Writing A Novel Is Hard

Writing a novel is such a freaking roller coaster ride and I don't even like roller coasters all that much anymore.  One day I'm really proud of what I've created and then the next day I'm convinced it's the worst thing anyone has ever written. I have loved and loathed this painstakingly created collection of words a million times over during this entire process.

I let my mom be the first person to read it in paper form and make edits.  Then I read it for myself and made edits of my own.  I tried not to even think about it for about two months so that helped me look at it with fresh eyes.  It started out really good.  It was interesting and I liked what I was reading but then it fell flat.  There were different parts of the story that were just boring and other parts where I just didn't like my own writing.  I was probably really over it the day I wrote certain parts and I could tell.  After spending years and years on this it was really discouraging and I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do to fix it.  I had a few ideas, but nothing concrete.  Nothing I felt confident about making that difference I needed to make. 

I decided to deal with the basic edits first.  Getting through it was tedious but I had to get it done from the paper version  before I started making any major changes in Word.  A lot of it was grammar, some of it was wording, some of it was calling characters by the wrong name, but all of it was really time consuming.  It was page after page, correction after correction and it felt like it would never end.  It took me about three sessions to get it all done.  I did session two at my favorite coffee shop and I felt really old school carting that giant stack of paper around but in a really good way.  A really proud way.  Like, I wrote that.  Those are my words.  Every single last one of them.  It's technically a manuscript although I don't feel comfortable referring to it as such. 

After I finished that round of corrections it was time to get back to writing mode and start trying to make it better. That's when I got discouraged again because I still wasn't sure exactly where to start.  Part of me just wanted to be done with it.  I wasn't totally satisfied, but I did what I set out to do.  I wrote over 100,000 words.  I wrote a novel and it's done.  I was tired of thinking about this thing so maybe that was good enough.  That's what I tried to tell myself, except it wasn't good enough and I couldn't rest until I made it better.

Spurred along by forces outside myself that wouldn't allow me to give up; I sat there at my dining room table with my laptop open one Sunday morning.  I looked at the random notes I'd made in my phone while I did my paper reading.  I made some more notes in my dog eared spiral notebook.  I did a little bit lot of staring into space, and then I started typing.  Once I got started I couldn't stop.  I removed entire sections added new ones and moved existing things around.  If changed one part of the story I had to go through the entire thing and update any related parts.  One thing led to another and I was sent into constant editing mode of finishing and improving for a good two weeks.  I'd think about a sentence that should be changed or something else I needed to add on my way home from work and immediately open my lap top and do it when I got home.  If I thought of something else while I was in bed I'd add a note to my phone and add it in the next day.  My mind was constantly racing with thoughts and ideas about this fictional group of people that I've come to know and love.  It's exhausting and it doesn't seem to stop no matter how much I kind of wish it would until I feel that it's where it needs to be.  I've only had a few different updates pop into my head over the last week.  I'm really excited about the changes I made and I think it's pretty much where it needs to be for now, until I decide that I hate it again.  I mostly meant to trim things down but my word count unintentionally went up.  I'm sitting at 471 pages and 111,301 words of double spaced Courier New. 

The obvious question is, "Now what?" and the annoying answer is still, "I don't know."