The Settled Version of The Ambitious Fairy Projects

 Just a note:

It's amazing how a novel evolves in our minds, especially if we have time. Some of the best stories I have written or worked on were products of having enough time, where others had little time. Time constraints can be both good and bad. When I do have constraints, I am a much better writer, but if the constraints are too tight, I end up shortchanging the work. That said, too much time gives a writer too much time to think. That is kind of what happened to me on this project. It began as one thing and now it's going to end as a completely new thing. However, I have no regrets because this project has been a heart book in many ways, it has been overly ambitious, and I've been making serious changes from the beginning. One reason I was able to do this is I had a team behind me who said, "Do what you want." I have never really had that. I was always writing with a contract and a due date and the constraints were so tight, I had to work long hours every day to finish. My first draft of this book was done long, long ago before my husband died. It was a very rough draft, the first time I had written a novel like that. By the seat of my pants. It was an experiment. At the end of that journal, I knew I had the wrong character as the MMC and the wrong setting. It was a contemporary set in USA. I think much of that story was just nostalgia. I sometimes just write something to get it out of my mind. I have done that a few times. And sadly, I had no interest in rewriting this story or even keeping anything but one big element. 

What did I do? Well, it took a few years, but I wrote another version the same way, by the seat of my pants and this time, I set in a new place but it was still contemporary. I printed it off. I did not keep a digital copy. I did not like it at all.

It was then that I realized, after four books (one was a completely different book that I loved and may finish one day but it would be a lot of work, how I can see it as a companion to this book I am working on) ... after four books, and hundreds of thousands of words, I realized that writing by the seat of my pants, not writing as an iterative drafter was just a waste time for me and I would never finish a novel. That is my process. And because my story does evolve and it changes a lot as I go I have to rework a book while drafting from the beginning. If I write an entire draft on a single form, it is nothing but a waste, like those four books I drafted by the seat of my pants. I did not revise, refine, or work as I went along. Four versions of a story that went nowhere.

So I stopped and said, I cannot do this anymore.  I am going to trust my instincts and make a plot, pay attention to structure and if I have changes along the way, I go back from the beginning and write it all in. I revise and revise and inch forward as the novel grows and develops into the story I feel best represents that vision in my head.

DOING this, I have learned my weaknesses as a writer, too. And so along the way, I have made changes to enhance my gifts and to mitigate my weaknesses. I have also applied this to the story itself. What can I change to make it better, which basically means smaller, tighter, more focused, to be able to make it propulsive without losing interiority. The latter was a hard lesson. I am still working on that. But really, no one wants big giant books with heavy prose. If authors are getting that, they have a reputation, a backlist, and a good agent.

That brings me to why I wrote all this mess. I knew my book was still too big and I was trying all the time to make it smaller by changing things. Deleting things.

The BIG THING was setting. I keep changing not the place, but the time. I had to ask myself this very week if I could make the story leaner and more mythic by moving time again and the answer was yes, but I did not want to move it to an era I did not love or know, just for the sake of fitting in with so many novels in the genre I write. It was a friend who said, I know what period you know best because you studied it for two decades when you were young. I about fell out of my chair at that comment. And then I knew how I could write the exact same story smaller, just by moving the time. My plot wouldn't change a bit, just descriptions would and even some of those would not. I just started laughing because that is what happens to all writers when they envision their story just one way. I was stuck on one decade and I moved the time back and forth in that decade. 

Now I made a larger jump, and I feel so free of the things that I knew I would not be good at or things that would weigh the story down. One reason I am doing this is I want to write a CHARACTER DRIVEN story, with a big theme. It's not a trail ride, it does not reply on gimmicks or shocks. It's a character driven story with lots of surprises created out of character motivations and basic human needs.

It did not start out that way, but that is how it will end. And everything I do serves that purpose.