Finishing my book and finishing my book and finishing my book and finishing

my book.

This one's been a tough one to finish and I don't know why I am surprised. It was a tough one to start. A tough one to keep writing. Tough to finish the first draft. And the second draft. And now this third draft...

The letter from my agent, the one where she wrote me six single-spaced pages of notes that I might want to consider, that was tough to read. And tougher to digest. I started working part-time at a bookstore during the writing of this book. And it was tough to adapt to a new writing schedule. I found a library job in the morning and taught myself to work in the afternoons. I found a library job in the afternoon and now I am teaching myself to write in the mornings.

There are a million reasons every day for me to not sit down to work. The dog wants to be walked. The house wants to be painted. My daughter wants to graduate from college. Meanwhile the book spins around inside my head wanting to be written.

I started this draft last summer. Now it's almost May. Outside my garden's been bulldozed in preparation for our move. It was too big, too overwhelming, I thought, for a potential buyer to want to mess with.

Once, when the kids were younger and I hadn't yet been published and was suffering from an almost insane level of desperation and desire, writing feverishly book after book after book, submitting and collecting rejections, pinballing between absurd confidence that one of these damn stories would eventually sell and despair. That was when I came the closest I'd ever come to quitting.

It lasted a week and then I was back at it.

I have one chapter left to write.

(And okay, a few earlier scenes to fiddle with.) Then I'll send it off to my critique partner to get her thoughts. Another revision before sending it off to my agent. In all likelihood there will be a new single-spaced letter of notes I'll want to consider.

I will consider them.

New grass is coming up in the place where I once had lettuce. Along the edge a defiant asparagus stalk pokes out to tease me.

When I'm finally finished, I already know the story I'll work on next.

A Brief Moment of Celebration between Showering and Scooping up Dustball Tumbleweeds

I finished writing a book this morning.

I've been working on the thing pretty much every day since September and when I haven't been working on it, it's been in my head, snippets of dialogue in the supermarket that I scratch out on the back of my grocery list, and sudden cold sweats in the middle of the night when I realize I've got a gaping plot hole, and moments of excitement when I snap together pieces that just might solve that gaping plot hole issue,

but mostly it's day after day of psychologically girding myself, gearing up to write, and fighting back the demons in my head that whisper why bother why are you doing this it's stupid and pointless and opening up my lap top and writing anyway.

You think when you come to the end of the book you've been writing for eight months, you'll want to whoop it up. Drink a bottle of champagne. Tear out of the house shouting I JUST FINISHED WRITING A BOOK!

The truth is nobody really cares.

Also, the house is a gigantic mess because you've been neglecting it for eight months and suddenly you can see the layer of dust on all of the furniture and the tumbleweed sized dog hair balls in the corners and the fact that you've been wearing the same clothes for possibly days? and when was the last time you showered?

(Don't answer that.)

So, there's tons of stuff to do and after you take a shower and put on some different clothes, it's time to get to it. Answering a bajillion emails and taking care of business-y stuff and never mind figuring out what to do with this Thing-- the inevitable revising once you get it back from your critique partners-- and Hey! It's time to query it! and what will you write next? yadda yadda ya...

One of my friends asked me the other day, when I told her I was getting closer to the end of this draft, how I was going to celebrate.

Confession: I'm not big on celebrations.

I'm not sure what it is exactly about celebrating that bugs me. The expense? The party-planning aspect? Anything to do with cake and glitter? Plus, it feels a little narcissistic to me. (See above: nobody really cares.)

I don't mind participating in other people's celebrations.

This weekend, for example, my son's graduating from college, and my husband and I are throwing him a party. A graduation is a Thing worthy of celebrating. The culmination of years of hard work and study. The marking of the movement from one life stage into another. An opportunity to hang together as a family, as friends, as a community to acknowledge the person you love who's done This Thing.

