Almost two years ago, I was inspired by all the kids riding bikes in Stranger Things to write a post about a thing that happened when I was the same age as those kids (12 in 1983), and I was riding my bike with my friends.
While I worked on that blog post, other memories from the same time began to percolate up through the thick dried crust that the decades had built up over them, and I started to get this idea … what if I took all these things that happened from like 1982 through 1984, and I used them and the kids who were there as inspiration for a short story? It seemed like a decent idea, so I got to work on it. As I approached ten thousand words, I discovered that there was a lot more story left to tell, so I decided to let it keep on going until it became a novella. When it got there, I still wasn’t done, so I kept going until it was an actual novel.
I ended up calling it All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, because I’m terrible at making up my own titles, and if you look at all of my books, you’ll notice that they are almost always titled after lyrics. It’s a semi-autobiographical work of fiction, about coming of age in the summer of 1983, told by the writer who is revisiting his childhood. Writing it has been one of the most rewarding and satisfying experiences of my entire creative life, even though I got so depressed after the election in 2016, I took almost nine months off from writing it (and doing much of anything creative).
I picked it back up earlier this year, and I began working on it, intensely, every day. It gave me a sense of purpose, creative satisfaction, and the hope that, maybe before too long, I could honestly call myself a novelist. Some days were easier than others, but even on the most challenging day, I never felt like giving up. I never even felt the absolute conviction, which I always feel at some point in a manuscript, that it was the worst thing ever and I was a damn fool for thinking I could write the story. The day I typed THE END for the first time was pretty special, even though I knew it was really just the beginning of the real work, which was the rewrite.
As a lot of you know, we had to vacate our house because of black mold this summer. While we were away, I worked on the rewrites, and as a result I spent much of my summer in my narrator’s version of the summer of 1983, which was pretty awesome. In no small way, working on this story got me through what could have been a not super awesome time.
So.
About three weeks ago, I finished a revision and realized that it was as good as I could make it on my own, and it was time to turn it in to my editor. He took his Red Pen of Doom to it, and sent it back about two weeks ago. It’s been sitting on my computer desktop, looking at me every day while I carefully avoided it, because I was afraid that his notes were going to say some version of, “I know you worked hard on this for a long time, but it’s all crap and here’s why.” Well, I opened it today and got to work on it. I am relieved to report that his notes do not say that. They mostly say some version of, “you don’t need this, and you are getting in the adult narrator’s way, while he tries to stay out of his own way and tell his story. Here’s how you can make this stronger…”
I don’t know how other writers and editors work, but we do this thing where I give him the manuscript, he opens itin LibreOffice, suggests changes and puts in notes that explain why he suggested them, and then he sends it back to me. I go through it, change by change, and accept the changes, respond to the notes, add new stuff as needed, and then send it back. Typically, we’ll do this three or four times before we’re finished.
This time, because he warned me he’d made some deep cuts, I just accepted all the changes at once, then started reading the changed manuscript, to find out if I really missed anything, or felt like something I wanted to fight for had been cut out. Well, it turns out that I didn’t miss anything, and his cuts made the narrative much stronger. I figured we’d end up cutting ten percent, and we only ended up cutting about six percent. That tells me that I did a better job with the draft I turned in than I thought. That note about getting out of the way is a really good one; I see lots of places where I was self-conscious and unsure, so I made the narrator explain himself in places where I should have just let him tell his story. There is literally a single paragraph that I want to fight for, but even as I have thought about fighting for it, I secretly (well, secretly until now) believe that it doesn’t have to be there and nobody will miss it once it’s gone, if we end up cutting it.
While I worked today, I was surprised to notice that I had been missing the characters I created and lived with for so long. I got to again experience that sense of meaningful satisfaction that I had been enjoying every day while I worked on the first draft and its revisions (even on the days when I felt like the words just didn’t want to flow together). I got to get excited and terrified about this novel being really close to finished, and that much closer to being read by real people in the real world.
There’s still some tough work to do. I still need to rewrite the ending (the very fair note on the current ending is “it just … sort of … ends, and you’ve earned a better ending than this one. Go find it.”) and I’m genuinely unsure how to pull that off, but it’s one of those things that I know will be super obvious, right after I metaphorically drag myself over broken glass to find it. But this is the work I want to do. This is what I want and need to be doing with my life, and it feels reasonably good to both know that, and be able to do it.
Have a good weekend, everyone. I hope you get to spend it with awesome people who make you happy.
