Running up that hill
Today I got an invoice reflecting my ‘sales’ of my book. I laughed because it wasn’t much. My ROI (Return on Investment) was somewhat paltry. And it got me thinking about all the effort that it took to write a book and then the similar amount needed to want to sell it.
Not only did I have to ‘learn’ to write fiction, but then I had to learn to write it well. Dialogue tags. Head hopping. Background information overload. Misdirection. Missed details. There were so many gotchas to writing fiction that I had a hard time reconciling. It’s why you need a really great Developmental Editor to read through your story and give you honest advice based on modern writing standards.
Sarah Chorn was both amazing and frustrating.
She was amazing because she gave me so much insight into my writing and what I was doing right or wrong. She reminded me of the demanding teacher who grades your papers with tough critique and pushes you to do better. But I totally needed that to thrive. Whether it was sentence structure or word choices, character insights, dialogue strengths or weaknesses, she pointed them all out. And it was very eye-opening to see my story, my vision, deconstructed so easily. It was disheartening because I had so much more work to do, even though I thought I was so close to publishing.
The frustrating part was when you thought you had accomplished a literary wonder, and she knocked you down several pegs by either ignoring some of those cool plot points you wanted to add or questioning them. There are a lot of pages that were left behind because they didn’t contribute to the story as a tight narrative and detracted from the reader's engagement. I love backstory, but it has a time and place. It’s easy to disengage from a story when you have tangents that run several pages. I learned to sneak them in with subtle cues and conversation, but nowhere near as detailed as I would have hoped. Sigh. I miss those pages.
And that was just so I could get the book written. That doesn’t hint at publishing. Maybe that’s the next post. That hill is more of a mountain after all.
