Muchness and Light

Come on, get your reasoning.

When I got suggested revisions for Persona Non Grata from my editor last month, I cried.

"She hates it," I told Tiff over the phone.

"She does not, Stephanie.  How could she hate it?  What did she say?"

Tiff and I went page by page through the draft, as I shared Leigh's comments.

"Steph, stop.  She doesn't hate it.  Some of her points are valid, and this is why you chose her."

They were both right, of course.  I have an inner circle of friends who've read one or more drafts, but I chose Leigh to edit for me because I knew she would push me with a perspective that was different from my own.  Some of her suggestions were absolutely spot-on.  Some I've opted not to take, which is totally within my prerogative as author. 

But, as she told me, she pushes me as hard as she would push herself.  She is there to help me make this into the best work it can be, not something that's just good enough. 

Within a couple of days, I started making changes.  Most of them were small, niggling details or typos that needed to be fixed.  As soon as I hit the hardest part of the work, though, my writer brain shut down. 

It wasn't that I was blocked mentally from the work.  I knew what needed to happen and how.  But I was having a really hard time wrapping my heart around these characters again. 

Writing Persona Non Grata has been incredibly emotional for me.  There's a lot of my real self in there—as well as a lot that's made up—and stepping back into the hearts and minds of those characters is exhausting.  I've been in and out of them so many times now that they are as intimately familiar to me as any real person.  Their lives and the story have a certain rollercoastery ebb-and-flow that can tumult my own heart at times, and I was very intimidated by slipping into that place again.

I sat for a week or more with about forty pages that needed to be reworked.  Some of it needed to be cut.  Some of it needed to be expanded.  All of it needed to be rearranged.  I couldn't just skip it and go back, because it would drive how I handled some other major turns of events.  Finally, I printed the pages and cut them apart, taping them back together in a solid framework of plot.  Then I was able to tweak those details and get going again.

Yesterday, I revised about fifteen chapters.  By 11:00 last night, I was wiped.  So I put it away for the night and will be back at it today. 

I'm 2/3 of the way finished now.  Then I have to reread the entire thing again before I pass it back to Leigh.  I'm trying to get it finished before my last surgery on August 1^st.  Even though I added an entirely new chapter (and several new or extrapolated passages), this revision is actually two chapters shorter than the last.  It's tighter and better balanced... exactly like my editor wanted.    

Turns out, her two cents is worth ten grand. 

 

The print is smaller than the ants in the grass, I'll have to put it away now.

For the last eleven years or so, any time I would fill out a form that required my occupation, I would write in "Mom".  I didn't use "Homemaker" or "Stay-at-Home" anything for my profession.  Most of my work did involve my home, certainly, but that wasn't the primary focus of my daily functions; it was my children. 

Sometime around the beginning of 2011, I started to answer "Writer" if I were feeling particularly brave.  Muchness and Light was a few months into its existence, and I was working on the original version of the first Junkture story.  (That's all been altered now, and the characters were repurposed for Persona Non Grata.) 

I was sitting by the neighborhood pool last week while the boys were at swim practice.  I was reading my editor's notes and marking up her copy even further, planning the revisions I started that night.  Another mom walked by and asked what I was studying.

"I'm reading... for edits," I said tentatively.

"You're an editor?" she asked.

"No," I replied, "I'm a writer."

She was surprised, though there are a lot of women who run in my Mom circles who have no idea about what I do.  I don't know them very well outside of the confines of PTA or school functions, but I know them well enough to feel confident that Muchness and Light isn't their cup of tea.  I sense they would likely brand me a heretic and suggest I wear some scarlet letter.  (I would suggest F, to be funny, but that would just knot their knickers even twistier.)

Even when I wasn't sharing what I was doing, I was almost always writing.  There are lots of short essays and stories on my computer that no one but me has ever seen.  Occasionally when I need an idea or to remember something that was once much clearer, I'll go back to those pieces and see what goodness there is to be culled from the crap.  Every so often, I'm surprised when I read something really old and try to find a way to work it into another piece. 

