I love the excitement of writing a first draft of a novel. I tend to loosely plan, knowing big events in my story, but discovering a million tiny moments in between. I love the rush when the story starts to write itself. Things I never could have planned with my conscious mind fall into place when my subconscious is in control. There are slow bits in between, especially near the beginning, but by the second half of the book, I might as well be sledding downhill, picking up speed the closer I get to the end. The first first draft I wrote took me two years to finish. I wrote the final quarter of the book in a month. The second first draft I wrote took me four years to finish. I wrote the second half in two weeks.
Revising a novel is like walking back up that very tall, snowy hill holding your sled. It takes infinitely longer, particularly because you need to take breaks when you get out of breath or step into a drift or your sled slips out of your gloved hands and you have to chase it all the way back down. It’s not anywhere near as fun as the first ride down. Now, the first ride is fun enough that the climb up isn’t going to kill all your joy. But it’s the sucky, hard-work part of fun.
One of the killjoys is having to plan. I can’t just write by the seat-of-my-pants. I have to know why things happen, the logic, the reasoning, the cause and effect. I have to know where everybody’s standing and how far apart they are. I need to be a fight coordinator and a strategist and a debater and a logistics specialist. These are all my least favorite things. I infinitely prefer living in people’s heads to setting scenes.
The first three chapters I revised when I moved back to Ohio all involved strategy and planning and debating and logistics. I crawled through them, longing for the end. I kept going, reminding myself that the emotional discussion in Chapter 22 would make up for all the planning of the other chapters.
Then I got to Chapter 22.
I had forgotten that the emotions are completely negative. An accident leads to tragedy. One character explains the extent of this disaster to another and the tone spills from joy and relief to despair.
Writing about despair was a little close for comfort. It lives in this house like a Siamese Cat, showing it’s presence often enough that I can never forget it, occasionally jumping onto the couch next to me and stepping over my lap with triumph. I wasn’t sure how to handle such deep pain, when I clearly couldn’t handle my own.
There’s a woman at church who’s been incredibly helpful in my crisis. She’s listened to me and prayed over this mess. She’s been trained in spiritual formation, a sort of liturgy for walking people through wounds and crisis. She says what she does is sit with people in their pain. She can’t fix them or their situations. But she can sit and listen and hold their troubles.
About the same time, a friend of mine started opening up about a terrible loss she’d suffered, a very similar tragedy to the one in my story. She shared articles and stories like her own. As I read, my heart breaking, I understood what it means to sit and hold her pain. I pulled up Chapter 22, closed my eyes, and listened.
The View from the Garret 