About a month ago we moved into a new house. Actually, it’s a very old house, but it’s new to us. To be even more accurate, it’s newly ours but it’s actually very familiar to us because it’s the house where I grew up. When my parents started thinking about downsizing, Josh and I decided to relocate (yet again!), this time to my hometown to raise our kids in my childhood home. It still feels a little surreal; I never imagined that I would end up back here.
One exciting thing about this house, at least for me, is that I have an office space for the first time. And now that we’ve had a few weeks to unpack and the kids are back in school, I’m finally starting to try and get into the groove of a writing routine again. Now coming to you live from my very own office! The wallpaper in here is…not great. And there’s still a stack of boxes behind me that I’m choosing to not think about right now. But an office! With a desk! And a door! Dizzying wallpaper or not, it’s dreamy.
As I’ve sat down to write again I’ve felt like I have to get my bearings a little. For the last nine or so years I’ve been working almost exclusively on the same project. Then, after a brief but enthusiastic affair with a new idea resulted in the birth of a messy and very thin first draft, I wrote almost nothing for the next year. Part of that was due to COVID and having the kids home all day every day again. But a big part of it was also that I had hit walls with both of my other projects. I felt a little lost at sea, unsure of what to do with either of them, so whenever I did find the time to make an attempt at writing I found myself bouncing between efforts to re-outline the old projects and making new outlines for fresh ideas I’d had knocking around inside my head. Surprisingly to me, most of the new ideas were for adult contemporary fiction, a bit of a left turn after spending so many years writing middle grade and teen fantasy.
One of the biggest issues I had with my other projects was that while I always started with a clear idea about the world of the story or about a character, I never really had a clear idea about what kind of story I was trying to tell. I’ve discovered that for me, the most satisfying books are the character driven ones. The kind of story where I am invested in the people I’m reading about and the journeys they are on, what kind of decisions they make and why, and whether they will be able to solve their problems or not. Of course there are lots of entertaining plot driven stories, where this happens and then this happens and then THIS happens and it’s all very thrilling. But I’ve realized that that isn’t the kind of story I want to write. I want to write stories that make my readers feel like they’ve just gone through something, even if the characters in the story weren’t on some epic journey or fighting a blazing battle with their magical powers. (Though that’s not to say I don’t want to write about magical powers. I still love fantasy, after all.)
So this time when I came up with an idea for a character and a specific situation she finds herself in, I knew I needed to spend more time chewing on why exactly it was I felt the need to tell her story. What is her story about? How will she be different in the end - for better or worse - than when she started? I now have a rough outline for the first five or six chapters of the story, and I know where I’m headed in the end. But even though I love making outlines, I’m resisting the urge to plan out everything beforehand and instead dive into a very rough pre-first-draft and spend some time just getting to know this lady and what makes her tick.
Speaking of character growth, I have historically been very slow to share my writing with anyone. I think it’s the old perfectionist tendencies in me that don’t want to put my work on display until I feel like it’s perfectly polished. But I’m trying to get better about being so precious with my writing, so I’ve joined a local a writers group and have already sent my first scrappy chapter to my husband and writing partner for their initial thoughts. Here’s to this new plot twist in my own story - the unexpected return to my hometown - resulting in some satisfying character development not just my in characters, but in myself too.
Cover photo by Erik Mclean from Pexels