Am I really a writer now?

In recent weeks, I’ve seen my first novel, Picking Daisy, come to publication on Amazon.com through my publisher. I’ve been offered a contract on my second novel (that is finished) and today I submitted a novella per my publisher’s request. As a full-time professor, I have almost no time to write during the school year, so I’m hitting the writing life hard this summer, knowing it will soon be at an end.

But now people are asking questions like, ‘how did you come up with the story?’ and ‘how long did it take you to write the novel?’ While they may be aware of my other writing endeavors, the only one that really shines for them, like the tip of an iceberg with all the real weight of the thing below, is the novel they can hold in their hands or read on their Kindle. The rest is a mystery they don’t need or want to solve.

The sheer fascination in their voices tells me something clearly. Since my goal has been to see my novel published, I was under the false assumption that I’d come full circle. And more importantly, I was in real danger of losing the awe regarding my craft.

In other words,

writing is never done– and even when you’ve completed a stage of it like research or character creation, you will likely return to these stages later when your writing is open for others to see (a whole other frightening area I should probably unpack in another blog post).  At this point, people will want to know the ‘behind the scenes’ work you did months or even years earlier. It’s fun, and humbling, to go back.

But at the same time you’ll be moving forward. In my case, I had the novel published, was working to prepare a novel for submission, and in the back of my mind I was thinking about the edits I needed to make to the other novel that’s been finished but waiting for me for about two years.

My conclusion?

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Maybe because I never reached this stage before (except with academic writing, which is a whole other area of work), I didn’t realize that writing is cyclical. We get on the merry-go-round and won’t get off until we stop writing.

So strike up the music and hop on your horse (you know the kind that moves up and down while you hang onto the useless strap?)- and get writing!