Lillian Clark's Blog

Why I Vote

Partnering with HeadCount, a non-partisan voter participation organization, Penguin Random House has started an initiative encouraging people to register to vote, called:

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And in honor of that, I’m here to tell you…drumroll…WHY I VOTE! (You’re surprised, right? I’m sure you are.)

So, why do I?

Well, because OF COURSE I DO!

Except, it’s more complex than that, isn’t it? Do you vote because you should? Because someone tells you to? Or better, why don’t you vote? Because it’s inconvenient? Because you don’t know how/where/who for?

Because you think your one teeny, tiny, lonely, little vote won’t matter?

I get that feeling, I really do. Especially in today’s…I’ll call it, climate…it’s hard to feel like your one small voice is anything but, well, small. The magnitude of today’s issues feel pretty freaking insurmountable at times. The water’s swift and maybe rising and you’re just one ant, right? What’s your one little ant voice supposed to do?

Well.

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Those are ants. One ant alone in the flood waters? Yeah, not a lot of luck. But thousands of them? Well, they made a freaking road atop the water.

You’ve probably heard this before. About how ants make floating roads and islands out of masses of their own bodies?? Maybe. (Either way, how cool is that?) Or…about how one vote plus one vote plus one vote to the nth power adds up to whole heck of a lot of votes? You probably have. Because it’s true.

And because it works in reverse, too. For every person who says “I don’t think my vote matters” there are probably a few thousand others saying the exact same thing. And your one little non-vote plus their non-vote plus the next person’s non-vote, well… You get the idea.

So why do I vote, personally?

Well, I vote because I matter. Because my family matters. Because you matter. Because the environment, the future, the world, people I have never and probably will never meet…it all matters.

I vote because the separation of “politics” and “life” is a myth. Because there is no part of your life or my life or some future person’s life that isn’t affected, in some way, big or small, by the decisions made by politicians.

The environment? Politics. Your rights? Politics. Your education? Politics. Your access to land? Politics. The food you eat, clothes you buy, how and where you travel? Politics. 

At some point, “politics” has touched everything in your life. Because “politics,” the laws and decisions made by people in office shape the very construct of our society. And, barring you running for office yourself, the first and most essential way you affect what decisions are made, and how those decisions are made, is by voting.

So, of course I vote. This is my life, my kid’s life. It’s your life. And it matters.

REGISTER TO VOTE TODAY!! Then get five friends to register, then tell them to get five more friends to register, then if they get five of their friends, and their friends after that? Pretty soon, you’ll have an ant raft floating majestically (okay, creepily) across the water.

Hitting the Road!

Hello lovelies, I have news!

In the next month, I’m hitting the road! Through October, I’ll be making stops in Tacoma, Minneapolis, and Denver to chat with indie booksellers about Immoral Code.

Are you an indie bookseller? Fellow author? General book fan? If so and you’ll be at any of the conferences below, come say hi!

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A Little Help From My Friends

**warning: sentimental ramblings coming your way in 3…2…1…**

Writing is a solitary process.

We writers (hunched over desks, faces lit by the bluish glow of our computer screens, mumbling to ourselves about coffeeses and deadlineses and preciouses… Oh wait, that’s Gollum. Anyway…) spend hours working alone, wadded up tight inside our imaginations with the characters that live there. It’s a necessity. Those hours spent holed up, butt in the chair, eyes on the page, are a major part of where books come from.

But they’re also a little isolating, a little lonesome, a little like riding an ever-tightening spiral deeper and deeper into the maze of your own head, that labyrinth populated by flashes of “Yes! This is awesome! I’m rocking it!” and pits of “Haha omg everything is awful what am I even doing,” dotted by tangled patches of frustration briars and epic slopes to sprint down, writing like the freaking wind, expect then you get to the bottom, lift your head, look back and ask, “Wait, is this even good?”

Writing is emotionally fraught. We love it. (We hate it.) We’re proud. (We’re swallowed by self-doubt.) We’re excited. (We’re anxious.) And that’s all before you throw in the swooping highs and plunging lows of publishing. (What if I never get an agent? What if my book never sells? What if everyone hates it? What if they love it but I never manage to write something people love again?)

It’s…a lot.

