The scrapping of a novel (and its rebirth)

Last you heard from me, I was coming back to work from my maternity leave, and expressing small (okay, medium) amounts of terror at the thought that it was also time to kick my creative life back into gear.

My creative life had been in neutral for pretty much a year. Plus, with another grey Chicago winter upon us, for the good of my soul (and my family’s happiness, so much of which is tied into my own happiness), I need to be working on something. A ridiculous short story? Sure. An unpublishable novel? Sure. A collection of poems about minestrone? Whatever. As long as I’m excited about the project and committed to seeing it through, I’ll do anything.

How about a project about me, Mom?

Uh . . . all I got is this:

You are so roly

your rolls bedazzle me, son

let me squeeze them now.

(No, it doesn’t rhyme, my son)

(It’s called haiku)

Anyway, there’s something about having gumbo bubbling around in your creative cauldron that just makes it harder to be sad/down/depressed/eating chocolates and popcorn because you’re not sure what else to do. Whether or not the gumbo is edible at the end–well, that’s not exactly the point.

The point is the process.

Everyone says so.

I say so.

Anyway! I blogged about choosing among my bajillion ideas and committing to a project, and I’m back to report that I HAVE COMMITTED.

And the project I picked makes a lot of sense. It’s a project I wrote and revised last year. Then it sat on the computer. I thought about querying it, but then I didn’t. I think part of me realized it wasn’t ripe (good job, Jenna’s Subconscious). When I opened up the document recently, I cataloged its problems. Unlikable heroine (again! Ugh). Slow pacing. Too much gratuitous description. Way too many scenes that didn’t further the plot. A cool set-up with a less-than-cool pay-off. Etcetera, etcetera. The thought of fixing it (mangling it and then trying to restitch it all back together) was too much (not to mention I didn’t want to create a Frankennovel), so there was only one solution:

I scrapped the novel, gathered its ashes into a small, sooty pile, and will henceforth try to birth a phoenix kind of a thing.

In other words, same characters, same story, but new writing. New pacing. New scenes, new dialogue, new structure, new new new.

The benefits of this are clear–I know the characters pretty well. After all, I’ve written a novel about them before, albeit a crappy one. I know the story and happen to love it, too. But there’s enough mystery in how I’m going to pull it off in this new and better-paced, page-turning way that I’m feeling that familiar exhilaration/fear.

Last night I was typing away and I felt a wonderful surge in my chest.

“I can do this!” I said.

Five minutes later,

“I don’t think I can pull it off,” I said.

Then I remembered–this is what it’s like to write a book. A wave of confidence followed by a wave of fear. You’re holding puzzle pieces but you don’t see how they’re going to fit together. You’re not even sure, in fact, that all the pieces are from the correct puzzle.

Sometimes the words flow. The scenes make sense. You’re on a roll. And, other times, like the Grinch, you sit there until your puzzler is sore, without typing a word, and you think I’m never getting out of this one. Then, in the middle of a hot shower as you’re singing Rudolph the Reindeer in harmony with an imaginary Fred Astaire, suddenly the solution comes to you and you rush out only mostly rinsed because you’d better write it down before it all evaporates.

The up-and-down of confidence and fear–it’s been so long since I’ve felt it.

And it’s good.

It’s the process.

It’s what I’ve been wanting. Waiting for. Longing for.

Hallelujah! Bring on the challenge.