That Statistically-Impossible Moment When You Actually Like The Book You're Working On
Photo by Kaitlyn Baker
Hello! I hope, whoever and wherever you are, you’re having a most beautiful day. I will start by saying that this post is a little longer than my previous ones, but please do sit down with me and help me celebrate one of the most fantastically bizarre times of my entire life – this one’s wild, to undersell it.
I’ve been a writer pretty much all my life, though it was only in 2011 that I determined authorhood was my future. Not once in the nine years since have I felt otherwise, though being a writer does present definite challenges. To simplify what it is to be a writer, imagine trying to run a computer with 168,000 applications all open at once. Needless to say, it descends into absolute chaos. Your mind seemingly only shuts up when you force yourself to go to sleep at 3am. That’s just me, though, thankfully there are fleeting phases where my body decides 10pm is a better fit. Ultimately, I imagine I’m not alone in my difficulties with those 168,000 applications. Characters, entire books that refuse to be translated onto paper, worlds that no one else will ever see that will linger for years and years… it’s a whole thing, and it makes the world you flounder about within a rather peculiar place. Crazier yet is when you have all that going on, on top of a life. Work, school, family, socialising to varying extents, even if only with the cat… attempting to remember to eat and shower regularly is a big one.
For me, there are mixed degrees of success to all of this. Unfortunately for me, I have a whole host of illnesses that make functioning properly infinitely more difficult. I’m not the worst-off person I know, but something I’ve come to embrace is that just because someone else has it worse than you doesn’t mean that what you have is invalid or dismissible. Just because I can get out of bed and do basic activities doesn’t mean that my heart rate isn’t still shooting up when I’m upright, or that I could run outside and do a marathon, much less a race. And simply because I can interact with others and stay invested in my hobbies doesn’t mean that my depression and anxiety isn’t there. There’s a lot of stigma around being sick – around mental health, especially – and it’s exceedingly toxic. But my health issues are a post for another day. Today, I’d like to focus on the positive.
In 2017, for NaNoWriMo (National November Writing Month, a charity-based initiative where writers try and complete 50,000 words in November), I knew I wanted to write something new. And out of nowhere, a series of short stories came together about a girl who envisioned herself partaking in these grand adventures in a fantastical world. Over a dozen short stories in all came to mind. I had four heroes and one antagonist, I had basic plots for each tale, artefacts for the heroes to find… I loved it, I loved the world, and most of all, I adored this one particular scene of my heroine drifting in a boat over a river that reflected a many-coloured sky, gliding her fingers through the pastel clouds, moon, and stars. I have never gotten that image out of my head, even as I lost steam with the book and failed the challenge at 23,000 words. The next year, I focussed on another project, only for last year when a picture I had printed during the short story collection – concept art for one of the characters – ended up on my desk again. It stared me down. So here I am, late January of 2019, being intimidated by a picture into writing about that world again.
Needless to say, yes, I got bullied into going back to this world by a picture. No judgement, please. It ended up being one of the best things that has ever happened to me.
I started rebuilding the world, having only a map I’d drawn up initially as a guide. I had new characters, the main one staying more or less the same (if not a little angstier), ultimately figuring out the rest without any of my old notes to cloud me. It took me a few days to figure out what the story would be in place of what it had been. I will add that it wasn’t until a week into this that the character whose concept art had dragged me in in the first place had found a place in any of it. Cheers, Domino (spoiler warning, that is her name). Ultimately, I had only rough dot points for what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go, with a lot left to my own imagination to fill in as I went along.
‘Tis But a Snippet of the Project’s Hand-Drawn World Map!
I started writing on the 2nd of February of 2019. I finished halfway through March at 109,000 words.
I had never written a manuscript with so much worldbuilding yet to do. My writing was a wildfire, my keyboard helpless as I wrote page after page, consumed by this story. I came up with fresh ideas partway through, then carried on as if I’d always had those ideas in place. I knew this draft was a shitshow, but there was something there.