Which is another sort of necessity. If you want readers to feel something when they read your work, you need to feel it, too, right? I mean, writing a book is a little like excising a (squishy, quivering) part of your soul, printing it on paper, then chucking it out into the world where people may love it, ignore it, or grind it into tiny bits beneath their cruel and disparaging heel.

Haha. Ha. Ahh…

Yeah. Writing isn’t easy. Publishing isn’t easy. So, the point of this post: Find your friends*.

You’ve probably heard this before. And I admit, whenever I read this advice in the past, it made me a little sad. Making friends isn’t always easy. Life is busy. Finding people can be hard. Opening up to them can be harder. Before selling my debut, I struggled to find writer friends. Geography, day job, imposter syndrome, social anxiety; the list can be long, the hurdles high.

But one of the absolute best side-effects of selling my first book** has been meeting so many incredible fellow writers. People who are lovely and welcoming and who get it. People who cheer for and listen to and support me. People I can cheer for, listen to, and support right back. People who understand those highs and lows, who’ve been in that labyrinth, and who will still be there for me regardless what happens with this book or the next one or whatever may happen after that. People I’ll still be there for, too.

Finding these people has made debut year manageable, because I know that whatever maze/spiral/cave I find myself in, I’m not alone.

So, people: THANK YOU.

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*I’m not talking about agents and editors and all of those incredible and talented people who push you and help you, who invest their time and energy and expertise in making you a better writer and your book a better book. This post isn’t about (my unending gratitude for) them.

**You absolutely do not need to be agented or published or even want to be agented or published to find a fantastic group of writer friends. I struggled with this, but less because I needed to have sold a book to find those people and more because I didn’t push myself to reach out before I did.

School Book Donations

Hello everyone! This Saturday, after speaking with a friend (a wonderfully generous person and incredibly dedicated teacher) about her school’s need for books, I tweeted this, reaching out to the kidlit and book-loving community for help.

The response has overwhelmed us in the best way! We are in absolute awe of your generosity. As I write this, the tweet has been shared over 2,000 times, and I’ve received hundreds of offers to donate!

Unfortunately, my friend’s school is not the only one in need. Of the twenty schools in her district, only two have libraries, and other teachers are attempting to address this lack in the same way; by using what resources and space they have to run libraries out of their classrooms. Thanks to the magnitude of kindness we’ve received in response to my request, we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to add books to each one of these teachers’ libraries for the new year!

If you have books you’d like to donate please mail them to:

Ánimo Ralph Bunche High School

c/o Laura Hastings

1655 E 27th Street

Los Angeles, CA 90011

Book donations mailed to my friend’s school will be sorted and shared with other schools in her district. (Be sure to ask your post office about library and/or book rates for cheaper mailing costs!)

If you are interested in purchasing books to be donated to my friend’s classroom library at Ánimo Ralph Bunche Charter High School, you can find her Amazon Wishlist here!

As I receive more information, including wishlists from teachers at other schools in need, I will update here!

Thank you again (and again and again) for your incredibly display of generosity. My friend and I are in absolute awe of the outpouring of support we’ve received. And we cannot wait to share your goodwill with her students and others in the district!

 

 

Your Book is Not Your Baby aka It Only Takes (the Right) One

Ok. This post is going to do double duty.

First, your book is not your baby. Honestly, I hate this expression. Not because your book isn’t an intensely important personal creation. I get that. What I take issue with is the assumption that your art is inviolable.

You write a book. Unpaid. For years. Pouring your time and hopes and dreams and the entirety of your squishy inner self into it. Because you love it. Then, if you want to be traditionally published, you willingly send it off to be judged and critiqued and rejected.

Which is HARD. Which is like unzipping your chest and inviting someone who has not invested three, four, eight years of their life into that externalized bit of soul to poke at your bare heart a bit. Maybe give it a flick before shrugging a shoulder and offering up a solid, “Meh, not for me.” Because, if we’re being realistic, yours is the twentieth bit of soul to hit their inbox that day.

Sounds fun, right?

Yeah, it isn’t. Querying is brutal. Sub is brutal. All told, between querying and submission for my first novel, I spent about three years being consistently rejected, feeling someone flick my exposed and increasingly bruised heart at least once or twice a week.

