Right now, it’s just you and I.

Right now, I’m enchanted by you. The plot feels organic, growing fresh and clear from the motivations of the characters, some of whom I know of old, and some of whom are new and interesting and whose very existence was a surprise. No one else has seen your storyline. No one else knows you the way I do, and I know so very little. I know I will discover more. A lot more.

Writing is not a struggle.

Yet.

There will be days. Days when I hate you, and want to stuff you in a box, and possibly burn the box and scatter the ashes – maybe in the four corners of the city I live in. Maybe in the four corners of the state. Days when I will want to deny your existence. Days when I might, maybe, admit you exist, but refuse to produce you.

And although you’re not the first, you are special. This is the first time I’ve felt like I have something of a handle on this process. It feels like I might have my head wrapped around what it means to write a novel, instead of scurrying frantically after pieces of the process as they zip past me, hoping like hell I got at least some of it right.

Time will tell.

I will push you away. I will dive back in. I will curse at you, ignore you, and editorially flay you to bits. Most likely I will question your value and your right to exist.

But I won’t abandon you. And I won’t just phone you in.

Here’s the challenge:

Use the word “should” in a sentence.

I’ll bet that whatever came after “should”, especially if you used “I” in front of it, was something less than pleasant.

The power of should. Should can suck all of the wanna out of you.

For writing, specifically, I wonder if too much should leads to burnout. The exhaustion of strength. There’s a basic inequity in the writing equation – You owe the world the best possible book, but the world doesn’t really owe you anything. So what fills the place that powered the book back up? All I can say is there needs to be something feeding the furnace. What’s that something? It’s poetry and heart and dreams, and those things are things you bring to yourself as presents, not things the world gives you as presents.

Should isn’t a sustainable reason. Please note, if you signed a contract or something, yes, you gotta do what you said you would do. Momentary setbacks, daily upsets, these are temporary obstacles, not apocalypses, and they don’t excuse a failure to deliver the goods. My hope is that we considered the magnitude of the desire to do it before the ink hit the paper on the promise.

So write big. Write different. Tell a new story. And don’t let should box you in.

When I send a manuscript out, I break up with it.

Not the dramatic kind of breakup. There are no tears, no threats, no ultimatums.

Just a quiet, amicable separation. I wish it well, I do. I think about it sometimes. I fantasize briefly about getting The Call while doing something humdrum – maybe driving home from work, or waiting at the dentist’s. But that heartfelt can’t-live-another-minute-without-knowing-how-it’s-doing feeling? Nope.

This is a defense mechanism. I’ll own that.

And then, eventually, the manuscript comes back. It knocks on the door, with notes tucked in its pocket.

I cave in. I let it back into my heart.

Me: “Poor little guy. I didn’t send you out with the right stuff, did I? Come in, sit down. I’ll make us some tea and you can tell me all about your pacing problems.”

Manuscript: “And you don’t even want to know what they called your protagonist!”

We work it all out. We fall in love again. There’s that needy-grabby-this-story-is-mine feeling again.

Then we drive each other nuts.

Me: “Maybe chapter 12 should actually be chapter 3.”

Manuscript (mutters): “I’m going to reinsert every “just” you took out tonight. Every. Single. One. While you sleep.”

And I send it back out again. I wish it well. I do. It’s not the manuscript, it’s me.

And it comes back. I throw the door open wide, and boot the other stories to their rooms. For now.

Me: “I’m sorry I called you a “work”. That wasn’t very emotionally available of me, was it?”

Manuscript (snuffles): “You used the word “project” when you thought I wasn’t listening.”

And then we work on it some more, and drive each other nuts some more. And then I send it to the agent’s (metaphorical) house and let it bother her for a while.

And so it goes.

Since it seems to be all I can think about…

Step 1: Receive feedback.

Step 2: I need these notes. I want them. They’re good. I must get to work.

Step 3: What have I done to this story? This can’t be right. What have I done? This isn’t right.

Step 4: This can’t be done. Nope. Impossible. Took it all apart. No way it’s going back together. Furthermore, there will be pieces left over. This is a certainty.

Step 5: Huh. Maybe this can be done.

Step 6: Don’t interrupt me. Don’t even look at me. This rewrite has a life of its own. I must pursue art!

Step 7: Wow. I hope I’m not deluded. This seems quite good. Please may I not be deluded. But I think I’m there.

Step 8: Send it off. Try to forget.

Step 9: Start again.

I knew it was going to die soon.

“That makes no sense,” my husband argued when I confessed that I had received the Prophecy of the Dying Battery. Probably he is right. Certainly he is right. Nevertheless, my truck signals the imminent death of its battery by making the stereo reset completely every time I turn the key in the ignition. It’s like leaves falling signals autumn. When the stereo resets, the battery is dying.

The battery died yesterday. Luckily, it was in the driveway and not the parking lot at work.

This truck has been my main means of transport for 15 years. It is about to reach 200,000 miles. 99.99% of those miles were driven by me. I make the mechanic and my husband nuts by stating things like thus and such a noise is a quarter tone lower than it should be, and therefore something is wrong. I cannot be more specific, nor can the truck, but we both know.

And I’m looking forward to getting to this stage with writing.

Instinct is something I’m coveting right now. I’d like to know when the story is a quarter tone off, or the clutch is getting mushy. Then I could fix it.

