One colleague of mine recounted a story he’d heard from a writer who believed there was no such thing as writer’s block. “There’s no such thing as ‘ditch-diggers’ block,” he quoted. Other workers in other jobs are expected to just get on with it.

We do seem to reserve special reverence for the procrastination of creative writing. Many authors will tell you–have told me–writer’s block exists. I’ve experienced it: sitting forlornly in front of my blinking cursor, my fingers poised on the keyboard, unable to write. Often, I’ll find something else, anything else to do instead of staring at a blank screen.

Yet I believe my colleague’s anecdote. What I have discovered is that my writer’s block is actually my early warning system.

My canary in the coal mine.

If I try to work on a section and it’s not coming together, if I’ve started and stopped a dozen times, if I have succumbed to the classic symptoms of writer’s block, I’ve learned (the hard way) that it in fact means I am on the wrong track.

Example:

David, Lyra’s guide in the Second World, is religious and he tries to convince Lyra religion is not all about violence. She reluctantly agrees to attend a church service. My idea was that she’d be intrigued by it–no where near convinced of religion’s value–but nonetheless taken by its potential enchantment.

Lyra understands very little of the service, yet she’s surprised to realize it doesn’t seem to matter. The words of the minister, the prayers, the sermon wash over her in a melodic intonation. The hymns, the music, the joy and song are universal. In fact, she startles when she hears a piece her mother used to play.

 “What’s this song?” Lyra whispers to David.

 “Amazing Grace,” he says.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. That saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.

Lyra has never heard the lyrics before; she knew only the music. The congregations’ voices are haunting, full, poignant. In her mind, Lyra sees her mother as she plays, sees the same rich vein of emotion etched into her face. Tears well in Lyra’s eyes, but they don’t burn like before; her heart feels full, but it doesn’t ache like before.

“You were moved,” David comments afterward.

Lyra brushes a light finger at her cheek. “Because of the music, not religion.”

“One is not so different than the other.”

Yes, it’s cheesy, I know, which is why I needed to rewrite it. I wanted the idea that the service could move Lyra in an unexpected way. So I start. And I stop. And I erase before I save. It all sucks.

Until I come to this:

“Forget about theology,” David implores her. “Religion is not all about doctrine and rules. It is about emotion. It is about the experience.”

An older couple, well dressed in neat, pressed clothes, like Annie predicted, stops at their pew.

“Good evening,” the woman says. She has cinnamon brown skin, milk chocolate eyes and a silver bun of hair at the nape of her neck. Her husband, his pale arm resting gently on hers, has a thin nose and thin lips stretched wide into a warm smile.

Lyra tenses, as if she’s been caught trespassing. She expects an interrogation, followed by demands that she, an obvious imposter, leave.

 Instead, the woman welcomes them. “It is nice to see new faces, young faces.” The man nods at them and they glide away, up the aisle into a pew at the front.

“See?” David smiles. “The church is inclusive. All are welcome.” He puts a warm hand on Lyra’s arm, as if reminding her she can relax. She doesn’t.

 “Only so they can recruit the weak-minded,” Lyra’s voice hardens. 

This last sentence was my muse’s way of getting me back on track. I subconsciously took Lyra’s reaction in the opposite direction–she isn’t moved by a bunch of hymns; she’s hardened against being in church. She grew up in a world where religion does not exist–she learned only that it was the cause of violence and chaos. Her first experience with religion is when her boyfriend, recruited by extremists, blows up her school in an act of religious martyrdom. She agrees to her mission to kill Moto, the bad guy, because she is terrified about the destruction that religion will re-introduce into her world if she allows Moto to gain a foothold in her country. Therefore it makes more sense for her to react negatively to her church visit.

Once I had her storming out of the church, the story started to flow again. Not only did I stay truer to Lyra’s character, but I also set up the inherent conflict between Lyra and David at the same time.

“Lyra, please,” David says, but she does not stop. She holds herself up tall and wraps her arms around her to ward off the night chill, to ward of the chill of David’s words.

“I am sorry, Lyra,” David says, keeping pace. “You were not ready.”

Lyra bristles, his condescension a steel brush against her skin. She wheels on him, snaps at him. “Ready for what?” She feels flustered, off-kilter, off-balance. She’s not used to her anger, her emotions roiling so close to the surface.

“You were not ready to open your mind.”

Let the conflict begin…

LESSON LEARNED: Think of “writer’s block” as a warning that you should stop the path you’re trying to stay on and rethink what you’re doing. If your story is not coming together, there’s good reason for it. It may take time to figure out the problem and then solve it, but I assure you, it’s time better spent than either slogging through and getting nowhere or avoiding writing altogether.