But here’s the thing to know if you want to pursue traditional publishing: Your book cannot be your baby. Your book is, well, a book. Better, it’s a manuscript, a draft. It is a work-in-progress. Because writing toward traditional publishing is not a solo endeavor, it’s a collaboration. With your agent, your editor, and more. Which, if you welcome it, if you look at your work as a malleable thing, an improvable thing, can be an incredibly satisfying and exciting process.

Which brings me to: It only takes the right one.

Writing toward traditional publication is a balance. (I keep stressing ‘traditional publishing’ because there are other routes. You can self-publish or write without ever planning to publish at all; it’s all valid and worthwhile.) Because art is subjective. What you love, I guarantee you, someone else hates. What you feel utterly indifferent about, someone else lives and breathes.

Lots (most) of agents and editors will not your like your book. Or, they’ll like it but not enough. Or, they’ll like this part and that part but want you to cut the other parts and rearrange it all into a different shape.

Or, they’ll love it. Adore it. Believe in it and you. Want to not only read it the requisite three, four, five times over the next few years but then shove it at everyone else they know and hope they love it too. Which is the goal. The dream. That person, the one who gets it? They’re the ‘right’ one.

But, guess what? They’ll still ask you to edit your book.

Hence, the balance. Between stubborn adherence to your intentions and open-minded willingness to accept and act on constructive criticism. Your book is not your baby. Your book is an evolving work-in-progress with a core integrity that you should not compromise.

This has been my advice to myself and to others through my years-long journey to publication: Guard your book’s integrity like a dragon guarding its treasure. Light up any criticism that would compromise it (or, you know, just ignore it. No need for actual fire). But the rest is window dressing. You will be asked to change your book. You will be told parts of your book are not good enough. But if you trust your instincts, respect your art’s integrity, and hold out not for just an agent or editor, but the right agent and editor, your book will be immeasurably better for it.

This isn’t to say you will be drowning in “ones” to begin with. I never was. And it is very easy to feel, after all that rejection, a deep connection with the saying “beggars can’t be choosers.” But this is where the two subjects of this post meet. Writing for traditional publication is such a bizarre beast. Writing, at its baseline, is an extremely personal endeavor. It requires intense levels of empathy, honesty, dedication and vulnerability followed by literal years of begging for criticism. (Seriously. Who volunteers for that kind of torture? What is wrong with us? *laugh-cries confusedly*)

But if you can strike that balance, between respect for yourself and your art’s integrity and your acceptance that you will always be learning, that your book can always be better, if you keep working and are lucky enough (I’ll talk about luck in publishing a different day) to find those right ones who respect those things too, your book can end up better than you ever dared hope for. And that is what you and your work truly deserve.

 

Who are you anyway?

Here I am, at the beginning again, in the infant stages of that infamous endeavor “Book Two.” And, you know what? A new book idea is just that: New. Bright and shiny and brimming with possibility and, well, not much else.

After finishing a manuscript, rewriting, revising, editing, rinse and repeat for a few months or years, starting a new book feels a little like going from picking out wall colors to trying to remember what a house is. You go from deleting and replacing commas to asking questions like, “So what is this book, um, about?” And “Who is this book about?”

Which brings me to the point of this post! In trying to answer that question and get to know my brand new main character, and having heard of other authors who do something similar, I thought, an interview! I’ll ask this girl a load of questions, simple, silly, and complex and end up KNOWING EVERYTHING ABOUT HER AND THIS BOOK. Ha ha ha. Ha. Ahhh…

Anyway. Then I thought, maybe other writers could use the list, so why not share?

So, here goes, everything I could think up (for now) to ask plus some questions suggested by a few lovelies from the Twittershpere:

 

Likes/Dislikes (and why)

-music       -books     -sports     -style (clothes/hair/etc)     -classes/subjects

-movies      -seasons/holidays     -food     -animals     -colors/words/misc

 

Family

What is your family like?

Who are the members?

Who are you closest to?

Who do you have the most complicated relationship with?

Who is your (least)favorite family member?

Are you close with any non-nuclear family members?

 

Friends

Who are your closest friends?

Next closest?

Meaningful acquaintances?

Who do you wish you were friends with but aren’t?

Do you have a crush?

 

Which One (and why)

Risk or caution

Spontaneous or methodical

Head or heart

Clean or messy

Rule breaker or follower

Leader or follower

Crowds or solitude

Decisive or indecisive

Loud or quiet

Omnivore or vegetarian

Passion or practicality

 

General

What are some of your favorite memories?

