two, pick it up and reread what I had so far, convince myself that, hey, it wasn’t THAT bad, write a bit more, and then let it languish again for days, even for weeks. This is NOT the way to get momentum going!! I had never given my poor little book a fair chance! I was the one who had doomed it!

 I returned to writing on the book for an hour each day, the lifelong practice I had let myself abandon here. I wrote in the darling writing nook in my little cottage. I wrote while off on a short trip to Crested Butte. I wrote on a family trip at Grand Lake. And guess what? As I steadily, faithfully, kept on writing, I started to like the book. I started to LOVE the book. That delicious, delightful momentum of writing was mine again! I finished a full draft two days ago.

 I learned (or learned again) what I had already known but somehow allowed myself to forget: writing goes SO MUCH BETTER when you actually DO IT. Bonus lesson: And stop saying terrible things about your book on a daily basis right there where the book can hear everything mean you are saying about it! Would you thrive and flourish as a book if your very own author did that to you?

Note: I wrote this originally at the invitation of the fabulous Carol Lynch Williams for the Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers (WIFYR) community she created in Utah, but she told me I could share it here, too!