My character is new to the Second World; it’s intimidating for her, but I want to show that she is intrigued as well. It’s a different, yet still exciting place; new, but not scary. For this, I chose an outdoor market as my scene. It had to be descriptive–a challenge for me, as I’ve already said.

My first crack at it:

It’s mid-morning. The day is warm and temperate; a fresh sea breeze cools the air. They come to the edge of the market, a vibrant, bustling square of food venders, clothing venders, button venders, [DESCRIBE MARKET; CONSIDER THE WINTER VAULT DETAILS. INCLUDE SENSORY DETAILS AND UNPREDICTABLE DETAILS. DESCRIBE HOW PEOPLE ARE DRESSED, TOO.]

The Winter Vault is a novel by Anne Michaels, a beautiful, lyrical story, one that includes an impressive description of a market. It’s less the details that I remember, and more the evocation of place. The author uses what I know I have to use: sensory detail and unexpected detail (i.e.: a girl reading to her blind grandfather).

So I worked on that, trying to emulate the lush beauty of her language.

Lyra returns the wide smile of a hollow-cheeked granny, a woman whose wrinkled face sags under the weight of her years, and Lyra laughs with a heavy-lidded middle-aged apple-seller, whose accent is almost impossible for Lyra to decipher. At David’s insistence, Lyra tastes a xxxx, but spits it out before the burning fire on her tongue can slip down her throat and she swats David on his arm when he laughs.

She likes it here in the market. It’s vibrant, it’s raw, it’s real.

Not even close. Not even close to close. But that’s ok; it’s a draft. Drafts are meant to suck. At least I knew I needed a lot of work.

Yet it wouldn’t come together. I tried so many different combinations of images, looking for the right words to create the right feel.

Until I made a startling and  embarrassingly obvious discovery: There’s no way on Earth I could imitate Anne Michaels or her market scene.

I focused so much on trying to write like Anne Michaels, I forgot to write in my own style. My novel is YA; my audience and purpose are different. My strengths are different. My characters are different.

I started over:

The market does not disappoint. It is a carnival, a street party, a kaleidoscope of sights and sounds and smells—cinnamon and saffron from the spice sellers and sweet mangos and papayas from the fruit sellers and fresh bread and croissants from the bakers. She and David are shoulder-to-shoulder, stepping sideways through the boisterous crowd, an uneven assortment of vendors, sellers and tourists, who, Lyra notices, are very much like her. She watches a wrinkled old woman, her eyes sunken by her loose skin, prod a tall, white First World backpacker to examine a handcrafted blue beaded bracelet; Lyra sees a sun-beaten middle-aged man, his food stall almost empty, retrieve crates of black olives from his dusty farm truck and replenish his supplies; she smiles at a gangly brown pre-teen who, over the yap of a mangy mutt beside him, bargains loudly with a reticent shoe seller for a pair of brilliantly yellow-neon soccer cleats. The boy must have prevailed; he skips away with his prize, his dog trotting happily at his heels.

I like that I’ve focused on individuals (the wrinkled woman, the sun-beaten man) and I like my specific detail (neon soccer cleats). More importantly, I feel it’s now in Lyra’s voice.

I think it can be tightened–that’ll be work for my third draft–but I’m back on track. My own style, my own story.

LESSON LEARNED: Trust your own style. Work on it, improve it, sure, but keep it your own. Trying to be the “next” Anne Michaels or J.K. Rowling or Stephen King or whomever will get you nowhere. (They made it there before you did). Good writing or bad,  I’d rather be the “first” Jen Braaksma.

I was taught a long time ago what the secret to good writing is:

A.I.C.

Ass in chair.

You can’t write well if you don’t, well, write.

I have none.

“Make time for your writing,” the experts  declare. While it’s true you can’t write if you don’t put in the time, how can you “make” time? You cannot create more of something that already has a finite amount.

“Find the time to write,” other experts say. Yet you cannot find something which is not lost. I assure you, I can account for every second of the day.

The harsh truth, obviously, is that you must give up something to fit in time for writing.

Ok, I’m ready. Let’s see what I can give up. My day job? I am long past the poverty-stricken Bohemian lifestyle of a starving artist in an attic. I like having a paycheque. Time with my kids? Perhaps a minute here or there, but since my kids are my priority, that won’t fly. Time with my husband? Yes, that often gets sacrificed because he’s so understanding, but I kind of like him, so I’d kind of like to see him every once in a while. Outside activities? Long since abandoned, in that very attempt to “find” time to write. Chores? I so wish… Exercise? I’ve tried to give it up. I hate it, so that was an easy choice, yet those damn health experts seem to be right. I feel better when I exercise, so I try to fit that in (to be honest, that’s the first to go, though).