Writing a book, while it feels monumental at times, is so much more solitary. Especially when there's no guarantee that anyone will ever read it. It's like running a marathon in the dark. You don't get a certificate of completion. There's no stage to walk across. No graduation cap to throw into the air. No Congratulations to The Book Writer cards in the stationery aisle.

Ah well.

Cheers.

*throws all the glitter*

When a Writer's Not Writing

When writers talk about the act of writing, they tend to speak metaphorically.

Writing a book is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.-- E.L. Doctorow

To write, you sit down at a typewriter and bleed. --Ernest Hemingway

Stephen King talks about diving into a dark pool or digging up fossils.

Maybe we speak metaphorically about writing because the literal description is so boring. Basically, writing a book involves parking your ass down and picking up a pen or typing on a keyboard until you finish writing it. Sometimes this take months.

Sometimes it takes years.

You are alone. Or you are surrounded by people in a coffee shop, but after awhile you forget those people. You type the letters right the hell off your keyboard.

(Goodbye A, S, and E) (the N and L are gone too)

Some days you forget to wash your hair or change your clothes. Your fingers get cramped. Your back aches. Your eyes burn. You drink a lot of cold coffee. You babble like an idiot to your family about plot holes and snippets of dialogue. 

Or you grunt at them. 

I'm kinda manic when I shut down for the day. I walk out of my office in a daze as if I have been holed up in a cave. There I go speaking metaphorically. 

It does feel like emerging from a cave when you finish writing a book. 

I stumble out into the sunlight, blinking my eyes. Huh. It's spring. Who knew? 

I don't know what to do with myself. 

Cleaning is usually number one on the agenda. When you spend nine or ten months writing a book, you tend to let household chores go. Now it's time to sweep up the dust tumbleweeds in the living room and tackle the science experiments brewing in the bathrooms. 

Do the laundry 

Plant seeds

I always think I should celebrate. Throw a party. Or at the very least, flop out in the hammock and read a book. Instead, I assign myself projects like Paint the Office or Create a Rock Garden. 

I'm not sure exactly why I do this. 

Yesterday I sat in my garden all day pulling up weeds and scattering mulch. There was something very zen-like about it. 

I was not thinking about the book I had just finished, the book that had pretty much consumed me for months. I wasn't thinking about how this possible mess of a Thing is now in the hands of my trusted first readers, how what they say about this Thing will determine how I spend the next few months. I wasn't thinking about publication or the fact that the last book I finished is still bouncing around with editors or more likely, sitting in editorial inboxes, untouched and unread. I wasn't thinking about why I Do This when there is no guarantee that anything I write will show up on a library or bookstore shelf ever again. I wasn't think about next books or speaking engagements or book signings or book festivals or teaching writing workshops. 

Instead I was squatting in dirt chasing the shade around my garden. I had mud under my fingernails and bugs crawling in my hair. 

My mind was blissfully empty and I didn't even realize what I'd accomplished until I stood up and stumbled out of the garden and looked. 

The End (ish)

I wrote a ton of stories when I was growing up.

Age 8, 9, 10-- nearly all of my stories were about broken people. Literally broken. With broken limbs or incurable diseases. The typical story-line: a crippled child saves a friend by miraculously recovering the ability to walk. Those were the happy ending stories.

In the ones with the sad endings, the kid dies while saving the friend.

I guess it goes without saying that I was a weird kid.

The book I have been writing and rewriting over and over again for the past thirteen years was "finished" multiple times. There are various permutations of the end but none of them ever felt quite right. It bugged the hell out of me and I couldn't figure out what to do.

When I go on school visits or talk on author panels, the question inevitably comes up: Where do you get your ideas?

I usually answer by talking about the Two Sticks Theory. I think Sid Fleischman said this: It takes two sticks to build a fire and two ideas to make a story--two seemingly unrelated ideas come together and spark the book.

My multiply-written book, regardless of all of the variations and permutations it's had, has always begun with the same two sticks.

