The Journey to My New Novel, Pt. 1
I Will Tell You This: It's been a long road to get here.
This is a series I’ve been thinking about for months, always putting off beginning it because, to be honest, to tell this story is to tell of hope and rejection, frustrations mixed with elations. Most of the time when I would think about writing it, I was just not in the mood. But as the release date on the novel inches closer, I know if I’m going to tell the story, I’d better get started. Because it’s gonna take me a while.
So I am going to tell the story in parts. And I’m going to be as honest about this journey as I can, for better or for worse. (Though many times I will not name names.) I am writing this series because I think it’s important to share what goes into pursuing a dream, to tell the truth for those who might be experiencing something similar in their own journey, so they know they’re not alone and, I hope, be encouraged. Whether you’re writing a book or going after another kind of goal, I want to share how to, to quote a magnet that hangs on our fridge, Never, never, never give up. Because, though I wanted to so many times (we will be talking about that), I didn’t.
So, here we go with part 1. I hope you guys will come back each week for parts 2, 3, 4, etc. Every Moment Since is my tenth novel, but getting to its publication made me feel like a brand-new beginner…
Let’s go back to 2020. Y’all remember 2020, right? My ninth book was coming out in the fall of that very weird year and I was thinking of what I wanted to write next because it was time to talk to the publisher about another potential contract. I had this idea that was akin to the kinds of books I was writing at the time— what some term domestic suspense, but what I thought of as psychological fiction. I had an idea that I wrote up for my agent and… she very much disliked it.
It was spring of 2020 and the world was in lockdown. My agent and I got on the phone to discuss what I had sent her and I remember she went through all the reasons she did not think my idea would work. She was very specific, even taking issues with the character names I had chosen. We hung up the phone and I felt shut down by the conversation. I’d been excited about the idea, and I wanted to write it. If not that book, I wondered, then what?1
I stayed in that stasis period of not knowing what to write next for months. I went so far as to wonder if I should ever write again. I’m not sure this was a rational or expected way to respond but, it was a weird time and my agent’s words had somehow amplified the weirdness. So I, like many, rattled around my house with my family members, who were also rattling around the house, cagey and bewildered.
Fast forward to summer of 2020. Some brave friends and I decided to rent a cabin in the mountains and do a writing retreat there. We didn’t care about risk of exposure! We wanted to see each other! To write! To sit on the porch by a babbling brook and drink wine and use all the words we’d been suppressing for months! And, thus, we did. And it was glorious. I wouldn’t call myself a huge risk taker, but that was a risk I gladly took, and would again.
But there was the question, for me, of what to write while we were there? I knew these girls and I knew that this wasn’t a “writing retreat” that was not going to be about writing. If I was going, I better have something to work on.
So, I pulled out some notes I had scribbled at some point in the past about a missing boy who vanished in 1985 and decades later, his brother— who was with him the night he disappeared— who had found success after writing a bestselling memoir about his experience. I had the brother character in mind, and his mother, and the girl next door who was the brother’s first love, and some other characters, besides. There were lots of POVs, probably too many. But I was just going with it for now. It would be, in my mind, a different novel than the ones I’d written previously. More literary, less “suspense” (though I personally have never deemed my other novels as suspense). This would be a family drama, set in a small southern town, about moving on in the aftermath of a tragedy.
I wrote the first words of that story idea on that retreat. Many of them remain to this day. But we’ve got a LOT of ground to cover between those first words, and the ones that survived. Because, reader, many of my words did not survive. Which was a good thing (though at times it didn’t feel like it). That was just one of the lessons I learned.
I will share those lessons, and the unfolding of events that will bring us to publication, in the coming weeks. I hope you will come back for this series. And if you’ve got friends who you think might be inspired/encouraged by one writer’s one step up/two steps back journey, feel free to share. And do let me know as we go along in the weeks to come if this helps anyone. It is my sincere hope that it does.
I still think about that novel and would still, for the record, like to write it. Though in the time that has passed since then, the idea has gelled more and I’ve got a different sort of book in my head now than the one I was proposing. A better book, I would venture to say. Time helps.
I’m really looking forward to this series, Marybeth! Your perspective is much appreciated, because it’s so easy for me to forget that it’s not just us unpublished authors struggling to make things work.
This shoots me right back to the first manuscript I wrote and all that doubt. Now I know it wasn’t ready but I still drag it around in my head and want it out there. And I can’t wait to read this book of yours!!