TELLING THE STORY THAT WANTS TO BE TOLD
on scrapping 33,000 words and starting fresh
Before we get into it — join me for a fun (free) little thing! creative co-working for joy notes subscribers only on Wednesday, February 22nd at 10 am EST. We’ll dive right into working on creative projects for ~ 50 minutes – work on whatever you want – and we’ll do a brief optional check-in at the end to chat about how things went. Register on zoom here to get the link and password (make sure you use the same email you’re signed up for this newsletter with).
Image by Tim Foster.
I recently hit over 30,000 words on my novel.
A few nights later, I went to sangha with my love and while meditating, I realized I was writing the wrong book.
Which is to say: there are no wrong books, but I wasn’t actually writing the story I wanted to tell at this moment. Perhaps I will tell that story another time, but that’s not The Book. It would be simpler, easier, require less of me to tell that story. But it’s not the one that wants to be told right now.
What the story actually wants to be flooded in – clearly it was not a very quiet mind type of meditation for me – and the next day I gently moved those 33,000 words into another folder in my Scrivener project, leaving a completely blank manuscript.
For a moment I almost hit undo, didn’t want to waste 33,000 words, well along the way to the 80,000 or so I’m imagining this first draft to clock in at.
But the truth is I don’t think a second of the time I spent writing those words was wasted. I got to know the characters. I got to know the directions they wouldn’t take, the story I didn’t want to tell. I got to let them - and this book - tell me what it wants to be, where they want to go. I could only do that by writing it. I could have never done all of that by just thinking about it.
Many writers much more accomplished and knowledgeable than I have spoken to this - Matt Bell (of
-- highly recommend) talks about discovering the book he’s writing by writing it in his wonderful book Refuse to Be Done.I read that and thought yeah, sure, but here we are deeper in the process and it does continue to be true.
And - there are certainly chunks of what I scrapped that will come back into the book in edited forms. I’ve put back in about 8,000 words of the raw material in different sections where it will need to be shifted but the core of those scenes will be similar.
Staring at that blank page the next day, I felt a trepidation I never felt when I first sat down to write the book. Then it was fresh excitement, all new and fun and unknown. Every five hundred, thousand words felt like massive, linear progress toward the goal. Now, what if I write another 33,000 words and I trash them again? What if I never finish this book? What if I’m just unable to commit to the story (LOL) and it’s never going to come to fruition?
I hold these questions with loose hands, with a gentleness, and remind myself that I the point is enjoying the process and making something beautiful — not making something fast, or efficiently, or hammering through it.
The point is to write the story in my body, the point is to write and be changed by the writing, the point is to write and let the story tell itself through me (and obviously, my cat – my trusty writing assistant).
Now I’m starting to understand firsthand the nonlinearity of it – the learning through writing, the writing of scenes late in the book that feel exciting, the jumping back and forward throughout blank documents and lines of text, the deleting, the copy and pasting from scrapped text to weave into a completely new storyline.
What magic. I feel lucky to be doing it. And I feel lucky that these characters want me to tell their stories.
In the comments, I would love to hear your experiences of shifting stories, of putting aside work that you’ve done to create the work that wants to be created, of releasing attachment to the idea that the words must be precious and final.
And please do join for creative co-working — write something, work on your embroidery or your collage or your painting or your doodles or your quilt or whatever you want!