Everything that's wrong with your manuscript
As you all know (and are maybe sick of hearing me talk about every month?) I recently took hold of my daily schedule in order to get back to a place of productivity, creativity, and inspiration (you can read more about it in my February, March, and April newsletters, if you've just joined us).
This month's revelation is that allowing myself the time to dive in to projects and really think about them has offered me the opportunity to see everything that's wrong with them.
"Now, hang on, Julie," you're saying. "That sounds pretty grim. What if I don't want to know everything that's wrong with my manuscript?"
Sure, sure. I get it. And I will offer you a cookie or a piece of buttered toast and gently ask, "Are you sure you don't want to know?"
I wrote a novel last year, and it wasn't good enough, so I rewrote it.
I was working on a picture book that was almost done, almost ready to go to illustrators, but I realized it wasn't good enough, so I rewrote it.
There was a chapter book I was writing this month, and my first stab at it was good, but after thinking about it, I realized it wasn't good enough. (So I rewrote it.)
Writing is harnessing the energy of your brilliant idea and your incredible writing ability, and then two days later going in to see how you can revise the mess you made. When you do a lot of shallow and distracted work, it can be hard to see what the problems are, and how to fix them.
Now, there are definitely people who think their writing is never good enough. Writers who work and revise and rewrite and trash everything and start again, forever. That's a different issue. I'm talking here to writers like me, writers who are apt to think, "Oh, this is fine! This'll do!" and declare it done.
It probably is fine. It probably will do. But do you want to be someone who writes "fine" stories? Or do you want to be someone who writes groundbreaking, mindblowing stories? Yeah, I thought so.
The thing is, once you've been writing for a while, and working on your craft, your "fine" stories, probably are pretty good. What I'm cautioning you about is staying in that rut and avoiding cracking the story open and figuring out how to make it better, because you know it will be hard. You know it will be hard because you've done it before. But if there's any little whisper in your ear that you could make it better, then you have to do it.
Look, you can always make an excuse not to dive deep and do the hard work. You will have doctor's appointments, sick kids, doubt, and be out of cheese. Your knee will feel weird, there's a podcast to listen to, and you have imposter syndrome. Those are all real. But you still need to make your story the best it can be.
I didn't even realize I wasn't making my stories good enough until I started doing deep work. They were certainly good enough for my shallow work state. But when you're committed to spending two solid hours with your manuscript, it starts to tell you things. It says, "Hey, you're bored. That's probably a bad sign." Or you'll be on a walk without earbuds, thinking about your story, and suddenly realize you can't come up with a decent log line for your manuscript because it doesn't have a solid premise. If you're doing shallow work, you don't have time to sit long enough in that uncomfortable state of "hey, I probably shouldn't be bored while I'm writing this" because you jump on over to Instagram and you're looking at cute dogs falling off of chairs and you aren't bored anymore. I get it. That dog is cute. But you don't want readers to put your book down and look at dogs on Instagram.
There's a secret about all of this, which is: lots of people are super distracted these days. If you choose to be someone who goes deep with your stories, your stories will be better. They'll be better than they were before and (shhhh!) they'll be better than the stories of those distracted people too. The other secret is that it's not THAT hard, really. It's just the difficulty of sitting in one place and thinking, and not letting yourself get distracted. But writing stories is fun, and it's worth it to stay with your words and avoid the distraction. You can do it.
Thoughts and Links
My next picture book (more info below) comes out in August, which seems far away, but is almost tomorrow in publishing time. I wrote a thread on Twitter about some of the bookish movie vibes you'll find in Yours in Books; check it out.
I love this interview with Twyla Tharp from 2019, encouraging us not to "accept the rumor that as the body ages, it becomes less." She's delightful, curses, and tells us to keep doing our creative work by doing it, every day. I'm hearing her voice telling me "Sternum up! Breathe deep! Shoulders back! Now we stride."
I'm only one chapter in, but so far Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses is an inspiring and eye-opening read. It's all about how the typical MFA program or writing workshop assumes a certain cultural default (usually white, male, cis, hetero), and what happens if we throw that out and start fresh? How can we examine the craft of writing through a cultural lens? "The way we tell stories has real consequences on the way we interpret meaning in our everyday lives."
I enjoy Antiques Roadshow as much as anyone, and their celebrity editions have been featuring children's book makers. Episode one has Jason Reynolds, and episode two has Marc Brown as well as John Hodgman, who isn't a children's book author (yet?) but does include some children's-book-related treasures in what he presents for appraisal. Fun!
Two recent finds from the awesome JetPens: An envelope template, so you can make any paper into an envelope to mail a letter to your friend. Ramona is getting this for her birthday. Don't tell. And: a teeny sticky-note calendar for habit tracking in my to-do list/journal notebook. I am not great at habit tracking but want to get better. I'm starting by marking off all the days where I do two hours or more of deep work.
I was on the Manuscript Academy podcast, talking all about deep work and how I've made it work for me. Also about keeping kitchens clean when everyone is home, blueberries, treating your creativity like a physical object, and protecting your unique storytelling mindset. Give it a listen and let me know what you think! It was a super fun conversation.
Yours in Books will be published on August 24, 2021. Preorder now! If you preorder from Print: A Bookstore, you'll receive a book signed by me (pssst: if you want any of my books signed by me, you can order them from Print at any time). You can find other buy links, and more about the book, on my website.