In other words, I have yet to find the right answer. I struggle with it constantly.

LESSON LEARNED: I try to book in time to write like I would an outside activity. You may even consider leaving your house, like you have to be somewhere, or at least shutting yourself off from the rest of the chaos in your house.

Here’s what I strive for: Through the support of my husband and kids, I now have Tuesday nights as my writing night (I don’t even have to cook dinner or help clean up!) and I get Saturday mornings. The earlier I get up, the more I have time to write.

I also try to add an hour each day from Mon-Fri, either before the kids wake up in the morning or after they go to bed at night.

Here’s the reality: Fit in an extra hour or five when I’m already tired from work, when I have to help the kids with homework, get dinner, take kids to activities, do my own school work (marking essays: the sad life of an English teacher), and fit in anything extra that comes up? And get up early on Saturday morning when my bed is so comfortable and no one is going to rat me out for not showing to “work” on time? Are you kidding?

LESSON LEARNED: In the end, I don’t “make” time for my writing; I don’t “find” time for my writing.

I steal time.

“I hate writing, I love having written.”

— Dorothy Parker, early 20th century American writer, critic and satirist

I’ve created a world in which there are only three countries: the First World, the Second World and the Third World, which, as you read from my most recent draft, aligns closely with the way we consider the grouping of countries today. My challenge as a writer is to introduce a new world in a way that can be easily understood by my readers.

In my first (multiple) versions, I had invented a fiction East African country called Taifa (the Swahili word for “nation”). I was following the old adage, “write what you know”. Years ago, I had the opportunity to live for a few months in Tanzania so I thought I could use my first-hand experience of the land, people and culture to create my new world. As an example, I have Lyra and the David-like character (who was then called Duma) being attacked by a hippopotamus. Really.

When I changed up my idea of the “worlds” and chose to put my bad guy in the Second World, my descriptions no longer worked. Changing it in my head was so much easier said than done.

As is all writing.

Here’s my first attempt:

Annie and Lyra take an overnight flight to Stone Town. They arrive in the Second World city early Saturday morning. Lyra has been to the Second World once before, to the capital XXX, a modern metropolis, for one of her mom’s concerts, but she’s never been to Stone Town. It’s an exotic port on the eastern coast of the Med Sea, a bridge between the southern cultures of the First World and the desert lifestyle of many Second-Worlders.

Annie guides Lyra through a throng of touts outside the airport, young brown men with large smiles waving pamphlets of tours, hotels and restaurants.

 “Pretty lady,” one persistent man calls out in a clipped English accent, fluttering his yellow brochure in their face.

 “A beautiful room for beautiful women,” a young boy nudges the first man out of the way.

Annie laughs, shakes her head and expertly pulls Lyra through.

“Fly catchers,” she says. “Always with their mouths open.” The affection in her tone eases Lyra’s tension. She’s not used to such aggression, such cheerful chaos.

Problem #1: I had to locate Stone Town on our globe in my own head. I had already done that with Thorin Hill, a town on the the north-eastern Atlantic coast and again with Burke, the First World’s capital, which is on the most easterly point of North America. In this draft, I place it on a Mediterranean Sea-equivalent. The location wasn’t right, though. I want to have the climax of the book in a scene like that; not the characters’ starting point. As much as I didn’t want to stick with the details of reality, I also didn’t want to create an entirely new universe. I studied maps of the Mediterranean and the Middle East and I finally decided to place Stone Town on the Black Sea in Turkey, then have my characters travel south to the Mediterranean Sea.

Except I’ve never been to Turkey. I know nothing about the landscape or the people, except what I’ve read on the news, but I had no interest in researching for accurate details.

My solution? Make it up. I plan to use real landscapes and images taken from the Internet as my starting point, then create it how I want.

LESSON LEARNED: Make your world make sense in your own head first.

Problem #2: I was still trying to use examples from my “Taifa” drafts, but they reflect the African country my first-version Lyra goes to. Yet Stone Town in the Second World is very different from my fictional Taifa. It wasn’t until I stopped trying to “shoe-horn” in versions of my own experiences in Africa  that I got a better handle on the Second World.

LESSON LEARNED: Don’t always write what you know. That’s why it’s called “fiction” 🙂

Ok, so I’ve eliminated “what I know” of a foreign, exotic, different land and I can make it all up.

How?

It took me a long time to figure this out. Description for me is a challenge. I know description has to include specific, unexpected detail and I know it has to include sensory detail (how things smell, sound, taste, feel and look like). I attempted multiple times to describe Stone Town, Lyra’s first introduction to the Second World. None of the descriptions survived.