Stick one:

A Greek myth about a man who decides to chop down a massive beautiful oak tree even though a dryad resides in it. [Side note: Dryads are nature spirits connected to trees. The belief is that if you destroy a tree that has a dryad attached to it, you kill the dryad too.] The man ignores the screams and the pleas of the dryad and chops down the tree.

Stick number two:

When I was eleven years old I went to camp for a week and when I got home I found that the tree in my backyard, the one I loved to climb, had been cut down. My mother didn't like the tree because the roots were messing up the yard so she had my stepfather take care of it.

When you write a book, you don't always know what you are writing. Sure, you might have your two sticks, your outline. A plan. But stories have a funny way of morphing into something else as you write them. They veer into places you didn't intend to go, places you may not want to go. Ever.

People talk about the difficulty of writing, and what they usually mean is the time spent. Hours of working on your computer, banging out draft after draft. Self-discipline. That part is all true.  But that is not what makes writing difficult. At least for me.

Last January I went to visit my critique partner at Hamline University. Hamline offers an MFA in Children's Literature and my friend is finishing up her coursework there. I went to hear her present her critical thesis, but I also sat in on a few lectures.

The one that pretty much slayed me was given by Jane Resh Thomas. Jane is a writer and teacher. She's the mentor of people like Kate DiCamillo and Gary Schmidt and she is one of the most amazing speakers I have ever had the privilege to hear.

When I sat in on Jane's lecture, I was in the midst of struggling with my revision. There I was AGAIN reworking this story, which for whatever reason I could not let go of and could not get right. And there was Jane, speaking in this booming voice:

WHY ARE YOU WRITING THIS STORY?

WHY HAVE YOU CHOSEN TO SPEND A YEAR OF YOUR LIFE IN DEVOTION TO IT?

WHY HAS THIS STORY CHOSEN YOU?

When you write a story, Jane said, you are not the same person you were when you come to the end of it.

All of us who write for children have a locked trunk in our attics, a box where we hide all of the secrets from our childhood, the things that hurt us, the things that were too difficult to handle when we were children... BUT WE ARE NO LONGER CHILDREN. 

It's time to go up into your attic and unlock the trunk. 

The heart of your story is like a hot stove. We don't want to touch it, but to do the story justice, we must. 

We have to sit on the hot stove and cook. 

I came home from Minnesota and started the book again. I wrote every day for seven days a week. Every day I climbed up into the attic. Every day I parked myself on the hot stove.

In the midst of all of that, I purged my house. I literally cleaned out every closet and drawer. The Goodwill guy threatened not to take another carload of my stuff.

There was a certain point--maybe back in March?-- when I realized that I didn't care about publication anymore or even if another person ever read this damn book. The only goal was to come out on the other side of it without suffering from third degree burns.

I finished a couple of days ago.

I am happy to report that I don't have permanent skin damage. But I am sorta wandering around my purged house like a stranger. Apparently, I have different furniture. New pictures on the walls. New drapery.

Jane Resh Thomas was right.

I am not the same person I was when I started this book. I'm not exactly sure who I am. The story, it turns out, is about broken people who have to figure out how to save themselves-- or die trying.

Who knew?

Why CAN'T All Books Be Like WE WERE LIARS? (Also, please tell me when I have spinach on my teeth)

I read a great book the other day. We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. One of Lockhart's earlier books The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, is a favorite of mine. Laugh out-loud funny, clever, and original. It's got a cool feminist manifesto twist at the end that'll make you (if you happen to be a woman) pump your fist in the air and roar.

We Were Liars will probably make you burst into tears. I just want to give you fair warning.

It's about a girl named Cady who spends summers hanging out with her cousins on their grandfather's private island. When the story begins, Cady's not doing too well. She's suffering from horrible migraine headaches. Something happened a few years ago during her fifteenth summer and it's what probably caused the headaches. She's not sure. She can't remember much of what happened that summer.

Now she's back on the island and hanging out with the cousins and everyone's tiptoeing around her. They've been instructed by their mothers not to tell Cady what happened.

So that's all I'm going to say about the plot and Cady.

