Writing is Like Life; It Sucks Sometimes.

Writing a book is hard.

That doesn’t sound like a revelation until you try to write one.

Starting a book is easy. You’re lying in bed one morning, and you get a flash of brilliant story, running through your mind in full technicolor. You run downstairs in your underwear, flip open your laptop and start tippity-typing away, eager to capture the scenes on paper. This is the part they always show in movies — the writer version of the Rocky training montage. Pages ripped out of typewriters, pencils behind ears, many cups of coffee consumed.

Then, you get to the hard part.

You spend hours, days, months, years, writing and staring off into space thinking about your story. (Daydreaming as a work-related activity is one of the few perks of being a writer.) Your characters are selfish friends who take up all your time and energy and don’t give anything in return. Writing a book is, as far as I can tell in my extensive experience of one completed manuscript, five percent blinding flash of inspiration. The other 95 percent is tentatively typing things you know you’re going to have to redo, all while secretly fearing the whole thing is shit. It’s a lonely endeavor — just you and your imaginary people.

You’ve decided you need accountability.

You tell your real-life friends, relatives and strangers in line behind you in the grocery store, that you’re writing a book. They ask how it’s going periodically, and even though you have no real answer, it does sort of keep you on track. Then one day, they ask, “How’s the book coming?” And you finally get to say, with a triumphant flourish, “It’s finished!” often followed by, “No, you can’t read it (because I’m secretly still afraid it’s shit.)”

The hard slog up the mountain is over.

You have written the denouement and the conclusion. You have typed  “The End.” (For real, I did that.) You rise from your desk chair, stretch your aching, hunched back, holler to your spouse and open a bottle of wine in celebration. But then you stand on top of that massive mound of paper, ink and tears and look up to realize you’ve only just climbed a foothill. The big, bad specter of editing and rewriting is looming over you, daring you to start scaling it. It’s enough to make you cry. Or to put off even looking at your story again for at least six months.

That’s where I am right now.

I am reading every single word of that “completed” manuscript, rife with inconsistencies, plot holes and typos. I am rewriting the entire thing because that’s the only way I know how to do it. I am starting to hate my characters and my story. I am sick of them, and because they are now real, I fear they are also sick of me and my waffling on what they get to do, feel and say. It all convinces me even further that I’ve written a B-minus novel at best.

So, if you were wondering whatever happened after I wrote that post ALMOST A YEAR AGO about being done with my novel, there it is. It’s done. And it’s so not done.

Writing a book is not hard.

It is excruciating to the point that sometimes I want to delete the whole file and all the sub-files of notes and pretend the whole damned thing never existed. It’s like having a baby; if you knew what it was going to be like before you started the process, it would never happen.

I once heard a favorite author of mine speak, and it took her six years to get her first book published. At the time, my jaw dropped, but at the rate I’m going, I may be editing my own AARP application before I get this thing done.

And yet it will happen.

I keep getting derailed by my own insecurity and laziness, but damnit, I will slog through this swamp of a story, clean it up and see it published one way or another. By that time, though, instead of reading like commentary on current social standards, it may be more of a historical novel.

I could pretend this post is intended as advice for the young writer or a reality check for anyone considering starting a novel, but really it is entirely selfish. I needed to vent, to complain, and let’s be real, avoid editing. Now I can get back to rewriting the book….oh, will you look at the time! Well, there’s no way I can start now.