My solution: I focused on the “feel” of the scene. What emotions did I want the readers to get from Stone Town? A scary, poverty-stricken place? An exotic, other-worldly place? Once I decided on “different, vibrant, exciting”, the scene started coming together. Here’s what I’m working with now:

   Stone Town, across the Atlantic, is an exotic port on the southern edge of the Black Sea, the geographical divide between the First and Second World and the philosophical divide between secular progressive cultures and the traditional religious cultures. It sits on the border, a pawn between those who insist it should be a wall and those who argue it is a gateway. Yet the city itself seems ignorant—or at least indifferent—to its role in the religious wars. It is vibrant and lively, chaotic and hectic. Even in the early Saturday morning hours, as Annie and Lyra’s taxi makes its way from the airport through the cobblestoned streets, grizzled fishermen, their brown skin tough and leathery, haul their freshest catch from the sea up the steep hill to a sprawling outdoor market, fabric vendors lay their brightly-colored wares on tipsy tables outside their narrow shops and kids on rusted, sagging bikes bump over the uneven roads, ululating in a high trill at every divot in the pavement. The taxi snakes its way around the downtown core, a clutch of five or six heritage blocks whose centuries-old stone buildings give the town its name. The taxi driver, a stooped old man with a toothless grin, expertly maneuvers the car through streets and spaces impossibly too narrow for a vehicle and bursts out onto a wide boulevard that hugs the white sand beach and the deep indigo waters of the Black Sea. But along the boardwalk parallel to the road are armed patrols, soldiers dressed in riot gear, their machine guns aimed and at the ready.

Lyra startles at the sight, a harsh blot on the natural beauty of the landscape.

LESSON LEARNED: For every descriptive scene, focus on what you want your reader to feel, then choose your diction (word choice) to match. I used “vibrant” and “lively”–positive words for crowds–not “disorder” or “turmoil”, because I want my readers to come away with a sense of adventure instead of fear.

I may still tighten this scene up on my next draft, but for now, it’s good enough for me to move on.

Here’s the intro to the most recent draft I’m working with. What’s changed from earlier drafts:

• Lyra is no longer so angry (and  immature); in fact, she’s the opposite; she holds in her emotions.
• Jonah’s text about God not wanting their relationship to work now has greater significance in my “post-religious” world.
• I try to explain the world my characters live in.
• I try to get to the action quickly.

I don’t yet have feedback on this from other readers; I think it’s good, but I also know I can’t rely on my judgement alone. Something may be clear in my head, but I may not have explained it well on paper. I struggle with believability (especially when dealing with an improbable scenario–super cells–to begin with.) I don’t yet know if I’m making my readers roll their eyes, but at this stage, that’s ok. I’m just trying to fix up my story the best way I know how right now; fixing it up the story the best way others know how comes later.

Feel free to let me know what you think.

God?

God?

Lyra slides down her locker to the cold hard floor, cell phone in hand, staring at the text from her boyfriend Jonah. Staring at the text from, it seems, her now ex-boyfriend Jonah.

God doesn’t want our relationship to work. Sorry.

It’s Monday afternoon in mid-June, the last week of Lyra’s last year of high school. The day’s final shrill bell has rung and kids spill into the hall. It’s an unusually warm spring day in Thorin Hill, a normally temperate northeastern Atlantic coastal town, and the students are impatient to surge outside. They shout, and slam lockers and stampede toward the door.

Lyra, by contrast, does not move. She sits still, a rock around which the swell of students swirls.

God.

Lyra doesn’t understand. No one invokes God these days. Any mention of God or religion is an archaic throwback to the Conflicts, the period of time decades ago before their world evolved into a post-religious society. Post religion doesn’t mean anti-religion, of course. There’s no law against religion. People are free to speak of God, worship or practice any sort of religion if they choose; it’s just that no one chooses. No one needs to. The idea of a higher being, an all-knowing ephemeral, intangible deity who controls the lives of humans is simply irrelevant. It took time for people to move beyond religion, but they did it in a natural, organic evolution. No politician, group or organization coerced the population of the First World to such views. People finally realized that years, decades, centuries of conflicts—prejudice, assaults, wars, genocides—were often the result of strict religious dogma and the more they questioned their belief in God, in spirituality, in religion, the more it dissolved, like tendrils of clouds dissipating into the sky. It’s not that people mourned the death of God; it’s that God likely never existed in the first place.

Why, then, would Jonah speak of God? That worries her more than him breaking up with her. They’d been growing apart for a while; Lyra had suspected that the end of high school would be the end of their relationship and it saddened her, but God?

