Writing Evolution

I’m not going to tell you “I’ve lived and breathed writing since I could hold a crayon!” Awesome as that sounds, it would be a lie. I read about so many authors who wrote since they were in diapers and always KNEW they would be a published author. Good for them. I will say I have written for a very long time. My first book was “published” when I was in fourth grade. It was a class project to write a story and illustrate it. We wrote it on construction paper then bound it with string. I still have “The Lonely Unicorn” in my memory box. The story is about what you’d expect from a ten-year-old, and the illustrations are atrocious.

I again wrote a book in sixth grade, which we bound with cardboard and laminated. I don’t recall the title, nor do I have the book anymore, but I remember the joy of writing it. I also started, but never got far, in several other stories on my own time in grade school. One was about a girl who won the lottery and moved to New York City with her best friend. At the time, moving to NYC was a dream of mine, and what better way to realize it than by writing about it, and all the adventures I imagined I’d have there, and making millions of dollars off the story? That didn’t happen. I’m not even sure I finished two chapters.

Throughout high school I wrote lots of bad, angst-ridden poetry. When it wasn’t angsty, it was disgustingly sappy love poems. It simply depended on whether I was single at the time or not. I still have all these poems, and I think a few are very good, but most make me cringe.

Then I got to college. And that’s when it all changed! OK, not really. I did take a creative writing class, and loved it. I wrote my first vampire story for that class. My only vampire story, actually. I wrote a few more short stories that year. A few more poems here and there over the course of the next 5 years. But that was about it. The poems, and the journal I kept, were therapeutic and not much else. No grand dreams of being published.

Then I found the Zen Writing Group, a group of people who met once a week at the Missouri Zen Center. We would read a short piece, often from Natalie Goldberg’s “Writing Down the Bones” or Dainan Katagiri’s “You Have to Say Something.” Then we did a timed writing of 7 or 8 minutes, and shared what we had written. I came and went for 4 years, and again only sporadically.

After an extended absence I realized how much I missed the group, and writing. I returned to find the group had evolved into a core of four women who were all at various stages of writing a novel. I couldn’t write a novel! But they welcomed me back anyway, with my short stories and personal essays.

A few months later, I came across a short story I had written in my college creative writing class (not the vampire one). I realized it would make a great young adult novel, so I set off to expand the story. With the support of the Zen Writing Group, I had a first draft complete in 6 months. As often happens with first novels, it has been revised and revised again and again, and finally set on the shelf, in need of either a total rewrite from scratch, or to be written off as a good first attempt. It’s a story near and dear to my heart, so maybe I’ll self-publish it someday just for the pleasure of seeing it in print. But it still needs work before I’d even do that, so, we’ll see.

In November of 2008 I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel (or the first 50,000 words of a novel) in 30 days. I had the wisp of an idea that had been floating around my skull after a dream I had one night. All I knew was “a young detective goes undercover to investigate a cult.” Nothing more. November 1 happened to be the Zen Writing Group’s monthly meeting – a very auspicious sign – so I sat down to my MacBook – Tesseract (yes, I name inanimate objects) – and started typing, having absolutely no idea what would come out. A veritable flood of words poured out, and by Nov. 14 I had 50,000 words. By Nov. 30 I had 87,000. On Dec. 1 I finished the first draft with 90,000 words.

After a few months of editing, I set Divided Heart aside to begin the sequel. I have now set Ravaged Heart aside for a final, harsh round of edits to Divided Heart. I moderate an online critique group which has been indescribably helpful in making my novel the best it can be.

In 2008 the Zen Writing Group published our first anthology, In the Moment: Writing from a Spacious Mind. This is a collection of some of the essays and poems we wrote during our weekly timed writings. See the books page of my site for information on where to purchase this collection.