I’m deep in a revision at the moment, and this “instinct” seems like a fine thing to have, a thing that might have saved me a pack of 100 plain index cards, some of my finest swear words, and a whole lot of musing, among other things. I covet this thing. I envy writers who have it. I rely on my agent to supply a healthy dose of it. Why don’t I have it in a quantity satisfactory to me? What deal must I broker to get some more?

Then I remember the truck. The only reason I can receive the Prophecy of the Dying Battery is instinct, born of turning the odometer over once and laying bets I can do it again. Hours and hours and hours of driving under all conditions, all speeds, all weathers, and all moods. I spend a serious chunk of time reading and writing, but I’m not sure whether my writing time (especially if we’re only counting the deliberate, solid time spent since 2011 and not the devil-may-care random writing time from prior to 2011, which was passionate but undisciplined and largely uninformed) exceeds my drive time.

So. Now the aim is to turn the writing odometer over.

“So if this goes well, how much of the credit are you going to take?” my husband asked me the night before a Very Important Work Event.

“I’ve had a lot of great folks working with me. It was a team effort.”

“And if it goes to hell in a handbasket?”

“Well, then that’s my fault.”

He eyes me. “I want you to think about that for a few minutes.”

Spring is the season of new hope, of gonna-get-it-right-this-time.

Fall is the time for evaluation, for looking at what went right and what didn’t. Deciding how much of the bad gets owned, and how much is neither my circus nor my monkeys. How much of the good was hard work and how much was right time, right place, right people.

With this messy process going on in my head, I met an elderly gentleman and his wife.

He went to law school at my alma mater, leaving the West for the East, and then brought his education back to fight for equal rights for women. As you might expect, we had a good long chat. He’d done amazing things with his life. He’s made a mark.

His wife of sixty years watched us with calm indulgence, listening to the stories she’s heard a thousand times. She was there when they were written. I’d have loved to hear her half of it, of the late nights and missed dinners and the distance that work like that can drive between two people. About patience and love and how to cope. I didn’t get the opportunity.

When it came time for them to leave, I shook the gentleman’s hand and thanked him for his time.

“Thank you, young lady,” he said. “You do very important work here.”

the things he’s done and he thinks I do important stuff?

Then his wife had her say.

“It’s good to see the young people,” she said, clasping my hand briefly. “It’s good to see things going on.”

I pressed her hand in return, gently because of the knobby joints and skin thinner than paper. “Yes. It’s encouraging.”

She smiled and left on her husband’s arm, and I was left with an unambiguous sense of benediction.

I will take this year seriously, but not too seriously. The good was good, and the bad… well.

I won’t have genuine perspective until I have more chips to count.

I got notes on my manuscript from my insightful agent recently. As usual, she’s right on and I wind up wondering why I didn’t see the things she mentions in the first place.

One sticky part, where a character I love makes a choice I hate. The agent also thought it was a section that needed work – but not for the same reasons I had.

Which left me trying to answer a really good question about the character’s motivations.

I cogitated. I drafted. I daydreamed. Nothing felt right. I couldn’t see it the way I could see the end of the book – and that meant that the writing wouldn’t be as good.

So I took a small turn into crazyland and asked the character the burning question. Just to see what she had to say about it.

Me: “Okay, so why did you do this?”

Character: “I didn’t.”

Me: “No, but you did. See? It’s right here, on this page. You did.”

Her: “You must think I’m an idiot.”

Me: “Of course n…”

Her: “I’d never do that.”

Me (slightly frantic): “But you have to.”

Her: “Why?”

Me (glad to plead my case): “Well, otherwise this huge section of the book doesn’t work. See? It’s a really long section. It’s all depending on you.”

Her: “Huh. Then I guess you have a lot of rewriting to do.”

Yep. Guess I do at that.

One: Less flexibility, because you built the sandbox with the first novel and everything that follows has to make sense and follow the rules you made up. Now it’s up to you to build a worthy sandcastle. Confined by the sandbox on all sides, but absolute freedom to build within those confines. Doesn’t mean I don’t wish I could tweak the confines.

Two: More responsibility. If people liked the first one, the responsibility not to suck is even greater than the first time you lobbed this storyline and this cast of characters into the universe. People care now. From page one. This is both awesome and terrifying.

Three: More accountability. I blew off the idea of spreadsheets to keep track of anything other than word counts and queries sent to agents once upon a time. After several hours spent cursing and trying to find out exactly what I said or how I spelled a minor character’s name, I am now a solid fan of the tracking spreadsheet.

T

hink my learning curve looks a bit like this:

1) Writing thoughts smack you in the face when you least expect it. Recent conversation with a friend:

Him: “Course, I been swinging a hammer for twenty years.”

Me (thinking only, not saying): Anyone who looks at you would know that.

Wait, stop. Why would anyone know that? It’s the way he walks, the way there’s always a phantom toolbelt around his waist, the weight pulling his stride into a swagger. Hmmm.

2) Sometimes you’ve learned all you can from one story, and it’s time to work on a new one, even though learning new things makes me want to stop writing new things until I know all the things. Thankful for patience of wonderful agent who accepts my wordslinging and points things out to me.

3) Gotta persevere.

Brainstorm

Maybe it’s a good idea. Maybe not. But it’s going to brew until you write it down.

You get started

So much promise. You know you want to get to

But in between there’s

And you’re pretty sure there’s

And sometimes the words are like

But sometimes you feel more like

Or maybe a bit like this

 Eventually, even though you had some

You finish the journey.