read part 1 of this series here

Can We Just Do This Thing, Please

It seems so simple. Just sit down and put to paper those thoughts that are streaming through your head. When they’ve all come out, you’ll have a complete story.

Easy peesie.

Right.

Our thoughts aren’t so coherent as they seem inside our heads. A dream that seems to take minutes, or more, in reality only takes the briefest of seconds. The imagery of our imagination doesn’t translate so directly to words, and train-of-thought is too fast for us to always capture what we mean to say so eloquently to story.

Hence, writing is hard.

Giving Up

I did that. I gave up completely.

Let’s back up a bit.

I’d finished. I had 120K words of what would become the majority of my current book 1 and 2.

It was time to query.

I researched how to query, researched agents, then queried.

I think I only sent 6. None of them landed.

In the back of my head I knew. I knew it wasn’t ready for this. The story needed refining. My writing needed refining.

Then, life happened and it was years before I came back to it.

When I would find my way back, it would be brief moments where little work was done.

I realized that if I really expected to FINISH, if I really expected to make it a book and not some pages I played around with, then I needed to PUT IN THE TIME.

But, I didn’t.

So, I decided that if I wasn’t going to do it, I needed to embrace what that meant and just get rid of the whole thing.

So, I did.

After All These Years

But it wouldn’t go away. Desiree was alive and wouldn’t be shushed.

There was still work. There was still a lot of things to figure out. There was still too much time between working on it. There was an entire manuscript to be written from scratch.

NaNoWriMo

I always did that thing where I’d only write when I felt like it. As we know, the further and farther we get into a project, the less fun it becomes. Finished was something it looked like I still wouldn’t find…

I hadn’t heard about National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWrMo until I started on Instagram. The first year I came across it, I didn’t see the need to join. The next year, still not seeing the need, I participated anyway.

50K words in one month. That was more typing than I’d done in years!

That spark of accomplishment I found then still excites me. It still brings me to my computer, sits me down, even when I don’t feel like it. That month taught me how quickly words add together to become a completed novel 🙂

The ending was my beginning

If I hadn’t deleted; if I hadn’t given myself this clean slate to bring my story back to life, I’m sure it would never have been finished. I can’t take the credit though. If Desiree hadn’t been so alive in my head, she might have just stayed a figment.

• How’s your WIP coming along?
• Whose your favorite book character?