Who wants to write?
Many people have ideas for stories or want to write a novel. Most of those people never will. You probably have friends that keep saying they want to write, but they never had. Maybe you are one of those people also!
I was one of those people. I had ideas but it was always too hard and would take too long. I’d do it sometime in the future. When you’re young, there’s always a future BUT it gets easier and easier to let time slip away and soon you realize years have gone by and you haven’t written anything.
Finally, I realized I would never do it unless I just sat down and did it. That’s just what I did in February of 2016.
The first weekend
Without any preconceived notions or worrying if it would be perfect or wondering if anyone would buy it, I started writing. By the end of the weekend I had written almost 15,000 words! I was amazed!
It was a fantastic start. If I did that every weekend for a month I would have a 60,000 word novel done. So why didn’t I do that?
Keep going
Good question. Like most people life happened. Other things took my focus. I started telling myself that my writing sucked. Etc etc. It took effort to sit back down and write more. I did finally finish the book, in a year, and sent it to an editor. It was over a month before I got it back and then I couldn’t look at what the editor said right away.
Feedback
I was so nervous to look at what the editor had sent me. In my head, I was the best writer and this was the best story and there’s nothing they could say that would make it better. In fact, they were probably so impressed by this book that all they wrote was how fabulous it was and they’ve never read a book this good.
When I did look at the feedback, it wasn’t saying it was the best ever. A lot of notes to point out to the newbie author where the writing and the story were less than par. Not the great American Novel I had hoped for. After reading over the editor’s notes I agreed with almost everything and could see the weaknesses in the story.
That’s the editors job – to tell you where you story isn’t the best so you can fix it and make it best. I decided to take that feedback and use it to improve. I read what was written and really thought about it.
What did I do? I ripped out about half of the book. Stuff that really did stink. Leaving some good writing. What about the writing I did the initial weekend, how did that fare?
Actually, I kept most of it. It wasn’t bad. When I didn’t care how things went or how things sounded, I wrote pretty good. What made the writing take longer was I started actually trying and thinking about it.
There’s the lesson. We can be much better writer’s when we don’t worry about our writing. We get so caught up in our hopes and desires and we want it to be perfect that we actually are less perfect than we would be if we didn’t care about any of that.
