The Process

I registered for a creative writing workshop at The University of North Florida in the fall of 2003. The professor, Mark Ari, and my classmates were this group of strangers I have an extreme love for to this day.  During that semester together we laughed so much and so hard I started smashing my fingertips into the skin under my eyes when I laughed, in an effort to self-Botox.  Freeze crow’s feet. It was useless.

The day of my critique, the story I’d been scribbling and snickering over to myself at home suddenly had twenty pairs of eyes on it.  Out of the blue, I was sick with embarrassment at all of my characters’ silly and outrageous acts. How juvenile, they will say.  Surprisingly, though, it went well. I got great feedback, critiques, and one resounding comment: Make this a longer work.

I took more workshops and by 2004 it reached seventy-five pages. I thought about my story constantly, it was playing in my head, like a movie, while I was doing dishes, driving my kids to soccer and ballet practice, in the grocery store. Even in conversations with others, the story was in the background, always swirling around, picking up momentum. And I would jot things down on little pieces of paper, and smile. Once I was jogging on a golf course and had a story idea I was scared I’d forget, so I stopped the beverage cart girl for paper and pencil and wrote some sweaty notes all over a golf course map. I was swept away in this process. My idea for a novel had grown monster truck wheels and was rolling on its own. The characters were writing themselves.

Then I stopped it.

I suddenly felt selfish that I wasn’t giving my whole mind to my children and my family. And I completely shelved my novel in the backburner of my brain, like a pot of beans, turning it to low so it wouldn’t burn, but warm enough that it’d keep on cooking. It didn’t cook, of course. It sat.  Because I didn’t just turn down the heat; I turned it OFF. All the while I’d say I was writing it. And every so often, over the years, I’d take it out and add something extra onto it, or change whole scenes.

Please. Never do that. Never let some perceived guilt stop your creative flow. It is a gift. It is the opposite of writer’s block, or any kind of creative block. It needs our attention. Then it feeds us back that glorious charge of inspiration, power, and beauty that creates a something from nothing.

In the spring of 2011, I woke up depressed. I had characters that’d been in limbo since 2005. They had lives and adventures and endings I was denying them. I just finished reading Stephen King’s On Writing for the third time when it finally sunk in. This novel ain’t gonna write itself.  Either do it, or burn it.

I sat down and did it. Parked my derriere at my desk each day between noon and 8 PM, from June to August, and finished.  Then a sweet swarm of writer friends and editors read my manuscript, gave me feedback, and I rewrote until December. Finished again. But I’d already started querying literary agents. The query is tough business. I spent hours and days in the fall of 2011 researching how to write the best query in THE WORLD, and trying my hand at about twenty-five different versions.  Literary agents replied, Thanks, but no.

In December of 2011, The Wall Street Journal did a piece on self-publishing, recounting how Darcy Chan became a best-selling author on Kindle, selling her book for ninety-nine cents.  I was in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the time, at the funeral of my father, and didn’t see the article until I returned home to Florida two weeks later and found it lying under a month’s worth of WSJ’s in the garage.  I was inspired.  I continued to query agents, but researched the self-publishing route a little more.  Twitter is apparently a great way for new authors to get noticed.  I have no clue how Twitter works, hash tags and everything, but I started following gobs of literary agents. Maybe one would notice my saucytweets, and ask me if I’d written any books lately.  I maybe squeezed out two fairly unsaucy tweets, but noticed one agent tweeted that Cogitate Studios was offering a contest. The winners would get their novel professionally edited for free.

I submitted the first thirty-five pages of my novel, and ended up being one of three winners. You’d think I’d won the lottery, or received a Nobel Prize. Such was my excitement.

When my story edits arrived in June of 2012, that skyrocketing feeling plummeted. Think: Wiley Coyote falling off a cliff. What I got from their comments was something like, YOUR STORY SUCKS. WE HATE YOU. I showed the Cogitate critiques to a few friends and complained. They agreed Cogitate was being too hard on poor me. Those fascists.

But two weeks later I woke up from my pity party and reread their reviews. They were good comments. I was grateful. They also said they enjoyed my story. Somehow I missed that part in the first read-through.

In August I started my rewrite, creating a whole new back-story. Now another June is sneaking up on me.  But I’m doing it. I’m not doing it for anyone but me. Yes, I wish others would love it. Along the way I’ve created about fifty different covers, and retitled it several times, per the photo for this blog. But, it is happening.

I shy away from morals to stories, but if this has one, it’s hurry up and do it. What’s it?  You already know. Once you begin, the process itself takes long enough, so get crackin’.

(And…If you like any of the above book covers, could you please tell me?)

—Raleigh Rand