What does your room look like? You locker?

Where is your favorite place?

What are a few of your favorite items?

What thing(s) do you take with you everywhere?

What are your hobbies?

What do you love about where you live? What do you hate?

Do you have any pets? If not, do you want any?

What scares you?

What makes you feel safe?

Do you have a dream career? If so, what is it?

If you could live/visit anywhere, where would you go?

What three things would you take to a desert island? Which three people?

What makes you secretly smile?

If you could live in any time period, when would you live?

What do you love about yourself? What’s one thing you would change?

If you could have any superpower, what would it be?

Do you have any allergies?

Do you believe in love at first sight? True love? Soul mates?

Do you have a favorite teacher or non-relative adult?

What’s your Hogwarts house?

What’s your Meyers-Briggs type?

What is your most embarrassing memory?

What is a memory that makes you feel guilt or shame? 

Are you religious?

Do you believe in fate?

When was the last time you cried? Why?

What is your biggest fear?

What is your biggest hope?

Do you know where do you want to be in five years? Ten? Fifteen?

 

(Okay! This is all I can think up for now, but I may add more later as new questions occur to me. If you have any you’d like to add, mention them in the comments and I will!)

With A Grain of Salt

A couple months ago I did one of those “One like = One…” threads for writing advice on The Twitters, and as I am now making a concerted effort to add actual content to this here site, I thought, hey! Why not write a post about that?

So, here goes…

0.) Take all writing (all anything?) advice with a grain of salt. Everyone thinks/works/imagines differently. Everyone has different contexts and circumstances. Take what works for you and leave the rest.

1.) READ.

Read everything. Read carefully. Read closely, thoughtfully. Read within your genre and without. Read for structure, pacing, voice, audience, and so on. Read for what to do and what not to do. Read. (I wrote a whole post about this once, if you’re interested: Read. Read everything.)

2.) Get comfortable with critique. And rejection.

You know that saying “the only things certain in life are death and taxes”? (Of course you do. It’s a tired cliche.) Well, I’d argue that the only things certain in writing are critique and rejection.

When it comes to critique… Learn to accept it, welcome it, but vet its source and effectiveness. Meaning, have you worked with that source before? If they’re a writer, do you like their writing? Do they share some of your tastes? Do they ‘get’ your work? And (so important) do some or all or none of the criticisms ring true? Like with advice, take what works and leave the rest behind.

As far as rejections go, if qualifiers are given, listen to what, if any, are helpful, then move on. Reading is subjective. That’s it. The end.

Bottom line for both critique and rejection: Believe in yourself. Trust your instincts. Guard your story’s integrity like a dragon guarding its treasure. But remember that writing is rewriting, and you have to know what the problems are before you can solve them.

3.) Okay, pebble of salt time as this is my personal preference… SLOW DOWN.

I am a slow writer. I don’t keep track of word counts beyond a general, book-length goal. And that works for me. Writing slowly, considering each word, each sentence, methodically and (yes) tediously, starting with the first draft, saves me time and effort in the long run.

That said…3a.) Set goals!

I don’t set daily word count goals because ack! The pressure! I’d never meet them! But I do set long term, finish x by y, sorts of goals because so much of writing is self-determined. And accountability (can be) key.

4.) Find your sweet spot between vulnerability and having a thick skin.

Being a writer is like being a gusher. You know, those goop-filled candies/fruit snacks? Because writing requires vulnerability. It needs empathy, that gooey center, to elicit empathy. But being a writer also requires a thick skin, that waxy exterior to keep all that ooey gooey goodness inside. (Okay, the visual here just got extra morbid, so ahem, I’ll uh, move on.)

5.) Word choice!

Word choice, word choice, word choice. Also known as: Write carefully! This is foundational. Meaning is complex. Pay attention to it. Be aware, of context and connotation and avoid unnecessary repetition. Be exacting.

6.) BE AWARE OF PHYSICAL MECHANICS!

Sorry I yelled. But, wow, this is a pet peeve of mine. Understanding physical mechanics is another basic of writing. And while they may be tedious to write, nothing throws me out of a book faster than flaws in physical mechanics.

Picture your characters in a scene. Was the door open or closed? How many people are there? Were there two then, bam!, suddenly there are three? Were they sitting at a table, then wait, what happened to the table?

