Worthwhile: Thirty-Five Years of Writing A Novel to Done
Near the first of spring in 2017, I sent an email to my writing partner to ask her, “Will this work?” The rest of the letter detailed a story I’d locked in my head for thirty years because I couldn’t figure out a way to structure it. She said, “Write it and find out.” In that early spring, a way into the novel opened. A light sparked in the distance. A sense of shape pulled itself together, an armature on which to build a novel.
I’d no clue that March that it would take until November of 2022 to reach the end of my novel’s writing journey. It helps to see any large project as a journey. Not only in the writing itself but in how the writing mirrors back the changes the writer lived through during the book’s creation. Had I known the manuscript would take five years, I’d still have undertaken that first sentence—if for the only reason that after three decades, I wanted to see if I could execute the concept.
It helps to see any large project as a journey. Not only in the writing itself but in how the writing mirrors back the changes the writer lived through during the book’s creation.
Here at the end of year five, after fourteen full revisions, I’ve produced a novel but not anywhere near what I’d originally planned. What it became is better. When started, the story focused on the wages of trauma. When finished, it had become a story centered the reality of healing, that weirdness of moving intentionally through the worst of past pain so you might leave that pain in the past. Real healing, like real writing, is not meme-platitude easy. Both are a street fight on a chess board. My novel, Glimmering Girl, now captures that battle as best I could, and I hope it shows that while the healing process is a gift, it’s a difficult gift.
What I’d not expected: in writing out my thirty years of imprisoned narrative, I began to revise myself. To write the conflict for my characters, I had to live the analogous conflict. The writing became both liberating and terrifying in the same instant. I wanted not to go through that. Yet, I wanted to see how the story turned out. In reaching the finish-line of each new draft, I’d feel certain that the whole of it needed to end differently. Nothing for that problem but to start again and start again and start again, each time moving a little closer to the sensation I’d wanted to attain.
I began lopping off material that wasn’t necessary. Eighty-five pages worth. In Revision Fourteen, I rewrote the final fifty pages and had reached the last paragraphs of the new ending I’d planned. Without any attendant angel choirs, confetti, or champagne corks, the ending began to shift under my fingertips. In those final two-and-a-half pages, the ending I’d been trying to reach for thirty-five years in total, quietly emerged in the form it was destined to take. The last sentences wrote themselves. I felt the novel come to an end.
What happens from here, in 2023, depends on matters beyond my control. I’ll send manuscript out and hope it will find a good soul to take the story further into the world. No matter how the future of the finished book turns out, I do get to keep the story of who I am for having written it. That, to me, is what makes writing worthwhile.
Writing Exercise
Write to a person, real or imagined, who finds the vocation of writing or any other art form a self-indulgent waste of time. Convince that person they’re wrong. Explore the reasons you undertake your work when it can demand years while holding no promise of monetary profit. By what else can we measure our work’s success? Bonus Points: In convincing your addressee, did you convince yourself? Keep writing until you find your real meaning in your work. There are no wrong answers.
Photo by Ameen Fahmy on Unsplash