I've been writing my whole life: journals, stories, poems, pretty much everything. In sixth grade, I had a binder I carried around, writing a novel about a game my brother and I had played as kids--The Princess and the Thief. I used to tell everyone I would get it published by the time I was 16. Then I grew up a little, realized that my book was actually not good at all (makes sense, seeing as I wrote it when I was 11) and got interested in other things.
In middle school and high school, my main focus was friends and dance. I continued to write, just not as much. I didn't really have a dream of being a published novelist anymore. I was in my high school journalist class, went through a huge poetry phase, and started (but didn't finish) countless novels. I also wrote a date ideas book that got published when I was 19.
After Ben and I broke up, Ben discovered Nanowrimo, or National Novel Writing Month, where writers come together to write a minimum of 40,000 words on their novel in November. We were talking over texts and Facebook and he got me interested in it. I decided to write a memoir of types about my summer and how I dealt with the break up with Ben. Not very far in, it felt very silly to me and I gave up on it. My brother Jon read it, though, and told me he wanted to read more. That encouraged me to pick it up again. It took me a long time--I finished in February--but I finished it at over 40,000 words, more than I'd ever written on a single project before. And it ended up changing my life--because Ben had been sending me what he was writing, he wanted me to reciprocate. I pushed past feeling self conscious at how personal it was and sent it. He said he couldn't put it down and he loved how authentic I was about myself in it. It reminded him of how much he loved me. Two months later, we were married!
After we got married, I tried Nanowrimo several times again, this time with novels. I never made it past 20,000 words, but each time I learned something new. I learned that I need structure and an outline (and I had to actually learn about story structure for that), I learned that I write better in short word count spurts (I think I could get a high daily word count, I would just need to break up my writing sessions throughout the day), and I learned that I actually can be creative. I always struggled with brainstorming and coming up with ideas, and I thought that was because I wasn't "a creative person". Now I understand that creativity is a skill like any other and I can learn it.
I started my current project (a dystopian Rapunzel retelling) in the fall after Rylee was born, in October of 2018. Learning to write my first draft was a process, but I finished it (over 45,000 words) about a year after starting it. I'm currently working on the second draft, which (after filling in a lot of the middle and rewriting the entire ending) is going to be about 65,000 words. I'm so close to finishing, I have about one and a half scenes left!
My plan going forward is to edit another draft of my current project and then move on. I want to get the practice of editing it, but I don't want to put in the amount of work it would take to get it to a publishable point. I have learned a ton about story structure, tension, and character arcs since I wrote the first draft of my last project. I know I still have a long way to go, but I'm confident that the first draft of my next project will be better and I'm planning on editing it to a publishable point.
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