This post is for all you readers out there who don’t necessarily know what it’s like to write a book.

So I finish my novel. After you finish a novel, it’s not actually done. You’ve only written to the end. You’ve only completed an eighth of your goal if you’re me. So I write to the end with a bad feeling. I knew the rewrites were going to take a little longer than usual. Three fourths into it my vision for the ending had changed, which meant inconsistencies throughout. I could live with that. Every inconsistency is fixable.

No, something else I couldn’t live with, something I’m struggling with even as I write this post is what concerned me.

Time.

Like most writers I have time set aside for writing. I have allotted approximately four hours a day to writing and research and all that stuff. What I’m running into is lack of writing energy. Yep. I’ll admit it. I get off work and the day sticks with me enough to where it effects my focus. It’s hard to admit, but it’s true.

I work with middle school kids in an after-school program, so the challenge is leaving all the emotion behind and thinking about the people who really count. My characters. I’m only realizing how much work is effecting my writing. The draft I just finished, I purposely wrote with thin characters, meaning to do a draft where I inserted the details that would make them come to life or off the page or make them do whatever cliché makes them seem worth it in this blog post. I just couldn’t write the story and fill out the characters as much as I wanted to with the energy I had.

So in the new draft, I’m finding out a certain things about my characters that I wish I knew before. I found out that, Dustin, one of my main characters, has an immense amount of integrity, regardless of the situation. For example, at one point, his girlfriend tells him, “I guess sometimes you have to go against yourself to do the right thing.” He responded by telling her, “If you’re doing the right thing, you’re not going against yourself.” Those lines might not make it into the novel, but it doesn’t change Dustin at all.

It wasn’t until the latest draft when I realized how much fear Lenny has to endure. He is the most scared person I have ever heard about. I think he’s so scared that it makes him that much more brave. It’s amazing what you learn about somebody, a character, after you’ve tried to kill them a few times. It’s like they forgive you and stick it out through the entire novel despite you.

This is what I want you to do. Go ahead and post something in reference to when you tried doing something the first time and maybe didn’t succeed the way you’d liked. Then you came back and conquered whatever it was you didn’t necessarily succeed at the first time. I know there are fantastic stories out there. These stories are what moves society forward. My little anecdote about a draft of my novel should be one of millions out there. I want to hear your stories.

http://ulharper.com/

In Blackness