I’m not saying we need or want to read about every time a character brushes their teeth or opens a window, but readers need followthrough and consistency. If a character slammed a door, the door needs to stay closed until someone opens it. If a character took a haymaker to the face and ended up on the floor, they need to stay on the floor until you tell us they got up.

7.) Cultivate your internal editor.

Okay, yeah, vague, so here’s an essay by George Saunders, who says it better than I’ll likely ever be able to.

8.) Know your characters and world inside and out. This should go without saying, but you should know far more about your characters and the world you built (fantastical or otherwise) than actually ends up on the page.

9.) Time for some anti-advice… “Write what you know” is garbage. I mean, come on. Imagine, really, if people only wrote what they “knew”. No dragons! No Narnia! No Westeros! No !

That said… Do your research! Lots of it. More than you think you need. (Or, I don’t know, maybe I just LOVE RESEARCH.)

10.) “Show don’t tell” is not the end all be all of writing advice. I mean it. Info dumps? Loads of unnecessary exposition? Explaining how a reader should feel versus writing in a way that makes them feel it? All valid critiques under the “show don’t tell” banner. But sometimes telling works.

11.) Know your audience. Respect your audience. If you aren’t writing for an audience of people you respect, stop. Because you’re doing it wrong.

12.) If it’s not working it’s probably because…it’s not working.

I mean, obviously. But if you’re stuck and struggling, if your thoughts feel like how that wadded up pair of earbuds at the bottom of your purse looks, then look for the cause. Maybe your structure is wrong? Maybe a plot point three chapters back pushed you in the wrong direction? Maybe the character you think is the book’s center really isn’t and some secondary character is?

Making big changes or even (ack!) starting over is HARD. But it’s better than forcing yourself to finish a book that just. Isn’t. Working.

13.) Failure isn’t failure, it’s experience.

My first book, the one I found my agent with, didn’t sell. And while not selling that book absolutely felt like failure, I’d never have written Gray Hats without having written it first. I even wrote a post about it.

14.) Last but not least (and, really, not even last since the well of available writing advice is deep and ever-refilling): WRITE.

There is no ‘right’ way to be a writer, to write a book. Find what works for you and do it!

 

The Road is Long and Full of Potholes

Obligatory “how I got here” post!

Hahaha. Kidding. This isn’t an obligation. This is a doing-a-backflip-while-happy-crying delight. Also one I’m not too proud to admit that I’ve been drafting in my head for years.

Really, years. Eleven, to be exact. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. This post, this “I SOLD A BOOK!!” post has been rumbling around my head since my first book went on sub over two years ago. But the writing thing? I crossed the decade mark last year.

I started writing my first book when I was twenty. I wrote other things (bad poetry, a short story here or there) as a kid and tween. But the idea of writing professionally didn’t cross my mind until college, and I didn’t start (re)writing with that goal until after I graduated. Four years after that, I had a book I was ready to query. Over a year after that, I signed with my (lovely! fabulous! brilliant!) agent. A few months of revisions after that, my agent sent that first book out on submission to editors. A year and a few months after that, during which I received a slew of rejections and did an eight-month complete rewrite as an R&R, that book ended up shelved. Over the next year, I coped by…writing another book! This book!

Which is the long way of saying that when I said I’ve been drafting this post for years, I meant it. But that doesn’t mean I always believed it was one I’d get to write. Because the road is long. And filled with potholes.

All told, between querying and sub, my road was dotted by at least 100 rejection potholes (I’m estimating because I stopped keeping track.), a chasm caused by that unsold first book that I crawled up out of with my bare hands, in the snow, followed by wolves, while a kraken waited at the bottom, tentacles reaching, jaws snapping (Ok, sorry. I’m done. But, hey, overcoming that failure was hard! Accepting failure is hard! Learning to call it a “pothole” or “part of the process” instead of “failure” is HARD.), and countless stretches of doubt, thick like quicksand. But.

But, here’s my favorite part of every post like this that I’ve read: I didn’t give up.

Don’t give up.

Repeat: Don’t. Give. Up.

I’ll admit, sometimes when I read that part of other authors’ posts, I felt bitter. Or I felt jealous. Or I felt sad and defeated.