Lyra closes her eyes, the din of halls seeping into her head, making it hurt. She clutches the phone, her hands folded against her chest.

God. It doesn’t make sense.

“Hey, Lee-Ree, what’s up? You’re as pale as a ghost.” Ivy, Lyra’s younger sister, nudges her with her wedge sandals and laughs at her own lame joke. Lyra is always pale, her skin milky white, ghost white. Snow white. That’s her dad’s nickname for her. With her long dark raven hair and her large, jewel-green eyes, her dad insists Lyra is the human embodiment of the fairy tale character.

When Lyra says nothing, Ivy crouches low, peering at her sister’s face. “What is it?” she asks, serious now. Lyra blinks a few times, then hands Ivy her phone.

Ivy scans the text, her Cinderella-blue eyes widening. “What the hell?”

Lyra leans her head against the cool metal locker, despondent.

“This is bad,” Ivy says. “Has he ever mentioned God before?” She looks up and down the hall, as if the swarm of students in front of her has the answers.

Lyra shakes her head. Jonah talking about God would be as likely as Jonah talking about his feelings.

Ivy bounces up and tugs Lyra’s hand. “You gotta find him, you know that.”

Lyra sighs, and gets to her feet. She’s taller and thinner than her petite sister. “Mom’s waiting,” Lyra says. She drifts toward the front of the school.

“Dad’s flight doesn’t get in for another hour,” Ivy plants her feet and crosses her arms. “Find out what’s going on with Jonah first. You know it’s more important.”

Lyra wants to ignore her sister, but she’s afraid Ivy’s right. With what’s been happening these past few months, Jonah’s comment warrants attention.

But he wouldn’t… not Jonah…

Ivy follows on Lyra’s heels, eager for answers. The girls turn the corner into the school’s grand entrance hall, a neo-gothic monstrosity of stone arches and pillars. Kids still mill about the open space, their shouts and cries echoing around the hall. Lyra spots a familiar figure across the way and stops short at the sight of her boyfriend—ex-boyfriend—hovering near the heavy oak door. Jonah is the same height as Lyra, and thin, too, like her. He’s lean and wiry with a mop of tangled brown curls, and usually juts out his chin with a cocky confidence, but now he hunches his shoulders as if he carries the weight of the world. Lyra’s heart hammers, her pulse races. She senses, more than understands, that Jonah’s posture is a harbinger.

It can’t be true…

Jonah’s eyes lock on Lyra’s. She sees anguish, guilt, sorrow, hurt. She knows him better than anyone since they’d been dating for almost a year, yet his stare is that of a stranger’s. It strangles her, crushes her. Pained, she reaches out as if her hand could bridge the divide between them, but at the same moment Jonah opens his black coat and Lyra knows why he’s wearing it on such a hot day. Lyra sucks in a breath—it should have been her last—as Jonah raises his hand, presses the detonator and blows up the school.

 

Here’s the story of my heartbreak:

I finally finish my third (fourth? fifth?) first draft in the fall of 2015 (you know, when I originally thought I’d have a polished manuscript completed…). I’m excited. It’s been a long road, but the hard work is done. I have rough sketch of the whole book, the whole plot. I know the ending so I can go back and touch up the beginning, make sure everything fits together. I know I still need to “wordsmith” it—to find the perfect word for the emotion and tone of the scene—but that’s ok, that’s easy. As is the proofreading. It’s all downhill from here. I work and I work and I work.

Until March 2016.

I’m 20 pages from the end of my real second draft. I’ve had to change a lot, but it’s all for the better.

Except I can’t end it.

I mean, I have an end, I had one from the first draft. But it’s not sitting right. It doesn’t work. I think about it. And think. I no longer go to the computer. I lie on my bed, despondent. Why can’t I finish this last section?

I brainstorm. I change the ending. Now Lyra ends up surviving a submarine blowing up. (And if you don’t know where the submarine came from, neither do I.)

Finally, finally, it comes to me.

The whole damn book doesn’t work. All two years of effort.

I had Lyra survive a nuclear bomb; she’s supposed to kill the bad guy. But why wouldn’t her country (the U.S.) have retaliated? I tried to explain that away with my fictional African country of Taifa being allies with China, but now I’m getting into geopolitics that I have little interest in. Then I go back further. Why did the bad guy (Moto) even launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. in the first place? And why Thorin Hill, this suburb I invented outside of Boston?

There was no answer. There was no reason for the bad guy to attack.

If there’s no reason for the bad guy to attack, there’s no reason for my heroine to survive an attack that never happened, nor any reason for her to go on a quest to eliminate a bad guy who isn’t yet a bad guy because he hasn’t attacked because he has no reason to attack. (He knows he’ll be decimated if he attacks).

