From Summering to Storytelling

This post was written on September 12, 2016.

And so the school year begins. Today is the first school day for both kids. Lucia started first grade last week; Greta started pre-K today. 

I’ve had back-to-school butterflies in my stomach for over a week, and the girls’ new beginnings are only partly to blame. My own re-start is also roiling in my gut. The truth is that I haven’t sat down to write in months. This stepping away from new work was deliberate: Each Vagabond by Name deserved my full attention, and I’ve enjoyed every second I’ve spent on promoting it. That said, I’m a creature of habit, and having been out of the daily writing process for so long makes the prospect of returning to it daunting. 

A couple of weeks ago, I opened up the Word doc of my novel-in-progress, and read the first few lines. Seeing my yellow-highlighted jumble of paragraphs and chapters and all-caps editing notes and ideas--without any kind of comprehensive memory of what-all I’ve actually written, changed, deleted, inserted, brainstormed, planned, envisioned--was panic-inducing. This is the problem with dipping in this way, a few minutes at a time--there’s no time to get a foothold, or even a toehold. As a result, the three hundred pages of semi-coherent sentences hit me like the powerful waves at the beach this summer that knocked my kids off their boogie boards. Crashing over me, pushing me under, leaving me scrabbling on the sand.

Those stolen minutes can stretch out now, and I can breathe a little. Starting today, I’ll be able to actually read through my draft carefully to get a sense of where I stand. With four hours a day to work, I’ll be able to make steady progress. First: reread the draft. Next: make notes. Finally: dig into revising and rewriting. The way forward is clear.

And yet…

Anticipating a return to my writing life isn’t at all pleasant. Though I swore I’d be a plot-focused, efficiently outlining writer for this novel--avoiding the many drafts of pointless meandering that have always been my roundabout path to finding my story--there is a lot, lot, lot of pointless meandering right now. A lot of dead ends, an unclear trajectory, a question of what, exactly, the novel is about. You’d think, three hundred pages in, that I’d have an answer. And I will. I know I will. Even if I don’t right now.

And so the work looms. Starting today, I’ll once again be bee-lining home after preschool dropoff, pouring a cup of coffee before sitting down at my desk, where I’ll spend fraught hours writing and rewriting and scribbling lists and notes that won’t make sense to me the next day but are vital to getting the revision done. 

It sounds awful. Is it that awful? It’s kind of that awful. But on the other side of these next few months is a new draft of--something. Something that will have a coherent beginning, middle, and end. And digging into that draft--the one where the story is finally clear--will be so much fun. I can’t wait to see it, to work on it. The me of November, or December, will be so grateful to the me of right now, who bore down on the rewrite despite being certain, at this juncture, that I need to scrap the whole thing and start something new. 

Daily, I’ll be tempted to set the pages on fire. 

Onward, friends.