I knew going into the book there was going to be a big twist and I was trying to figure out what it could be as I read.

I have a difficult time reading books and falling into them the way I used to as a child. Years of deconstructing texts as an English major and English teacher and years of writing and trying to figure out how stories are put together so I could put my own stories together end up being hazards when you just want to lose yourself in a book.

Reading We Were Liars, I was doing that. Thinking. I'd put the book down and marvel for a minute at the strong, crystal clear voice of Cady. I'd bend a page corner over and wonder about the structure of the book. Why did E. Lockhart begin with that particular moment? Why'd she stick the fairy tale interludes in where she did? Why all the mentions of dogs? Etc. Then I'd keep reading, thinking, This is a pretty good book, enjoying the cleverness of it and the humor and insightful bits.

And then. BAM.

I turned a page and it hit me. The twist. With such force I gasped out loud and burst into tears. I cried as I read the last few pages. I turned back to page one and started reading the book again trying to figure out how Lockhart did it--how she tricked me--not just with the brilliant twist--but how she struck such an emotional chord, how she made me feel for these pretend people and forget that I was reading a book.

I couldn't figure it out.

I called my friend Donna, who happens to be my beloved trusted amazing critique partner and we hashed it out for a while. What makes the book so good? How did the author pull it off? How'd she write something that transcends the genre, that makes you THINK and FEEL as well as be entertained for a few hours?

(Back story: Donna is my Ideal Reader. She is the person in my head whom I write for--the reader I most want to please. Last week I finished the fifth revision of a book I have been working on and struggling with on and off since 2009. When I "finished" it last week, I had no real sense of what the hell I had. I still don't know exactly. I realize that I don't trust my own judgment anymore when it comes to my writing. I see smatterings of beautiful stuff and I see larger chunks of garbage and the two things intermingle and even switch places depending on my mood and/or the weather.

I sent the manuscript to Donna and waited anxiously for her response, going back and forth between dread and eagerness to hear it. I geared myself up for the worst. The worst would be Donna saying the book is a massive unfixable mess and she can't believe I spent 5 years of my life wasting my time on it. I am not proud of this, but I toyed with the idea of asking her to lie to me if it came down to that. Then I worried that she WOULD lie to me to spare my feelings and the book would eventually be published and every reviewer on Amazon and Goodreads would give it 1 star and muse about how such a mess ever made it to publication.)

Anyway, we kept talking about We Were Liars. Donna read a book recently that bugged her for a variety of reasons and she started telling me about it and that led to us discussing other flawed books that failed for a variety of reasons. Poor writing, weakly developed characters, massive plot holes, whatever. We worried about the authors of these books. Why didn't anyone TELL them when they still had a chance to fix their various messes?

I said to Donna, Oh well, not every book can be We Were Liars. 

And she said, Why not?

And then I wondered, Yeah. Why not? Isn't writing a great book what we're all striving for?

Maybe some writers don't think about this kind of thing. I don't know how a book goes right and I don't know how a book goes wrong. I only know the end result--whether it falls into the We Were Liars category or, um, the other category. I also know that if I am going to bother, if I am going to spend 5 years writing and rewriting and rewriting a book, tearing my hair out and pacing around my home muttering and staring at my computer screen until my eyeballs burn in my skull, then, damn it, I'm shooting for the WWL end of the spectrum.

Which means that someone-- DONNA God love her--must absolutely level with me and tell me the truth.

I gave her this speech before she read my book.

She just laughed. "Aren't we always honest with each other?" she asked. "If you had spinach on your teeth, I'd tell you."

Whew. I guess.

I mean, Whew. Thank you, Donna, as I would tell you, too.

She sent me her response a few days later. I was at the grocery store and I made my daughter pull the critique up on the phone...

(to be continued)

On Finishing a Draft (Again)

The other day I finished working on a draft of a novel that I have been revising (on and off) for five years. This was version number 4.

There will be a draft 5.

