One of the weirdest things about motherhood—in my experience at least—is the way in which change seems to take forever, at the same time that it happens without me even noticing. Last week, for example, I spent about five days trying to teach my two-year-old that markers are for coloring on paper–not the dog. But at the same time, it feels like yesterday that this very same child couldn’t even talk. And today, he’s able to go on a 30-minute diatribe about how, if I had only provided the correct type of paper, he wouldn’t have had to color all the animals blue.
And I think that’s why writing has been so therapeutic for me, and so many of us “moms of the internet,” over the past few years. Because while writing is also a slow, multi-directional process—we write, then delete, then rewrite, and edit—it has a clear beginning and end. Most of us end up finishing (eventually) whatever it was that we were writing, and move on to something new, pocketing the satisfaction that comes from a completed task as we go.
But in motherhood, there’s no such thing as a completed task. The kids may be dressed, fed, listened-to and loved, but at the end of the day, there will always be some way in which I fell short. And even though my son is no longer coloring on the pets, that doesn’t mean he won’t try to do it again–or perhaps turn to the walls–a few weeks from now.
While I feel weirdly guilty admitting this in writing, the “unfinishedness” of day-to-day life as a stay-at-home-mom can be hard to power through. A lot of days, my progress feels so minuscule that I question whether it actually even happened. When I zoom out—by a month, or maybe even a year—I can see just how much we’ve done, and how much we’ve grown. But sometimes I don’t want to do that. Sometimes I just want to hold in my hand the results of my hard work, and know that something is done. And that it’s good.
So, for me at least, that’s where writing has come in. It’s not only a way for me to process the goings on in my life, but it’s also a way for me to feel the satisfaction of moving forward, and of seeing my own growth, in a tangible way. Or so I thought.
Where’s this going? Somewhere, I promise.
If you’ve been here for a minute, you know that I embarked on a novel-writing journey in November of this year. November is #NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and while I’ve been considering taking the leap into fiction writing for a while now, the structure, and the deadline, that NaNoWriMo provided was crucial in encouraging me to actually bit the bullet and do it.
And I did! Over the past three months, I wrote a 110,000 word draft of a novel. I listened to about 100 podcast episodes about fiction writing, editing, querying, and the publishing landscape in general. I read several books on storytelling and craft. I re-read my draft, edited a few things, and sent some of it off to other people to read. I got feedback from those people (some of it was good, and a lot of it was “constructive”), and I came up with a plan for how I want to move forward.
And the funny thing is, that while I initially turned to writing because I craved the forward progress, and the finished result, the process of writing this novel has been the exact opposite of that. For a solid month, as I was drafting, I added words, and chapters, to the page. The manuscript, the story, and the characters, all grew into something bigger than where they had started.
And then, I went back and looked at both the story, and the feedback I got on it, and I had some hard, late-night conversations with the little written world I had become so attached to. Because some of it wasn’t good. And some of it wasn’t original. And a bunch of it would never be “marketable” in an incredibly cut-throat publishing landscape.
So, I went back to the beginning again. I reimagined my characters’ inner lives. I took my 350+ pages of story, and outlined it backwards, noting anything and everything that didn’t work. And I joined a writer’s group, so that they can help me find all the other things that don’t work—the one’s I’m too invested to see—and so that I can hopefully help someone else with their writing in return.
Next month, I plan on diving in to draft 2. I’m going to give myself some space from the story, and some time to fill in the holes in my plan, and then I’m going to get back to work. Just like our kids do, my story will also have to take a few steps backwards, before it can begin to move forwards again. And while, at first, this detour really frustrated me—writing was, after all, the thing I was supposed to be able to “finish,” I can now see it for the learning experience I’m sure the universe intended it to be for me.
Nothing is a straight line. Not parenting, or people, or even our hobbies. And while going backwards is always a bit of a bummer at first, it’s also sometimes the only way we can move forward again.
If you’re in any way interested in my fiction writing journey, and the tools that I’ve leaned on, and learned from, along the way, I plan on writing a more detailed post (possibly this weekend, if the rugrats allow), about all of the amazing resources I wish I’d known about before I started.
As always, happy reading, happy hobbying and thanks for following along on my corner of the internet!