Beginning

Begin at the beginning… and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

I was twenty years old when I wrote my first book in just under two weeks. My right foot had mysteriously swelled up to double its size and turned a sickly shade of blue. The doctor wasn’t sure what had caused it – maybe an infection? But she put me on a massive dose of antibiotic and Vicadin for pain and told me to stay home and rest. In a drug-induced fog I bellied up to the computer and started to type. I didn’t stop until I was done. The Fire at Redfish Lake was a middle-grade adventure about three children who get trapped in the mountains during a forest fire. It had action, humor, even a little romance. More importantly, it had a beginning, middle and end.

Back then I was pretty much convinced that writing a book was as simple as sitting down with a vaguely formed idea and writing out a story until it was finished. Maybe a bit of editing, but basically ready to send off to a publisher. Done and done.

So when I read Fire at Redfish Lake all the way through and discovered that I didn’t like it very much at all, I filed it away under “that one wasn’t very good, I’ll try again someday” and went on with my business.

Years went by and I didn’t write another word. “I’ll try again someday” started to fade into “Maybe I’m not really a writer after all,” and the creative urges fizzled until they were gone. Some people say that true writers have to write – that they can’t not write. That their heads are overflowing with ideas and stories that insist on spilling over onto paper. This didn’t happen to me. Not writing made me not want to write, until I found that I had no stories to tell.

If you don’t have any stories, you’re clearly not a writer. At least that’s what I told myself.

Fast-forward to this year, when a childhood friend moved back to Seattle –a friend who had shared my writing dreams. “We need to start a writing group!” she said. I was noncommittal—I had my job and my family and a lot of episodes of Revenge that I needed to catch up on. But she was insistent and so, a month ago, we had our first meeting.

Preparing for that meeting was torture. I cleaned every room in my house. I organized. I washed and folded clothes. I designed and ordered my Christmas cards – in October. Anything but writing. The day we were scheduled to meet I spent the last part of my workday throwing something together, then showed up and nervously helped myself to a glass of wine. We warmed up with a simple writing exercise, and then one-by-one, we each read aloud the piece that we had brought.

Feedback was kind but honest. Each person shared constructive ideas for how to improve and edit, what to cut and what to keep. We didn’t always agree, but we all agreed that it mattered.

That first meeting opened the floodgates. Motivation surged through my veins and I woke up the next morning at 6am and sat down to write. And then I did it again on the next day and the day after that. We flew to Maui for a week vacation and I wrote every day. Even though I was stuck inside on my computer when the sun shone brilliantly outside. Even though there were a hundred other things to do. I wrote for the entire airplane ride home – long-hand in a tiny notebook after my laptop battery died. I wrote over 9,000 words on that airplane.

This is how I wrote my second book in just over three weeks. Another middle-grade novel that is yet to be titled.

Immediately after writing the last sentence, I sat down to read it, beginning-to-end.

I hated it.

But this time, something was different. As much as I hated the writing, I loved the story. Even though it needed work — a discouraging, overwhelming, mind-boggling amount of work — I wasn’t ready to give up. This was a story that deserved to be told. And no matter what it took, no matter how many revisions and edits, no matter how many long nights I would have to struggle for hour after hour to find just the right word, I wouldn’t give up.

I will not give up.

Related Posts:

• Tips for attending your first writer’s conference
• The wake-up call
• A cluttered mind

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