Writing this draft almost killed me (in order to meet a totally self-imposed deadline, I worked 6 to 10 hours a day for 46 days in a row)

--but it also taught me the greatest truth I know about writing (again).

Trust the process.

Say it with me, people:

TRUST

THE

PROCESS.

I understand this mantra now at the very core of my being. I say it at the beginning of every new project. I say it somewhere in the middle. And I say it at the end. Most of the time I don't even believe it.

And then I do.

Trusting the process means:

• pushing forward, writing every day whether or not you want to/feel like it/care/have fantasies about flinging your laptop through a plate glass window
• focusing on the day's goal--whatever it happens to be--a passage, a scene, a chapter, a word count, a character arc, a plot line, etc.--and not worrying about what you will have to work on the next day (or God forbid, next week) 
• pushing out of your mind if this story is any good, if it will ever sell, what your agent or editor will think, and/or what the bloggers on Goodreads will say. I heard once that every writer has an ideal reader in mind while writing--this is the person you imagine reading and responding and it is the person you most hope to please. My ideal readers are my husband--who is extremely critical, and yet, I admit, nearly always right, and my writing critique partner Donna, who knows exactly what to say and how to say it and who has kept me from jumping off a ledge too many times to discuss here. I need both of them in my writing life. I also need to push them out of my mind during writing sessions.
• celebrating small successes and going easy on yourself when you feel like you've failed. 
• reminding yourself and then believing it--that this is only a draft and you will finish it, and if you have to, (likely) you can pick it up again and go back in, knowing that each time you really are getting closer and closer to that nebulously termed "right" feeling of completeness.

A few months ago I was chatting with one of my favorite writers Rae Carson. We had volunteered for Small Business Saturday to work at our local children's bookstore Cover to Cover. Small Business Saturday, unfortunately, turned out to have been poorly scheduled in our town of Columbus Ohio--it coincided with a college home football game and not just any college. The store is about 10 minutes away from where the Ohio State Buckeyes play.

Rae and I spent quite a bit of the quiet day in the bookstore chatting--about our favorite books and about the writing life (she is a New York Times best selling author, so let's just say that her writing life is a tad different from mine). But at the same time, there are similarities--ie: figuring out how to balance writing with promoting and with actual living of life with kids and bills and grocery shopping.

At one point the conversation turned to what our latest project is. Rae has a three-book trilogy out, the glorious Girl of Fire and Thorns, and now she is working on writing her next three-book series, something she's already sold on synopsis. When she told me this, my mouth dropped open. I can't even imagine writing under that kind of pressure--selling a book before you've written it... Yikes.

I told her that I was working on a rewrite of a rewrite of a rewrite, and we lamented about how to fit in writing around travelling (I laugh as I write this because Rae's travel schedule dwarfs mine--I think she said she hasn't been home for more than a month at a time in several years). She asked if I had sold the book yet and I said no, and she had a funny expression on her face.

She said something like, Wow, I can't even imagine that kind of pressure.

My mouth dropped open again. What do you mean? I asked.

She said, you're writing something without knowing if it's ever going to go anywhere?

After a pause, I laughed, because this is how I've written every book I've ever written. I've never had a guarantee that anything was going to sell.

We parted that day, probably both feeling sorry for the other person. Okay, that's stupid. I do not feel sorry for Rae Carson. She probably does not feel sorry for me either. So, forget I said that.

My point is, (I think this is my point), that writing is hard for every writer, no matter where you are in the process or in your career.

I know that my friends and family look at my crazy, totally self-imposed work schedule and shake their heads in amazement and confusion. Why not take a day off? Why work so hard for something that you could easily put off for another day? Why work into the night in order to get just one more sentence?

The answer: I don't know.

The answer: it seems to be my process.

And, I trust it.


PS: For the record, I am taking a two-week break from writing. I am traveling soon to the area where I grew up. I will be visiting libraries and schools and reconnecting with old friends and relatives. Stay tuned for all the fun (and pressures of a different kind)...