I left the manuscript for a few weeks. I will add I was in the middle of a university semester at the time, reading and doing assignments while riding this project out. Once my semester was done in May, I went back. I printed all 479 pages out, read it through, not touching it once with a pen – honestly, the not correcting my many, many mistakes was by far the hardest part of that draft.
I will say, cutting in here, is that in that semester, I received perhaps the best writing advice I have ever been given. Which is write what you’re writing out, then let it sit for a few weeks. Give it time to separate from your brain. That way, when you’re reading it through, you only see what you wrote, not what you wanted to write. My reading manuscripts as soon as I drafted the darlings has killed so many of them. But this…
I didn’t hate the draft. There were so many plot holes that if I’d fallen into all of them combined, I’d have died upon impact at the bottom, but there was something feasible here. The characters, the bare-boned world, the story, I genuinely wanted to go back in and refine it. I wanted to take all my ideas, finalise the worldbuilding, and carry on.
If my health hadn’t taken a turn for the worst, mucking me up for virtually the entire second half of the year, I probably would have gone back in then. But alas, with crippling headaches and mental health that spiralled downhill in almost spectacular fashion, writing became an impossibility. My whole deal with not having been able to write is also an entire post for another time well down the track. But yes, that all sucked, my semester in that time was a disaster, and I had jaw realignment surgery! The surgery was thankfully at the end of the worst of my health spiral, and though it was a tremendously expensive ordeal, having my jaw pulled forward was another of the best things I’ve ever done.
The picture that started it all, by Dropdeadcoheed
Fast-forward to this year. I will preface this next part by saying I suspect February has become my month of madness, my time of getting shit down. I was due to have a procedure to help with my crippling headaches, and I had found the only pain relief that helped me not feel like my head would explode every hour of every day. And so I had enough energy to get back into this project. I built myself a 60-page companion book with the characters, significant settings, and deities that feature – though many are not yet mentioned in the book as I imagine it will one day be published. Once that was done, on the 4th of February, I started writing… at chapter two, chapter one was actually written after I’d finished chapter 61, one of the final chapters in the manuscript. Over two weeks after I started the draft, I had the procedure to help my headaches. That was on the 13th of February, and I was sitting at 13,000 words.
On the 28th of February, not a couple of weeks later, I finished draft #2 at 140,000 words. I still cannot tell you what happened, except maybe my brain realised I could finally write again. To my brain: if this is your means of compensation, I’m totally cool with that, and I’m all too keen for more.
I left it for roughly a week or so. I read through the draft. I still didn’t hate the book.
For non-writers, I will clarify that getting to the end of the second draft and still enjoying the project is a statistical impossibility. Like, it’s genuinely one of the most bizarre experiences of a writer’s life. I have spent a fair bit of time wondering what is even happening to prompt this non-hatred. I’m enjoying the enjoying of my work, but that doesn’t mean I’m not confused as all heck.
So now, for March, I’ve written a chapter guide (including all my necessary corrections) for the book’s first third. The story doesn’t need dramatic changes this time around, meaning that so far, editing this book has been… really smooth-sailing? I still don’t get it.
Right now as of writing this post, I’ve just finished chapter seven and am about to go through chapter eight. By the time this post becomes public, I may have already reached chapter nine or ten. I am delighted with this story, with its direction, with the foreshadowing and the worldbuilding, and especially the characters. Oh, how I love these characters.
While there are things I know need fixing, like the density of the writing, it’s all… okay? The density’s a given, though; after all, we’re looking at a high-fantasy that is introducing a brand new world, meaning potential expo-dumps are a dime a dozen. And yeah, it’s a little bit confuzzling that I’m not feeling the need to scrap and rebuild, if we’re being honest.
Still, I will take actually-enjoying my work over imminent mental breakdowns any day. Writing very rarely gives any of the former, all the while it’s all too happy to dole out all of the latter, so indeedydo, much obliged, brain!
Thank you for reading — I post on Fridays! And again, please do have a great day.
— Charis.
