The Sun Rises on a New Year

"Dates that come around every year help us measure progress in our lives. One annual event, New Year's Day, is a time of reflection and resolution."
                (Joseph B. Wirthlin)

Here we are at the time of year when resolutions figure in many people's conversations. What are your New Year's Resolutions? That's a question you have probably heard this week and perhaps have even asked. Losing weight is generally a favorite of many of us and one I need to make after too much Christmas goodies!! What are some others that you hear? Perhaps to read through the Bible? More time with family? Exercise every day? Be kinder to those you meet? There are so many ways we can resolve to be better.
 
For many years I would write in my personal journal around the first of the year. Most of the resolutions I recorded in my journal were writing related. Perhaps to sell a new book. Or to not give up hope in spite of rejections. To come up with a new idea. To finish whatever book I was writing. 

Tonight while considering what to write here on my blog, I decided to dip back into one of those journals in the hopes of finding something I could just lift out of a New Year's entry to share here. I went back to 1981 and leafed through the journal. While I didn't really find anything I thought would interest anyone but me, it was eye-opening for me to look at myself as a writer thirty plus years ago. 

In 1981, I'd published two books, paperback historical romances in the general market. I was hoping for the third and fourth historical books I'd written that had yet to find a home. As it turned out it took twenty plus more years for those particular stories to find a publisher and make their way out to readers. Meanwhile, as I flipped through the years, I walked through some rejection valleys until finally in 1985 I sold a young adult novel. 

That began several years of writing for the young adult market and the oft expressed worry of whether the stories I came up with were going to be ones the editors I was working with liked. I had one editor who filled my ears with great words of praise but then would send back my books with lots of red edits and suggestions for rewrites. One day with her, I'd feel on top of the world when she said something like she could "pick out one of my sentences anywhere" since I had such a unique style and then I'd get a letter saying I needed to "trim the lard" out of my story. Up and down, but all the time I was learning. Not only how to write, but how to deal with those ups and downs of the writing life. I was so young as a writer then. I had two kids in college, but I was still so young. 

Oh, to look back through the years and remember. And now I feel so blessed to have books published. To have my stories out there for readers. To have the promise of being able to share more stories with readers in the year ahead. 

One of the most interesting things about glancing through several years of my 1980's writing life was that I mentioned stories and characters that I don't remember at all now. Obviously the books didn't sell or I gave up on writing them. One I mentioned trying to write through several years. The character's name was Candra Lynn. I often refer to my books in my journal by this or that character's story rather than a book title. But now I don't remember Candra Lynn at all or her story. Too many characters through the years have pushed her deep into my memory where I can no longer retrieve it without some reminder. The story is probably here somewhere on my rejection shelves. Someday when I don't have a newer, fresher idea to take all my attention, perhaps I'll seek Candra Lynn out and see what story she tried to get me to tell. 

Here's a snippet of a journal entry from January 1987. 
"You wouldn't believe the things I'm doing to keep from beginning work - including writing this. I've even been cleaning my desk drawers, looking through old letters, etc. 
    I'm timid to plug in my typewriter in and begin. I keep worrying the words won't come. I know they will but I also know how hard their coming sometimes is. But this book may be a gift."

That book did turn out to be a gift, one of my very favorite young adult novels, The Discovery at Coyote Point. But when I read through the journal entries while I was writing it, I often spoke of the struggle in the writing. I suppose that's what I need to remember as the sun rises on a new writing year - that the words may come hard, but the story may nevertheless turn out to be a gift. 

Thank you all so much for reading. You are a definitely a gift to me each and every time you come by here to visit. 

Tell me what you are resolving for the coming year. 

On the Hunt for "The End"

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. ~Hart Crane

Once more I am searching for the end of a story. Once more it seems to be hiding from me behind a crazy mixture of words that don’t seem to be paving the pathway I need to glide on toward “the end.” Once more I’m feeling the way I did back in 2009 when I wrote this:

It's been a hard work week so far with too many other things I have to do getting in the way of my five pages a day quota to make sure I meet my summer deadline. I've been writing and maybe almost getting my pages, but at the end of the day I sometimes end up thinking that I'm going to have to cut most of those words in the final draft. But I tell myself to just get the words out there where I can cut them or improve them, where I can tell the story I'm trying to tell. In the best way I can.

That’s one of the good things about keeping a writing journal. You can see you’ve been in the same place before. You can see that it wasn’t fatal. The story did get written. You can see that it even got published and people read it. Maybe not as many people as you might hope. Most all writers wouldn’t mind an appearance on the New York Times Bestseller list, but any reader’s list is good too.

I’m not sure which book I was writing in 2009. Maybe The Seeker or The Blessed. I’m almost sure it must have been one of my Shaker books. That’s what I’m searching for the end of once again. A Shaker book. I’m anxious to be at the end. I tremble a bit thinking about reading it over once I find those elusive words for fear I have not written the story I hoped to write when I first typed in the words “Chapter 1” and began.

The post back in 2009 was titled “Making the Words Disappear.” You can click on this link if you want to read the rest of what I wrote then. That is what a writer needs to do - make the words disappear. A writer wants readers to be living the story with the characters and not simply reading about them. Some years ago I was teaching a community ed class on writing and one of the sessions was how to make characters come to life. In the process of searching for something that might keep my wannabe writers interested in this very uneducated in writing processes teacher I searched for inspiring advice from other writers who were more educated in the writing process. One of the things I read that I have never forgotten was a writer saying she wanted to create characters who would crawl up into a reader’s heart and find a home there. That’s what I want to do. That’s what I’m trying to do with this book as I push my people out on the paths that will help me find an end of the story that will satisfy them and me and you, the reader.

Do the words disappear for you when you’re reading? 

Have you met characters that you invited into your heart and that you remembered long after you came to the end?

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~William Wordsworth