My first writing marathon was over the second weekend of spring break in March, and I wrote over 16,000 words in three days. The words were not golden, but they did propel me through the plot and show me that I had a ton of work to complete.
Since then, I finished the first draft of my novel and knew that it was flawed in several major ways. The basis for almost all of the flaws was that I was trying to tell too much story in too little space.
On Mother’s Day, my boys (husband included) took me to a restaurant and we waited in a foyer for about 45 minutes. I had an epiphany – an epiphany, I say! – and I had nothing on which to write but a sales receipt. I held the receipt onto the glass separating the foyer and the restaurant and I scrawled as quickly and as small as I could with three boys under five were uncomfy in dress clothes and enamored with my skirt (note to self: wear skirts more often to desensitize the children) and dancing to the lively music as they tried to climb the walls (yes, literally). Lunch was great. Naptime rocked, as usual.
But by evening I craved to get the epiphany out. So, I did what any mother would do, I claimed the kids’ roll of butcher paper as my own and started a time line on said paper at the kitchen table. That is when this little YA superhero fantasy novel turned into the epic I have hunted for most of my life. I love epics – by my own definition, any story in any genre that is longer than expected and takes you places you never expected to go, you know, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Sea Mariner. I have written somewhat prolifically, albeit with little effort to publish, since I learned to write letters. My brain is automatically set to scan for bits of untold epics on a routine basis, and still, this took me by total shock.
So, I revised. The usual: delete adverbs, drop sentences even though I like them and feel sad for them like the kind of sad you feel for the person never picked for kickball – wait, that was me, restructure thoughts, strengthen dialogue, spice verbs, etc. The other type of usual: move some things to later “books”, move some things to “notes”, reconfigure to suit new longer-story storytelling, etc.
Then, I wrote a query letter and a synopsis. No, I haven’t sent it. The point is, the story is finally clear enough that writing those two essential items was not a chore but a blessing. The query letter flowed, and it probably isn’t the final draft, but I wrote, essentially, catalog copy and flap copy – AND DIDN’T CRY. I wrote the synopsis – very much first draft – and found that I could encapsulate the novel’s arc in two pages. I may never find an agent for this work, but I hope I do because I am so excited about the story and its room for growth. Even if I find an agent I may never find a publisher. Even if I find a publisher they may only want this one book and not the larger epic. Even if the story is published and in every Barnes & Noble on the face of the earth readers may not want it.
Those if statements are sad, to be sure, but if I can meet the potential of this story, if I can accomplish a crisp arc using a fresh voice, if I can inject the humanness of the story into the ink on the page, an agent will be excited to represent it, a publisher will jump on the chance to print it, readers will find it, and I will continue onward. I must tell this story. Even in the absence of commercial success, this is a story I am uniquely positioned to write, and so I must.
This weekend’s marathon began at 6:00 pm tonight and runs through Monday at midnight. My goal is 24,000 new words. The point is to get the story out so that I can revise and strengthen and rethink.
What are you doing this weekend?
-Amanda Salisbury, writer, ShyJot
) She responded with a stunned, “What?” She’s a doctor and doctors are really smart; well, she’d be really smart even if she wasn’t a doctor. The point is: she’s smart but she needed a bit of explanation to understand how writing a book is like birthing a baby. I explained to her that a writer knows the story is in there like a pregnant woman knows the baby is in there, we both know the story/baby has to come out, the story/baby is going to be amazing, but we first must survive the labor pains and to do that we must trust that we were meant/designed to bear this exact story/baby, no one else can do it, it is unique to us.