Or, I felt brighter. Hopeful. Because writing is hard. And so often, we aren’t as privy to the hard parts, the potholes and krakens and quicksand, the long, pitted paths that lead to posts like these. But without the hard parts, without the rejections and failures, I wouldn’t be here.

Here, where I get to say: Immoral Code comes out from Knopf Books for Young Readers in Spring, 2019! Follow me here or on twitter (@lillianjclark) for updates!

 

Starting Over

So, I am terrible at posting. Maybe it’s a time thing. Maybe it’s that I’m not very comfortable talking about myself. But last I posted, I’d finished a complete rewrite of my YA speculative novel and was waiting to see if that rewrite would sell to a publisher. As it goes, it has not. Yet? Ever? Who knows. But in the year since, I’ve done a lot of wallowing and doubting and growing and learning as a writer. I also did a lot of writing. Hence, the title of this post: Starting Over.

The process of writing my first book was a long one. I got the idea at twenty. Wrote (total garbage that will never see the light of day) in a bunch of notebooks. Set those notebooks aside while I finished college. Scribbled notes and ideas as often as I could in the meantime, letting the idea grow into something less garbage. Then when I graduated, I got to work. (Some magic, unicorn people have managed to write fabulous books while also in school, but alas, I have a nearly impossible time splitting my focus between big projects.) Four years later, I had a book. Yes, four. I am not a fast writer. I had no idea what I was doing. I stumbled along, researching, writing, rewriting, getting advice, rewriting again, and again and again, until I had a product I was not embarrassed by. A product I figured was good enough for other people to actually, well, read. Then came querying. Over a year and sixty rejections later, I signed with my fabulous agent. Then came revising. Then, submission. (In the meantime, life. I worked full-time, got married, bought a house, had a baby, etc.) Submission brought more rejections and finally an R & R (a revise and resubmit request) which led to the aforementioned rewrite. A rewrite that went to acquisitions, but didn’t sell.

Which catches us up to… Yep! Starting over.

Not selling a book I’d spent the better part of my twenties working on was a tough blow. Working that hard at anything only to fail is never easy. It made me question my choices. I was a 29 year-old new mom who’d devoted the time most people use for career-building to an endeavor that didn’t go anywhere. I doubted myself. A lot. Publishing a book, having a career as a novelist, these are big and sometimes impractical dreams. Failure is inevitable. Doing thousands of hours of tedious, passionate, emotionally taxing, repetitive work for zero guarantees (and zero money if it doesn’t sell) is inevitable. And I knew while writing that book that failure was a possibility. A statistically likely one. But knowing that intellectually didn’t make the reality of it hurt less. I cried. I worried. I second-guessed nearly a decade’s worth of dedication.

Then I thought, Okay. Now what?

I still had my agent. Alongside those rejections, I’d gotten some positive feedback. And, really, what was I going to do? Quit? Throw away eight-odd years of painstakingly teaching myself how to write a novel? Or, start over?

It wasn’t easy. I was still so emotionally tied to my first novel and it’s failure that falling in love with a new one felt, irresponsible? After all, what if I did it again, all that work, all that emotional and intellectual effort, spent all that irretrievable time and energy, again, only to fail again? It was a high hurdle to overcome. One I scaled and tumbled over gracelessly while concurrently researching and writing the first draft of my new book if only because to not overcome would mean those years of teaching myself to write were truly a waste of time. Maybe this sounds melodramatic. And maybe it was. But writing is inherently an emotional endeavor. If I can’t care about my own work, my own characters, what they do and/or what happens to them, how can I ask a reader to?

At first, I faked it. I had this idea, so I ran with it. I read books for research. I outlined. I did character sketches and world-built. I wrote. And wrote and wrote and wrote. And slowly but surely, I got over the failure of my first book. I let it go. And I fell in love with my new one. I’d stopped faking it. And the best part? I stopped defining who I am as a writer by my first book. I stopped feeling like a failure if only because that book failed. Instead, I started seeing it for what it is. A step. A foundation. I found my agent with that book. I built bridges with that book. I started the life-long process of learning how to write with that book, a book that took me four years to reach a place it took me just eleven months to get to the second time around.

So, moral of the story? I can’t know if my second book will sell or end up shelved with my first one. But I can know that if it doesn’t, instead of calling it a failure, I’ll call it experience. And instead of starting over afterward, I’ll simply try again.