Better to realize this now than get a stackful of rejections from publishers?

Sure.

Didn’t make me feel better.

I had two solutions: abandon my idea; cut my losses and run or…

Start over.

I bucked up. Dammit, I’m going to finish this novel if it’s the last thing I do (I fear it will be…)

But how to make it better? How to fix it?

1. Get rid of the nuclear bomb. If Lyra, a 17-year-old untrained civilian is expected to assassinate the bad guy, it better be because the people in charge don’t want to waste their time or resources on him. So the bad guy has to start out as a minor threat—something the politicians don’t think is yet worthy of attack. Only our far-sighted spy Annie appreciates Moto’s true threat.
2. What can Lyra survive to show her super cells, if not a bomb? A terrorist attack.
3. Why would a terrorist attack Lyra’s suburban school? This is where I got stuck again. I knew I could make it about religious extremism, very much like the present-day circumstances, but I didn’t want to be stuck with, well, reality. I want to write about characters’ emotions without worrying about whether I’m getting the realistic details accurate.

I’ve read a lot of “how-to write” books over the years. Almost all of them say to start with the story. Sure, a theme, that main idea, the main message, will emerge from the story, and it’s important, but almost all of them warn us new writers, don’t start with theme.

They’re wrong.

That’s what I was missing. A purpose to my book. A message, a lesson Lyra would learn at the end, something more than “I want to kill the bad guy to get revenge on him blowing up my family”.

Considering I teach theme constantly to my students, point out how important it is, I felt stupid I couldn’t see it was missing from my own book before.

So now I had to work on a main idea.

But I’d already started on one when I was musing about the terrorist attack on Lyra’s school being religiously based. In fact, the reason I had I already used for Lyra’s boyfriend breaking up with her (God doesn’t want their relationship to work), gave me my very starting point.

What if Lyra lived in a society in which there was no religion? What if she’d been taught to believe that so many historical conflicts were based on unyielding religious dogma that all religion was evil? What if she was then pulled into a society in which there was religion? What would she learn?

My ideas came together.

But man, I still had so much to do, and by this point I just wanted it done. I was also working full time and taking care of my family, made even more challenging with my husband’s heavy travel schedule.

I gave myself a challenge: I wanted to write 300 pages (yes, yes, publishers go by word count, but I was only focused on a first draft (again) so I stuck with pages). 100 pages a month. 25 pages a week.

It was tough. It was frustrating hell at times. (Why, why am I putting myself through this? No one cares whether I write a YA novel or not. Even if I finish it, it may not be good, and certainly won’t be groundbreaking, earth-shattering or world-changing, so why?)

I missed my target by a week. I finished my sixth first draft in early July.

I’m now on my second draft—lots of work left. I’m 100 pages into it and I’ve changed up almost every scene—except the main idea.

I like it.

Maybe I could like it better, which is why I’ll keep working on it.

I hope you’ll join me for the rest of the journey.

In my new version, let’s call it my second first draft, Lyra no longer knows about her super cells at the beginning; she finds that out as part of the story.

Shit.

The second I open the front door I know I’m in serious trouble. I look at my watch, something I should have done an hour ago, and see it’s already 6:30pm. Dinner is on the table. I smell roast chicken and sweet potato fries. There’s a whiff of garlic from the sautéed vegetables and the scent of anger souring the air. [I’m trying to include sensory detail in here—I’m focused on the “finishing touches” instead of making sure the plot and characters make sense.]

In the six steps it takes to get into the kitchen, I contemplate my approach: throw myself on my parents’ mercy, begging for forgiveness with contrite sorrow; plead neglectful ignorance that I innocently lost track of time or blame my English teacher Mrs. White for making me stay late to tutor a minor niner. By the time I slip through the doorway, my decision seems to have been made for me. I feel a cloak of defiance settle over me. Probably not the wisest strategy.

“I thought I told you dinner was at 6pm,” my mom says, her voice is ice cold, thick hard. She doesn’t look at me, concentrates on cutting up her chicken.

“I thought I told you I don’t care,” I snap back. Definitely not wise.

My father jerks his head up, his eyes flashing. “Don’t talk to your mother like that,” he says. Then, with a resigned shake of his head, he adds, “God, Lyra, are you 17 or a 7-year-old brat?”

“A 17-year-old brat,” my older sister Ivy throws out. [Ivy actually morphs into Lyra’s younger sister with whom she is best friends]She’s smiling up at me, but she’s not smug. As usual, she’s just trying to ease the tension. It doesn’t work. I glare at her, my fists clenched. I haven’t moved from the door, wondering if it’s in my best interest to sit through this torturous family time or escape to my room, going hungry.

