I started writing my novel in January 2011. I intended it to be a work of crime fiction told from the point of view of three characters, but a week after I sat down to write, I had 20,000 words and the first narrator was still going on and on (and on) about her mother.
Hmmm.
In the last three years, I have written perhaps 150,000 words on this novel and deleted most of them, trying to take it in directions different from the one I know it’s meant to go in—an exploration of how a selfish, suicidal, emotionally-insecure woman makes the journey from daughter to mother. That it coincided with my own journey from daughter to mother (I got pregnant three months after I started working on this novel) scared me from exploring motherhood and that I know intimately about depression because I suffered from it for years (and still do on occasion) put me off for fear of being judged. I follow far too many authors and am a part of far too many author groups to not know that everyone thinks an author’s first work is basically based on their life. And while this may be partly true, this book isn’t my story and I’m not writing about my mother or my husband or my kid or my neighbor or my friends.
Over the years, I’ve tried to write a book that hides away from what I know it should be. Every time I wrote a scene that was emotionally raw, the logical, rational part of me warned against going too deep. This is the intelligent part in each of us, the part that is worldly wise, that knows the market, that knows the questions readers and editors and friends will ask. And the intelligent part of us frequently wins the battle over the emotional, artistic part of us because we’re already vulnerable when we write and becoming publicly so scares us. It’s easier not to explore motherhood because I might write something horrible in my character’s voice that people might attribute to me. It’s easier not to write about depression because my character might do something that people will suspect I did.
This is what stops us from querying the journalistic stories that we truly believe in (why would they assign a story on such a controversial issue to a newbie?), sending out the personal essays about our families (what if my uncle doesn’t like how I’ve portrayed his wife?), and finishing the novels that we know deserve to be out there in the world.
We allow our intelligent selves to create excuses so logical and so beyond reproach that we sabotage our own success. But the thing is, most of writing—including journalism—isn’t always about practicality and logic. Sometimes you need to tell a story because it’s important. Sometimes you need to tell it because you care about it too deeply not to. And sometimes, you tell it for no rhyme or reason other than that you must. And when you do, it becomes imperative that you not let your sound rational judgment stand in your way.
I’ve written 30,000 words on the novel this month and I can see the road ahead shining brightly. Once you give yourself permission to write the book you really want to, it’s amazing how quickly the words can flow.
Think about this today: What would you write if your own good sense weren’t standing in your way and what will it take for you to shove that smart ass part of yourself in the corner?