Have you ever written something and in the midst of it, you were thinking, "This is the most amazing story anyone has ever written! They better start writing those checks!!"Yeah, me too.
And then you look back at it some time later - maybe a day, a week, a month, a year later - and you realize, "This is the worst thing I've ever written in my life."
Yeah, me too.
This is the realization I am suffering through right now.
When I was 14 years old, I started writing my first novel about King Arthur and the Lady of the Lake. 8 years later, I finally finished it. As you can imagine, my writing skill changed quite a bit in that time period. Of course, when I was fourteen, I thought I was an amazing writer. I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought a lot of things that weren't actually true.
I left that draft alone for a while. I did this for two reasons:
1 - you should always distance yourself from a draft. Writers are clouded by their own writing and they won't even see simple tyops. See what I mean? When I finished my story, I was still in the "I'm amazing, everyone should read this" mentality. There was no way I was going to see my flaws at that point.
2 - I really hate revising and therefore pretended it didn't exist for a year.
So I wrote it (over eight years) and then I left it alone. I let it chill. I let it marinate to perfection. Or realistically, I let it marinate from perfection.
Finally, I decided to look at it again. And you know what, it was perfect and I didn't have to change a thing.
For like three sentences. Or maybe it was three words.
Since I had written the beginning of my novel when I was fourteen, it quickly became incredibly obvious that, well, I wrote like a fourteen year old. Nothing against me as a teenager, but the writing style and absolutely everything made it apparent I was fourteen. Maybe fifteen if I was lucky :)
So I revised over the course of three months. And it wasn't as terrible as I was expecting. Mostly I was deleting scenes, characters and making the story actually make a little bit of sense. And when I finished, I was so proud of myself. I was the most amazing writer that ever existed.
So what did I do next? I ignored it again and for the same reasons. But I did something else this time, something I didn't do before.
I kept writing.
Over the course of the next year, while I was completely ignoring my first novel, I wrote two more novels (including a sequel). While I'm still not an expert (not even close), I am certainly a BETTER writer than I had been because I kept practicing.
I did something else with my story that I hadn't done before.
I let other people read it.
They gave me feedback. Some of it was great, but some of it I didn't want to use. It didn't matter to me, I was just happy to get some feedback. However, what sucks about it, is that other people can usually see your flaws a whole heck of a lot better than you can. And then they point them out and it hurts. Why? Because I was the most amazing writer ever - I don't have flaws. Who do they think they are?
When I finished freaking out that my story was not perfect, I answered that question. Who are they? They're normal readers who are going to read my story and see my flaws. So why not catch them now and then fix them now? Sounds simple enough.
Unfortunately some of the feedback involves some pretty extensive revising. Like entire sections of my book need to be completely rewritten. Huge, alarmingly gigantic sections. And it's a little daunting.
This is where I am now. I am staring at the abyss that is revising and not looking forward to all the massive changes I've got to make.
There are a few things I have to keep reminding myself:
1 - I am not a perfect writer and I will never be a perfect writer
2 - I can write to the best of my ability and I can write something great
3 - If I do write crap (and I probably will), I can always revise again. And again. And again.
4 - It doesn't matter what I write, as long as I still love it.
So, time to stop distracting myself and start revising!!! Let's go--
Wait.
Is that a squirrel? Stupid squirrel, it's Michigan in January. Haven't you heard of hibernation?
Oops. Distractions. Okay, now let's start revising and ignore the squirrels!!!!!
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