“Oh, Lyra,” Ivy has been studying my face. “Don’t tell me you were with—”

“Shut up, Ivy,” I growl. Ivy’s eyes soften, her expression sympathetic. She guesses—correctly—I was at Jonah’s, trying in pathetic desperation to have him take me back. I’m embarrassed that I succumbed to wretched begging, everything Ivy warned me not to do after Jonah dumped me, but I couldn’t help it. We’d been dating for almost a year—in fact, our senior prom night next month would have coincidentally fallen on our one-year anniversary and I was so excited. Then Jonah came home yesterday from a family weekend getaway at a church retreat his parents made him go to, and I got a text. A text.

I realized that God doesn’t want this relationship to work out

God? God?! Until last Friday, Jonah didn’t believe in God, but one weekend at a flippin’ Bible camp and he’s suddenly the biggest convert?

God my ass. More like Melissa Burns. Whose parents also dragged her to that weekend. I heard her moan about it all last week in biology. Bitch.

Not much happens here, does it? You get a sense of character (cardboard as she is) but it’s not enough. It takes me a while to get to the point that Lyra survived a nuclear bomb. I have a spy, Annie, discover that she survived when she shouldn’t have been able to and Annie’s friend, Dr. Hendricks diagnoses her super cells; Annie then recruits Lyra to assassinate the bad guy because she can survive a deadly plague, one that is so contagious a single breath with infect others.

Sound familiar? I was getting closer to what I’m working with now.

Lyra was going to impersonate the President’s daughter, Lauren, as a way to get a face-to-face meeting with bad-guy Simon Moto and I had her spend time in the White House, learning how to be “Lauren”. More importantly, I distracted myself for hours looking at floor plans of the White House so I could make Lyra’s stay realistic.

That was a waste; not a single sentence of that section remains.

I also changed up the beginning. Lyra becomes more of an angry, bitter character. I wanted to show that she’s capable of revenge—that revenge is partly her motivation for agreeing to kill the bad guy.

Bastard. Arrogant, cowardly, cheating bastard.

I reread the text on my phone in the hall outside my English classroom. The final bell has just rung; the halls are jammed with self-absorbed snotty teenagers pushing past me, slamming locker doors, shouting at their friends, happy the last Monday of school is done. Inconsiderate weasles, I think as a group of sophomores accidentally elbow me into the wall on their way past.

I squint at the screen on my phone. Lyra, God doesn’t want our relationship to work. Sorry J.

God?! God? If I hadn’t understood what Jonah meant when I first read the text in English class, I get it now. God my ass. Melissa Burns doesn’t want our relationship to work. Jonah, my boyfriend of 10 months—my now ex-boyfriend of 10 minutes— went to Bible camp this past weekend. Last week he complained incessantly that his parents were forcing him to go. This week, he’s miraculously converted? How much of a fool does he take me for? Doesn’t he know that Melissa Burns also complained incessantly to me in Chemistry class last week that she was being forced to go to the same camp? I can’t believe I actually felt sorry for the two of them, was happy they’d have each other for company at this Bible-thumping retreat.

Bastard. Arrogant, cowardly, cheating bastard.

I ram my way into the stream of kids pouring out the old building and into bright, warm June afternoon. Why is it sunny? It should be dark, cold, rainy. This Boston weather should be miserable, angry, fierce.

Like me.

I shove my phone into my jeans pocket and feel my house keys jangling at the bottom. I stop suddenly, on the worn stone steps, a wall of students pushing into me.

“Hey, move it!” some lanky, snot-nosed freshman snaps as he veers around me.

I ignore him. Instead I focus on the student parking lot, a small rectangle of cracked pavement to my right. More specifically, I focus on one yellow car. One yellow and black vintage 1973 Camero, belonging to one Jonah Peters. I bound down the steps, two at a time, my arms wide.

“Outta my way!” I shout, running, now. I pull out my keys, clutch them firmly in my hands, the key pointing forward like a sword.

My weapon of revenge.

“Lyra!” I hear my name, glance back briefly without stopping, and see my younger sister Ivy on the steps. I wave in acknowledgement, but don’t slow my pace.

“Lyra, wait!” she calls again. But I don’t. I’m on a mission. Besides, Ivy would try to talk me out of it, once she figured out what I plan to do. She’d be understanding and empathetic and reasonable and would convince me I don’t need to hurt Jonah’s car, his baby, just because Jonah hurt me. And I don’t feel like being convinced. I want to hurt him. How dare he throw away almost a year of my life…

Kids are milling about the parking lot, but anonymity isn’t important. Even without these witnesses, Jonah will know who vandalized his car. I want him to know he shouldn’t screw me over.

