I hate calling myself a writer. I just do. It feels like every person in the world is a writer these days, and it really grosses me out to put it out there. Because then I have to clarify it and it makes me want to vomit.
But alas, it’s true. I write. I’ve always written. When I was six, I used to walk through the backyards of my neighborhood by myself and make up stories. I did this for many, many years; the neighbors probably called me the Weird Kid Who Talks to Herself.
The first fully composed story I wrote down filled a one-subject spiral bound notebook. The notebook had a yellow cover, that much I remember. I handwrote it and let my fellow sixth-graders read it. People liked it. I was eleven and I had written a story, with chapters, that had a beginning, middle, and an end. Plotting was suspect, and characterization was nonexistent. It was, most likely, a total Babysitter’s Club knockoff. But people liked it. I got a little validation – I could do this.
A few years later I read a series of books by an author named Katherine Applegate. They were short and serialized, but unlike the Babysitter’s Club and Sweet Valley High they had a defined end point. She told her story in eight installments. I fell in love with them. I still have those little mass market paperbacks, and I still read them every year or so. I loved how she wove the details into the story instead of stopping in the middle of the book to remind you of who was friends with who and what everyone looked like (which were the hallmarks of BSC and SVH). It sounds minor and obvious, but this was a revelation to me.
I started writing my own series of books. The early drafts were, to be fair, pretty much direct ripoffs. Applegate’s books were set on an island off the coast of Maine and involved a group of friends whose lives were forced to intersect because of proximity. Mine were set on an island off the coast of South Carolina and while my island wasn’t as tiny, my characters fit into the stock character molds of many of Applegate’s.
Over time the books shifted. They were still set on the island, but the island got bigger. Their world got bigger. I got older, and my characters got much more interesting and became much more mine. I got a degree in creative writing along the way. I let people read various drafts, some of which would make me cringe in agony if I reread them today. I worked on other projects, but ultimately it came back to these characters, and this story, every time. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to write anything else until I finish this series, which is vaguely depressing until I remember how much I love these people that I created.
But recently it got harder. I’ve been at a standstill for a while. I sit down to write and just tinker around with the same sentences. I really like most of my scenes and most of the plot; I’ve rewritten them so many times that I can’t even begin to start over again. All I do is think of various character traits or descriptions, but honestly I feel like it’s not the characterization I have problems with – it’s bigger than that. So I sit petrified with inability to do anything.
This is because I had a breakthrough with the aid of a few helpful readers. I realized I had something really stupid happen at the end of the first part, something that I nicknamed the Big Deal That Sucks (BDTS if you will). It’s a really big deal. And it really sucks. I put the BDTS in when I was fourteen and I never got away from it because I needed it for later plot repercussions, and somehow it took me until I was thirty to realize that it has to go. Changing it from the BDTS to merely a Big Deal, that doesn’t quite suck, is infuriatingly difficult.
Secondly, and more annoyingly, I realized that my structure has to change. When I was a teenager reading young adult books, they were short. Little two hundred page paperbacks that you could devour in an hour or two. Now they’re seven hundred page monstrosities. I realized I have to take my nine-part series and combine them into three or four bigger books. That is unbelievably hard. Unbelievably.
But I write. Or at least I try. People always say that writing is hard, and it’s true. The fact of the matter is that I wouldn’t give it up for anything. It’s hard, but I love it. It’s what I am. And there I go, speaking in the terms that make me generally want to vomit. Ultimately, I just like writing about these characters and trying to make them into real people, with real – if sometimes sensationalized – problems.
Oh, and if you read this far, I’ll explain the title of the post by closing with my friend Ryan’s joke concerning getting them published one day:
“If you add some vampires into that Young Adult series of yours you'll never have to work again...”
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