Picking Your Project: Part I

 

I turned in my revisions a couple of weeks ago.  Now, as I wait on line edits to arrive, I’m beginning to think about what I might want to write next.  The possibilities are always exciting, but at the same time, they are overwhelming.  The way I see it, the really, really bad news about women’s fiction is that anything (and everything) is the gamut you’re meant to pick from.  The challenge is never about having nothing to write.  It seems always to be about, what is the best thing, smart thing, right thing for me to take on as the next novel.  What is it about options that becomes totally paralyzing?

When Bill and I bought our house, a 1921 Arts & Crafts bungalow, the place had been a rental property for over forty-years.  And like most aging rentals, we really had to look beneath the surface to see the beauty of it.  Apparently the landlord had only one paint color to choose from.  Beige.  Inside and out, every room, wall and ceilings: beige.  It did have nice hardwood floors in the living room and dining room.  However, for the rest of the house, there was apparently a carpet outlet next to the beige paint store.  Room after room of shag-ish vintage carpeting in a shade that I’m sure was probably called chocolate.  Actually it was the exact color of Texas cockroaches.  The cockroach theme was enhanced in the family room where one accent wall was papered in suede of the same hue. 

We wanted to restore the place ourselves, paying as we go along, one project at a time.  Looking around at all that we wanted to do, the dilemma was where to begin.  Should we start out small?  Start out big?  Tackle the worse problems?  Learn on the easier ones?  Make the inside more comfortable to live in?  Update the outside so it looks like somebody lives here?  

Picking a writing project is similarly riddled with questions of choice.  Advice on the subject basically falls into two camps.  There are those who tell us to study the market, understand what readers are buying and where we can find a niche for our work.  And there are those who tell us to write that story that only we can write, the one that tugs at our heart, haunts our dreams, fulfills our fantasies. 

I admit to typically being among the latter group.  I’m guilty of constantly suggesting to people that it is about the writing.  Our job is not selling books, not promoting books, not tweet trending books.  We may have to do all of those things.  But it’s writing books that we’ve selected as our life’s work, so our stories should be completely connected with who we are and what we love.  We must be telling, not those stories that experts say are popular, but the ones that only we have imagined to exist. 

That’s what I’ve thought.  That’s what I think. 

But I also think that I might be wrong. 

When I started pondering this, my sense was, “oh fortunate me.  I’ve had a charmed career where I’ve always been able to write the book of my heart.”  But the thought was barely complete in my brain when I realized how false it was.  I’ve had enough proposals turned down to paper the interstate between here and Topeka.  Most of them I’ve forgotten, but a few linger with me.  A handful of them are even attached to wistful thoughts of “someday, sometime, somehow”.  Those are bittersweet, almost melancholy ruminations.  But I need to be careful not to confuse them with the reality. 

For every book I did not get to write, I wrote another story.  A story that I love just as much and to which I became equally as connected and transformed by. 

Or to take Stephen Stills out of context, “If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.” 

If you can write, then I believe you can write anything.  And every story you write is yours, if you make it so.  Every theme can be your theme, every setting one that you can breath inside.  You are a writer with a writer’s heart.  And you can find a place for that heart in any novel about anything. 

So get those paint rollers, rip up that carpet.  The next step is a new adventure and I can hardly wait.