About That Novel

There is this weird thing that happens every time I do a round of revision on my manuscript.  I'm reading, reading and revising and then I get to a spot where it's so boring and horrible that I question everything about everything I've been working on for all these years.  I cut, I add, and I shuffle, hoping that it makes it better and continue to do that every time I get to a part I hate.  Once this is done, I breathe a sigh of relief that it's finally done and I either feel really good about it or still kind of hate it.  The same thing keeps happening whenever I try to do the synopsis or summarize my plot.  I think, oh my gosh, I wouldn't want to read this book, and I revise again.  On the last set of revisions it's been mostly kind of hate it, and feeling embarrassed that I've spent so much time writing such a bad manuscript.  After the "I hate everything about this manuscript" phase and feelings of disappointment in myself pass, I start revising again.  This has been the general pattern since 2012.

I let my mom read my original manuscript two years ago.  She made notes on it for me, gave it back, and hasn't mentioned it since.  I sent my manuscript to my aunt, and she never finished it.  I saw her recently and she didn't say a word.  If my own mother never asked her own daughter about that whole entire novel she wrote and whatever happened with it, then it had to be bad.  She just didn't want to tell me that.  This is a story I want to tell.  Need to tell.  I couldn't give up.

I stopped working on it June 1st.  I just couldn't look at it anymore.  I moved past the phase where I was adding to it endlessly, but still feeling it wasn't getting much better to cut, cut, cut all the things. The original version was 107,000 and after reading it over I could tell that there were way too many words, for what was actually going on in the story.  I cut so much I started a separate word document called word dump; just in case I needed to go back to it.  Some of it was really well written, but either redundant or just not necessary.  I still wasn't so sure I was making it any better and I worried that I was slashing so much that there wouldn't be anything left of my story at all so I stopped.  I really, and truly needed to take a break.  My brilliant writer friend T asked me how the writing was going and I told her that I was on a break, but in reality I was thinking I might never look at it again. It was just too discouraging.  I was done.  She has started to really go hard at her writing with a goal of finishing her novel by the end of the summer and it kind made me sad that hers would be finished, agented, and published while mine sucked even though I had been working on it way longer and technically finished since 2014.

I'm in a writers group on Facebook that I got added into by T.  I ignore half of the post notifications, but randomly clicked on one and stumbled upon something very interesting.  It was a link to a contest that pairs pre selected mentors with writers of unpublished manuscripts to get them ready to pitch to participating agents.  It had been a month and half since I last touched my novel, but it sounded like a good opportunity I didn't want to miss out on. I started the read/revise process again to see what kind of shape my manuscript was in.  As I read through it, I got further than I ever had before hitting something I hated.  I got all the way up to chapter 10 and still liked everything I was reading.  It was interesting and engaging.  There was one chapter that sucked, so I ended up cutting out the whole thing and kept going.  Towards the end, when I got to some new material I'd written the last time, I hardly even remembered writing it.  I made so many changes and it went through so many versions that I couldn't remember what was going to happen.  I was engaged and interested as if reading it for the first time.  I continued shuffling and polishing things up, and when I got to the end, there was this overwhelming feeling of satisfaction. Normally, this is the part where I realize I hate everything about it, but this time I was pleased.  I had that same sense of satisfaction I had when I first finished my it.  That same feeling of satisfaction has popped up a lot during the revising process, but it always went away when I got t the end and realized there were so many necessary elements missing.  This time was different, and I was encouraged enough to enter the contest.  I told myself that I would hope for the best and that if I'm not selected, I won't let it get me down.  That was three weeks ago.

After years and years of revising, the horrible beta critique, and the big changes I made based on what I learned in writing class it's finally coming together into the cohesive well written novel that I wanted it to be.  It's gone from 107,000 words of rubbish to 94,000 words that matter.  I wanted to give up so many times, but I couldn't rest until I felt it was good.  I don't know what happens when someone else reads it again, or even when I read it again, but for now I just want to cherish that feeling of accomplishment I had about producing a quality product.  That feeling of being proud of what I've done.  All along, whether I ever published the thing or not that is all I ever wanted.

I didn't get picked.  There were no synopsis or additional pages requests and they announce the winners tomorrow.  I told myself I wouldn't let it get me down and I'm going to try to stick to that, but how fantastic would it have been if something that amazing and possibly life changing could happen to me? For once.  If nothing else it pushed me to polish my manuscript, write a query letter, and a synopsis.  I don't know what my next step will be, but at least I know did the best I could.  Getting a book published traditionally is damn near impossible.  Published authors are saying it took years and years and a lot of them had to totally shelve their first manuscript and write a whole new book before they got an agent.  I'm tired.  I might be ready to let it go.