I don’t hesitate when I reach his car. I extend my arm, grip my weapon, and scrape the key along the driver’s side door. Its screech grates at my ears in a most satisfying way. I walk slowly, deliberately all the way around the car, savouring the squeal of metal on metal.

Ivy runs up to me, her mouth hanging open. “Lyra! What are you doing?!”
I round the front of the car, digging the key deeper into the black stripe on the hood before I complete my circle.

“Lyra, what’s going on?” Ivy grips my elbow, tugging me away, but she doesn’t have to. I’ve already turned my back on the car. Turned my back on Jonah.

Bastard.

Better? Meh.

Which is why I went on to version number… see? I’ve already lost count.

Through the Humber College program, I was paired with Richard Scrimger, a writer of, among other works, young-adult fiction. (Check him out at www.scrimger.ca). He was very supportive and very (very) honest.

One of his first questions: “What does your character want?”

Ummm…

I just thought it was cool to have a character with super cells. And I imagined that she was running away from government doctors who wanted to use her… for something…

I totally understood what Richard was asking me. I got why he was asking. After all, I teach this very thing to my own students.

And yet…

I couldn’t figure out the answer. I had a great concept and a good character, but I couldn’t put it together into a cohesive whole.

I wrote outline after outline and plotted a dozen different scenarios, each one no doubt frustrating Richard more and more.

I finally came up with my three-sentence pitch:

Sixteen-year-old Lyra Harmon can’t die because she has “super cells”—cells that always heal themselves. When she learns her parents have contracted the fatal Hecate’s Plague, she sets out to save them because her body is key to finding a vaccine, since she’s the only person who survived the disease 10 years earlier. But a shadowy military unit tries to take her because it has other plans for her unkillable body.

Richard’s reply:

Pretty good!  You are on point.  I’d like a clearer sense of what ‘sets out to save them’ looks like, though.  Is she a scientist, warrior, computer hacker, spy? Does she work in a lab, battle a demon, break into the Pentagon, raise money selling chocolate bars? Lyra’s on her way to the city.  A journey.  Good. How does she hear about her parents’ illness?  Is she in an armed camp or a hospital or a safe sanatorium? And, in search of a vaccine.  Means what? Does the vaccine exist but in short supply? Is it ready but untested?  Does she plan to make one?  Is she a doctor? I mean, I wouldn’t know how to make a vaccine to save my life or my kids’ lives. Finally, is she the only supercell person on the planet? Just thinkin out loud.  

My reaction: Oh God, how the hell do I know?

A few more weeks, a few more futile attempts…

Finally:

Richard, you’re killing me! What do you think you’re trying to do… make me write a better book?! 

I’ve been thinking about your scenario comments and I’m basically considering rewriting the entire premise of the story (yet again!)

So here’s another crack at it. No idea whether it’s any good (guess that’s why they pay you the big bucks:) 

Sixteen-year-old Lyra Harmon can’t die. She’s the only person known to have “super cells”—cells that always heal themselves. That’s why the military believes she is the only one who can succeed in a special mission that will end the West’s bloody, long-running war with the East. But when Lyra learns her job is to assassinate the East’s dictator, she must decide if she can actually kill one person to save thousands.

I’d love for you to stroke my (tender, bruised) writer’s ego to remind me that it’s natural and normal to keep revising the idea of the story (as opposed to the story itself) by this point. 

Richard’s reply—something all us non-yet published writers need to remember:

You have a kick-ass story idea.  THAT is something not very many writers can boast. I have published a bunch of books with lousier central ideas than yours. You will publish more books, but they will not have this good a clear simple idea. BE THANKFUL for the good idea.

 It is totally normal to have to address the major motives.  I do this all the time.  I always have.  

My first kids book sold a shit ton of copies and made my reputation, but it needed serious rewrite.  My original draft had not 1, not 2, but 3 aliens (evil twins!!).  It was a love triangle.  My editor liked the book enough to buy it and then had me totally rewrite it with only 1 alien. The big idea was good but I needed to lose the scenes with the other Jupiterians.

Just last year I handed in Zomboy.  It is on a bunch of best-of lists now, but in its first draft the main guy Bob is a bit, well, dull.  My editor wanted me to make him more interesting. I changed his personality and then had to tweak EVERY scene he was in.  Guess how many scenes?  That’s right, all of them.

That made me feel better—for 10 minutes. Until I realized I still had to do all the work. So I went back to the drawing board.

Again.

And again.

Remember how I was going to have a full draft completed by the spring? We’re now February 2015.

I start over. From scratch.