One Third

I began writing the very earliest version of my book when I was fourteen. It started with a dream in which I was Wendy and Peter Pan got me pregnant and I ran away to a magical land and became an immortal queen. None of that original dream features in the current draft of my book, except for the theme of immortality and it does take place in a magical land, but no Peter Pan or Wendy in sight. I’ve lost track of the number of ever-so-slightly different versions of the same story that I’ve written and rewritten until my current work would never be taken as a decedent of the original draft.

I just realized this morning that I’ve been working on this one book for exactly one third of my life. Granted there were times when I tucked the book away in my desk drawer determined to forget all about it. I’d work on other stories, or get overwhelmed by schoolwork, but I always came back after a few months with a new idea. There was a point when I decided that I definitely wasn’t going to finish this book. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t very good, wasn’t very original. I had so many other stories to write, better stories. I’d work on those other stories for a little bit, but I’d always reach a point where I realized that my skill level wasn’t yet high enough to achieve my vision. And so I’d come back to my practice book, as I’d taken to calling it by then, and work on refining the skills that I needed to push past the obstacles I was facing in the book I actually wanted to write.

During that time I never actually finished a complete draft for any of my books. I think I’d been working on it for four years at that point and I’d just left college and was bored out of my wits, so I decided that I’d put aside all my grand ideas – put them in the drawer for them to season over time – and site down and actually finish a draft beginning to end of my practice book. And that’s what I did. It took me nine months, but I did it. The draft was a mess – as first drafts inevitably are, unless you’re Super Writer – there were plot holes everywhere, characters popping up at random and then disappearing. I used about thirty different points of view. I dropped some story lines half way through only to pick up others that had no anchor in the beginning. Like I said, it was a 700 page mess, but it was complete and in finishing it, I realized what direction I wanted to go with it, what story I wanted to tell, what characters I wanted to use. And now I have a story I love filled with characters I love and it’s no longer just the “practice book” but I book that I hope to get published and it amazes me that I’ve been working at one thing for one third of my life and I haven’t succeeded in giving up yet.

Thank you for reading.