In November of last year, I did something that I’ve wanted to do since I was in grade school.
I became a fiction writer.
Didn’t attend a seminar. Didn’t get someone to tell me I was a writer. Didn’t get an MFA degree. Instead, I sat at my keyboard and produced a novel.
I actually wrote two novels (we’ll get to that in a later post).
It was honestly, one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done in my life. Not writing “the end.” Not the fact that I have a book under my belt. But the joy of sitting there and letting the words decorate the empty page. And at the conclusion of a session, I felt like a professional.
I felt almost like I was the conduit for some supernatural transmission. It was otherworldly and I felt such a close and total dependence on God for those words specifically.
It was hard, but boy it was so easy.
It was easy as pie compared to what I’m going to share with you.
For the past 2 weeks I’ve been struggling with something called “write fright”
Yeah, it’s mine. I coined it.
It’s a condition I’ve developed that has prohibited me from opening this book that I’ve written to edit it. I took a planned four weeks away from the project in December, but write fright set in right around January 2.
Symptoms of Write Fright include but are not limited to:
-Overall feeling of dissatisfaction with work.
-Lack of knowing which direction to go.
-Distraction-itis (I watched three seasons of Parenthood).
-Feeling that maybe you’ve written the worst thing ever.
-Thinking other writers are so much more ahead than me.
So, that’s the general diagnosis. I’m aware now that I’m heading into the six-week mark. I’m encouraged by this because Stephen King says that you should take six weeks off of your project to let it rest and give your mind a chance to get away from it. However, the last two weeks have been scarier than the writing.
So here’s what I’m going to do (self-prescription). And if any of you are writers and you’re struggling with first-book angst as well, maybe you can follow this too.
1) I’m going to read the thing and blog about it. During NaNoWriMo, i wrote 500 words per day about how the process was going. I didn’t care who was reading it, but if three people were, I was accountable to those three people to produce content and produce a blog about producing content (somehow there is a reference to Inception in here).
2) I’m going to start doing easier things along side editing to make it seem more real. As of right now, I just have words in a word processing app. However, I’m going to begin to do the technical legwork of actually publishing this thing even though it’s not close to ready. For instance, I’m going to reach out to beta readers, figure out how to do an email list, sign up for accounts on Amazon, Kobo and Ingram Spark for distribution, and shop cover designers.
3) I’m going to rely heavily on other authors who have encouraged me. There are a handful of writers that really reached out to me when I started doing this. That meant the world. I look up to each of them because they’re somewhere I want to go and it looks as though they all lead big lives. I may be bothering them a little bit during this process, but I’ll take that chance!
All that said, Monday is it. NaNoEdMo (maybe it’s a thing) 2018. Stay tuned.