On writing a book: The first month . . . ish

Since you, my seven blog readers, are now my obligated book fans, here's an update on how the book writing is going. I feel like it's been a roller coaster ride already, with undoubtedly more changes and extremes to come. But here are a few things I've learned thus far.

It's fun.
I was all excitement the first couple of weeks. I made relatively fast progress, spewing out everything I had been thinking about for the past four years. And I did not anticipate the sudden increase in new ideas. It was as though my brain was waiting for the first ideas to get down on the page so that there was room for more. That was great.

It's hard work.
That said, there have been some challenging times. Sometimes the words just come and I'm happy with them. Other times I know what I want to say but I feel like I have to climb way up into the treetops of my brain and painstakingly pick them one by one after careful selection. And other times, I know I need to say something more but I don't know what it is yet and my fingers just sit on home row, waiting and waiting for direction that never comes.

When I set out to write this thing, I don't think I understood how carefully I was going to have to plan every little detail, how thorough I would have to be, and how I was going to have to build this house of a book brick by little tiny brick. Imagining the completed house is much easier than building the whole thing from the ground up. And it's overwhelming to think that I've probably only scratched the surface. So overwhelming that sometimes my laptop stays closed and I try to give it some distance when I walk by it.

Filter, filter, filter.
I have to do so much hard thinking about the story and the characters that sometimes I think too much. Sometimes my mind will go a little crazy and try to tie EVERYTHING to the book. I've had to fine tune my ability to filter these thoughts so that when I think "Oh, I should include that funny little bit I just came up with about the raspberry jam!" I can say, "No. Stop right there. It wasn't that funny." Not every thought that crosses my mind needs to go in the book. It's "write what you know," not "write everything you've ever known."

I am my own worst enemy.
Sometimes I'm like, hey, I have thirty seconds, I'll just open up the laptop and squeeze in a bit of writing because it's just itching to come out. Other times I feel like I want to write, but there are so many other distractions. Like the other night. I told myself that I would just check my email and then start writing; I wasn't allowed anything else. But when my one email was about something posted on Facebook, I had to go check it out, right? And then I found myself halfway down that slippery slope thirty minutes later, not having written anything but up to date on several friends and several blogs I had been wanting to catch up on. Geez. So I now find myself creating little rewards or mini deadlines to make myself accomplish something (like, finish writing this scene and then I can work on my blog post about writing a book).

There's a delicate balance between planning and flying by the seat of my pants.
What a great expression that is, by the way. Anyway, these past few weeks have been an interesting experiment in both planning and flying in this manner, for me. I'm a pretty organized person, for the most part. And, if this amateur can say so, organization is very important in book writing. So I have planned and plotted and made many lists about many things, but you can't plan everything. There are times when I just sit down and start a scene without a care in the world and it's so fun to see where it takes me. I'll be going along, kind of sort of knowing the direction I'm heading, and then I'll be like, "Whoa. I just created a new character. I like it." And off I go.

Anyway, it's been an experience. Sometimes I get scared that this book will be my practice novel, that writing it will be the way I learn how to write a real one. I'm scared it will be terrible because it's my first. I want this one to be good. I'm very tied to it. So I guess I'll keep trying to make it good, but seriously, keeping Self-Doubt at bay is a full-time job. Sometimes I succeed and have a stellar night like tonight, where ideas come and words flow and holes are filled and I think I can actually make something good out of this. And other times I warily eye my laptop like a scared animal, frightened that I'll sit down and nothing will come and I'll realize that I've been foolish to think I could do this. But I'm still committed. The nights like tonight keep me going, and I'll keep writing, hoping for more of them. Five more months to go.