 

 

Emerging from the Rewrite Cave

Hello from outside the Rewrite Cave! Or maybe I should call it a tunnel as there was an entrance, a very long (as in, eight-plus months long) middle, an exit, and even the metaphorical light at the end, at first a pinprick and then daylight, searing the near-translucent skin of my hermitage.

In either case, 107k words, a shift in character ages, POV, an added alternating narrative, and countless domino changes later, here I am! Shouting into the void. Or, in the least, using hyperbole to describe my pasty skin.

This was not the first time I’ve completely rewritten my novel, though it was the most extensive (and hopefully the last), and the process earned me a few bits of wisdom that might help if you ever find yourself stuck in that tunnel too.

Here goes:

1. Nothing is sacred except for your integrity.

That scene you love and those secondary characters you think you can’t live without? You can. And you may have to.

Many of my darlings met their final Delete during this rewrite, and others mutated to serve different purposes. But while some cuts were harder than others, my goal was to write a better and more cohesive whole, not to cling to imagery and secondary tidbits that, while I liked them, no longer fit when the big picture shifted.

So, no clinging, except to your book’s ‘soul’. Your book is still your book. My book is still my book, and maintaining that, my story, my point, and my belief and confidence in both of those things, is something I’ll never sacrifice. (It’s also my firm belief that with the right agent and/or editor, you shouldn’t have to.)

2. Trust yourself.

This can be a tough one. After all, a big (the main?) reason to rewrite your manuscript at all is because as is, it isn’t working. Whether it’s the narrative’s point of view or tense, the pacing, world-building, character arc, or that it doesn’t quite fit in the market, the point of a rewrite is to fix what’s wrong with your book. And accepting that something (in my case, many things) isn’t working is a little like accepting that you’ve failed.

But, who doesn’t fail? Who writes everything perfectly from the first sentence? No one. (Don’t tell me differently, or I’ll have to plug my ears and hum until you’re done.) And being imperfect, having ‘failed’, doesn’t mean you can’t succeed, it just means you have to try again.

Therefore, trust yourself. You made it this far for a reason, most likely because of many reasons. So, focus. Find what does work within all the things that don’t, and run with it.

3. If you have to bang your head against the wall, do it gently.

No, really, don’t do this. Imagine it if you have to (worked for me), but find another, less violent outlet for your inevitable frustration. Like exercise. Or laughing maniacally in public. Or petting your (or a friend’s) dog.

4. Keep working.

Some days I stared at my computer and felt hopeless. Some days I ripped each word out of my brain, one at a time, like pulling my own teeth with rusty pliers. Some days EVERYTHING CAME TOGETHER AND I WROTE LIKE THE FREAKING WIND.

The point is, writing is hard! Really, really hard. Especially when you got so close and an epic rewrite feels a little like having to start over. Especially when there’s a fulltime job or a baby or insert-your-circumstance-here to take care of and you feel like there will never be enough time. But, as obnoxiously cliche as the next thing I’m going to say is, writing (and hopefully selling) a book is a lot like running a marathon or walking across the country or whatever arduous long-slog analogy you prefer. Because as those are done by putting one foot in front of the other, writing (or rewriting) a book is the art of putting one word after another after another after another after…

You get the point.

The point being, eventually, all those steps and all those words will add up, and you’ll be looking back at the exit to that incredibly long and dark tunnel, saying, “I did it. I’m actually done.”

5. Edit.

Pure and simple, edit your work. Be brutal. Be careful. Accept that it’s tedious, and take your time. Make your manuscript as clean and close to perfect as you can possibly make it. Because you want all that work to guarantee you’re giving yourself the best chance you’re capable of.

6. Feel proud.

You rewrote your book! You did it! And that is something to feel good about. Even if the objective success of this venture is still up for debate (as mine is), you accomplished something big. So, celebrate! Let yourself, even for a little while (as in, until you face number seven), feel nothing-held-back proud.

And finally, 7. Hit send, take a break (drink, sleep, binge-watch that show everyone’s been talking about that you haven’t had time for), and brace yourself for feedback and revisions. Because in writing,  you aren’t ‘done’ until that thing’s bound and printed. (And, even then, even if/when that happens, I’ll totally be that person inking up the pages of my own book.)