I started to think yesterday about what makes me a writer.  It's not the success.  I make virtually no money now with my writing, and I have a small but growing fan base from all over the world.  No one was more surprised than I was that anyone else wanted to read what I had to say. 

There is something visceral in me that needs to write.  It's as natural to me as breathing.  I do it almost every day and often for hours.  Tiff and Mo and Mandypants know I will call them when I need to work through something—which seems to be all the time—but I also turn to my computer screen when there's something bothering me.  I used to write terrible poetry all by hand, and the process of physically creating the words in my uneven script was soothing to me.  I loved the sound of pen or pencil scraping across clean, white paper.  Now it's the soft clicking of the keyboard that soothes me.  I love the uneven syncopation of the process of thought taking on a more tangible form, the start and stop of the energy of creating words that have never before been combined in such a way.   

I've been stuck for hours in the middle of a new scene for Persona Non Grata, unable to find the way forward for those characters in their moment.  I decided to put it away for now and write something else, namely this post.  Already I can feel the shift in vivacity.  Taking the time to think about something else in a completely different voice will let the other voices rest for a while until they're ready to murmur their refreshed truths to me once more. 

I'm braver now to tell other people that I'm a writer.  Even when they ask if I've ever published anything, I can only answer with my blog.  Sometimes they'll go read it; sometimes not.  But it doesn't change what I do and why.

So what are you?  What makes you what you are?  Is it what everyone else thinks you are?  Is it what you think you are?

The world is scratching at my door.

I just finished proofreading the latest draft of my book.  I'd originally thought I would write about these things I wanted to tackle as non-fiction, but I later decided fictionalizing it would give me the freedom to cover some things in a better way. 

And I was right.

It allowed me to step outside of chronology and other constraints and to explore characters in ways I might not have otherwise been able to do.  Where one person in the book would be tied to a real person in my life, the characters could become amalgamous renditions of conversations and experiences.  I wasn't hamstrung by reality and found that I could be even more frank and honest than I'd originally thought possible. 

There are a lot of things in this piece that are real.  There are a lot that aren't.  I wrote a lot about what I knew and a little bit about what I didn't.  I turned it over to the inner circle for feedback and comment, which has so far been overwhelmingly positive.  Yes, these are people who know me well, but they also know I want their honest opinions.  I feel confident that I will get real, barely-tempered reaction from them.  That's why I chose the readers I did for this phase of the project.

What I also found was that I was pleased with what I've written.  Even though I see details and edits and things I want to change, I am happy with this work.  I can look at it and say, "It's good."  It was scary as hell at first, when I started to mark up my printed copy.  All of my niggling fears of not being good enough, or feeling like I had no right to write, all came rushing to the forefront of my mind.  My heart pounded, and I cried, thinking I was stupid to have ever thought I could do this. 

But as I calmed that and looked further, I found the energy and found the truth behind those words.  I found the places where my characters could say the things that I may have been afraid to say, both to others and to myself. 

I have no delusions that I've written the Great American Novel.  As much as I would love for this to be a smash hit when it's published (hopefully by the end of the summer), I know the statistical chances of that are pretty slim.  That's scary, and it's the kind of challenge that might have historically been so daunting that I backed down from it, in fear and apprehension that I couldn't succeed, that I would make a fool of myself if I carried through. 

And it's not that the trepidation is gone; it's just that I know I can do this.  And I want to do this.  Maybe for the first time in my life, it's a challenge that doesn't bore me, that excites me, that I can't wait to see through to the end.  It's not to prove a point to me or to anyone else.  It's just because it is.  It exists, and it deserves the chance to fly on its own, even if no one else ever sees that graceful flutter. 

So, it's coming.  Persona Non Grata will be here very, very soon.  There's still a lot of work to do, and I'm ready, methodically plodding through each step, trying carefully not to miss anything. 

And when it's done, I'm off and on to my next project.  I already know what it will be, though I'm holding back my own thoughts about it.  I can't start to focus on what's coming next until I can finish what's before me now.  I'm being careful to stay in this moment without worrying about the next.  I know there's something around the bend; I just can't look at it until I see every inch of this part of my path. 

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