Shocking

Even when I’m old and wrinkled, lying in bed wanting to do nothing but eat candy and complain about everything, I’ll still consider one of the biggest surprises of my life as the one that happened nearly one year ago:

The shocking discovery that I was writing a book.

Writing a novel wasn’t in my schedule.  In fact, a year ago, I barely wrote down my shopping list.  Last year, with little reason and less warning, I started to write.  The first thing I tapped out was a short story about…well that doesn’t matter.  It was terrible; a real embarrassment to the tongue.  It was about fifty pages long; maybe ten were good.  Of the ten that were good, about three were great.  

Two of those were amazing.  

I remember thinking that, though the story was hideous on every conceivable level, there was some fuse tangled up in the filthy little mess that I wanted to spark. 

So I did. 

I lit it and let it burn for three and a half months, all the way until it detonated in the last week of December.  My short story had grown into a five-hundred page behemoth.  Wow, I thought.  Now what am I going to do with all this?

Back in October, when I first realized that the first short story that I’d ever written was slowly morphing into the first novel I was ever going to write, it was the oddest epiphany, and one I’ll never forget. 

I never planned on becoming a writer, but then there it was in front of me like a color you can’t argue with.  

I took a break in January and wrote a handful of children’s stories, reading them to the children during daylight and to Daisy by the stars.  They were fast, fun, and the total opposite of what I’d been doing.

In February, I picked up the novel and cleaned up the language.  I tend to be wordy.  It’s probably my biggest weakness as a writer, other than having a tendency for truly terrible analogies (I mean terrible, like – I should probably just wipe my hard drive now before I die and someone discovers them and then also dies, but from laughing at my idiocy – terrible).  I added a couple of terrific elements to the draft while trimming it by a neat hundred pages.  I finished the second draft on the last day of March and expected to begin the third on the first day of May.

It’s July and I’m just getting started. 

Instead of starting to rewrite as soon as the April fell from the calendar, I did something I hadn’t yet done.  

I read my book. 

Reading and writing are not the same exercise.  I needed to read my document – straight through, without stopping every two minutes to tinker.

Did I like what I read? 

Sure, some of it.  Some of it I hated, and some of it I thought was immature in an almost staggering way. 

Some of it, though, I thought was fantastic.  

Since I wrote the book on accident, I’d never given thought to an outline, so I’ve spent the last couple of months taking notes and gathering ideas.  I started writing a couple of weeks ago and it feels amazing.  

There’s an old Greek fable about a ship that sails off to War.  The ship is gone for so long that by the time it returns, every sail and board have been replaced.  Is the ship that returns to Greece the same ship that left?  If it has the same frame, designed by the same engineer, and is sailed by the same captain, then I would have to say that it is indeed the same ship.  

The second draft added to the story.  The third cleaned it up.  This one tears it apart sentence by sentence, then strings them back together. 

I can’t wait to see what it looks like when it’s all finished.

Writer Dad

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