I thought you needed time to write a book, but that? That's the easy part. Writing is fun (amiright?). Writing is something people who enjoy it enjoy. (I know you love that sentence structure right there!)
But let's get real - ain't no person out there who enjoys editing.
At least, not their own stuff. Students don't like it - I was one, I teach them now. Most don't even bother. (If that's you, you should start editing. Trust me. You used the same word three times in a single sentence in your third paragraph, and that just sounds terrible.)
But editing a short paper is cake, is coffee, is peas and carrots, is easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy compared to editing a novel.
I dove in with my biggest problem - halfway through my "book" (trilogy, even though it wasn't intended to be at first), I added in a character. Seriously. He wasn't there until I realized I needed someone for my MC (main character) to play off of who was her own age. And working with my "no editing while writing" rule, I inserted him in where I was and kept it moving.
Which meant the first thing I had to do during editing was ADD A NEW CHARACTER TO HALF THE DANG BOOK.
Or the whole book, seeing as one was now three.
He had to have interactions with other characters. I had to write new lines for him. I had to develop a believable dynamic between him and everyone else he interacts with.
Around the time I started to look into this, I also read You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero. (If you're into snark and self-help, I highly recommend this one.) At some point in there, Jen suggests getting trained in the thing/s you love to do, putting some money into them if you have to. They're worth your time and effort.
I had discovered the website "The Write Practice" some time earlier and had attened one or two of their free trainings, but I had another one lined up during my read. In it, the trainer brought up a writing contest the site was having. It cost money to enter, but the universe was encouraging me to shell out if I wanted to be a badass, so I took that as a sign.
In the course of the contest, you had a few weeks in which to write a short story on the topic of "the best bad decision," in which your character was presented with two bad choices and had to pick the best of the worst. The contest had a 1,500 word limit - not a lot by any stretch of a writer who loves words's imagination.
Once the story was written, all participants (who were split into six or seven groups) had to post their stories, read and comment on at least two others from their group, and post at least one revised version of their story. You could comment on as many others as you wanted, and you could post as many versions of the story you wanted.
When you were "ready" (whatever that really means), you were to post the final draft of the story you were comfortable with on a website and submit it.
It had been a long time since I had received feedback on my writing, other than giving it to my mom and one or two close friends. I. Fell. In. Love. With. It. I had never seen anything like the website layout Write Practice used. You post your story, and readers can cross things out, highight, leave comments on specific words/phrases/sentences. It can get very nitpicky, but I kind of live on that nonsense.
I posted a story that seemed right for me to write at the time, about a person who resorts to uncharacteristic violence after a minor mental snap from being pushed too far by someone. I liked the idea, but the execution in such a short span of words was not easy. Character motivations didn't quite come through, and at times, neither did biological responses. (Someone ripped someone's tongue out - yikes, I know - and it was pointed out to me that the tongue is one of the strongest muscles in the body, so would that really happen?) Other things didn't quite jive, either.
So I did a thing. Somewhere in Google, I have a file of random writings that I can open whenever the moment hits me and jot down a sentence or a paragraph or even part of a story. I had started something there once, not really related to the topic, but I saw the opportunity to take it and mold it into something that would fit. I merged that piece with another short paragraph I had about snow, and then I just had to round out the last third or so of what happened.
I posted the new story as an alternative, and the feedback was immediate. People said I HAD TO CHOOSE THIS NEW STORY, it was so much better, it was really great, yada yada. It made me giggle internally, seeing as this wasn't what I had planned. I had just reached back into the archives of nonsense ramblings I store and was able to craft something out of it.
Even with all of that, I got great feedback from fellow contestants. Small tweaks in sentence structure that enhanced my comparison drawing, things like that. Tiny yet invaluable tidbits that people who don't write with a purpose might not understand.
I entered the new story.
And I placed in the contest.
Whaaaaaat?!
Yes! For real! My first writing contest, AND I GOT RECOGNIZED. Okay, sure, I didn't win, but even placing is a small miracle in the world of writing.
It felt like I had won the freaking lottery.
You can read the story for yourself here, if you're at all interested. It's not YA fantasy, like my novel; it's a short story about a woman who cheats on her husband. Just for a small trigger warning.
And now, of course, I was addicted to feedback.
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