Crossing the New Mexico Border (Metaphorically)

If writing a novel is like driving through Texas, then finishing a novel, it stands to reason, is like crossing the border into New Mexico. I don’t know why I always picture myself driving west. I could just as well imagine the finish line as Arkansas. It doesn’t really matter. The point is I’ve driven hundreds of miles. I’ve written a book, for crying out loud, one that didn’t exist in this world just a few months ago. New Mexico. Arkansas. I’ll take either one.

I’m tired. Exhilarated. My fingers are literally bleeding. Funny story (or sad one, depending on your point of view): the stupid backspace/delete button on my laptop broke off. Apparently I tap it a lot with my middle finger. I couldn’t figure out how to put the thing back on. Even my handyman husband couldn’t do it. So I ended up with a little knobby button and for the past few weeks I’ve been tapping the heck out of that. The problem is there are a bunch of poky wires sticking up around it. Yesterday one of those wires stabbed my fingertip. I was writing like a manic, speeding down the last leg of tumbleweed-strewn highway. New Mexico was in sight. No way was a minor injury going to stop me. Anyway, it seemed appropriate. Bleeding on my keyboard. Smudges of blood around the broken delete button. And apparently my middle finger taps the letter K a lot.

It’s great fun to finish a book. It’s also kind of anti-climactic. For a few months, you live with the characters spinning in your head. You hear snippets of dialogue in the shower. You wake up dreaming what will happen next. Then suddenly it’s over. You’ve written the last word. In this case: night. Then you close up your bloody laptop and realize your house is a disaster area. You haven’t scrubbed toilets in weeks. Your kids are really really tired of eating chocolate chip pancakes. And that used to be their favorite food. It’s time to rejoin the world of the living. The world of people who do not hear voices in their heads or scribble like maniacs on the back of grocery receipts because they just thought of a good line.

But first you must do something to celebrate. My all-time favorite finishing a book day happened last summer. I sat sniffling at my kitchen counter because I’d just written this majorly touching final scene. Oh. I was finished. My beautiful book and my sweet little characters were going off to a better place. The end. And I was home alone. With no one to tell. My husband was out of town. The kids had escaped the house and their distracted manic mother for the day. I called my neighbor. She’s a non-writer but seems to find me amusing. She came right over and she let me tell her all about it. She didn’t even seem bored. Maybe it helped that we drank a bottle of champagne.

My second favorite finishing a book day started on an airplane. I was going out of town for a writers conference. My plan was to finish the book I was working on before I left. But life intervened. I had a marathon week of writing—crazy 3000 word days and lots of chocolate chip pancakes for the kids. Still, I couldn’t finish before I left. I came to the second to last chapter and ran out of time. A non-writer may not understand how hard it is to take a break when you’re at this point in a novel. Imagine closing a book you’re reading when you’ve got ten pages left. It’s something like that, except add to it the fact that your head’s about to explode with the final scene you want to write. I took a notebook with me on the plane. I hadn’t hand-written anything in years, but as the plane took off I began to write furiously. I could feel myself nearing the end as the plane started its descent. I don’t know what my face looked like when I wrote the final word. (Yes. In case anyone is wondering) But I know what I was thinking. I was flying. I was caught between crying and laughing. I wanted to jump out of my seat and yell: Guess what, everyone on this plane, I just finished writing a freaking book! Instead I just sat there clutching my notebook. When I looked up I noticed the woman across the aisle staring at me. Her expression said it all: what the hell was that lady writing in her notebook?

A book. I wanted to tell her. But I didn’t. I just smiled. My best writing friend picked me up at the airport and we celebrated with champagne.

It’s a big deal to finish a book. It also, on many levels, I’m sad to say, means nothing. Especially when you’re plugging away as an unpublished writer. So you’ve got to take your joy where you can get it.

Here’s what I’m about to do: Clean off my bloody keyboard. And crack open a bottle of champagne. Throw out the pancake batter and broil up some steaks.

Cheers. Until January. When I have to revise this giant mess.