I have found that writing calms me down. The words flow from my head, through my fingers to the keys and onto the "paper". I don't often plan what I am going to write, I just write- it just comes out. I can write and write and then I go back and edit and make changes. But it's the writing itself that takes me away to another place, a place locked away in my head yet oh so far away. Each sentence forms itself as I think it and as I think it I type it simultaneously. It is in the planning that I get distracted and things don't flow. I get bogged down in the process and lose the creativity. I'm not sure if this is a normal style of writing but it is what works for me. It is the exhilarating part, when I can let the words shape the characters which shape the story.
So I think I left off around the winter of 2013. I was writing A LOT! I would spend hours on the weekends tapping out the keys and shaping the lives of my characters. The train station and the double sunset had been woven into the story and I was beginning to see more substance and fluff and filler and content shaping the lives of Ava and Jack. They became clearer in my mind.
At this point my sister, Amy Bitter, was reading through the story for the first time as I was working on the ending. Thank God for Dropbox! After we worked out a few kinks, she was able to edit right on the copy I was working from. Oh technology how I love you!
The ending was really bugging me. I had no idea how I wanted to tie it all together and finish. The more I thought about it, the harder it was to visualize how Ava and Jack would finish their tale. I spent many hours thinking about it and just couldn't figure it out.
So I just started writing again. I let my mind clear and I let Ava and Jack tell their story. As I put the finishing touches on the ending it just all came together, without any planning. Ava and Jack created the ending for me. It was their story and as I wrote every open piece of the story came together at the end. The ending is by far my favorite part and I am most proud of it!
At some point during this whole process I decided that I needed to have some trusted readers to give me feedback. I had a desire to know if this story was any good at all. Of course I loved it but would other people? I decided to ask two friends to read it. Both are avid readers and I knew that I could trust them to give me the information I needed. With a few instructions as to what I was looking for, Jen Kuessner and Jen Bethke read what I had written. Their feedback was invaluable!! I really enjoyed talking about the story with them and the constructive criticism was just what I needed and wanted. They gave me a readers perspective which helped me in the revising process. It was exactly what I needed to help me focus my revising!
Sometime early spring I think I had the story as a whole finally written. Amy had been busy editing and now came my task of going back through her edits and making changes. I started at the beginning and began reading through the story for probably the 100th time. This time I made changes to grammar, sentence structure and punctuation- mostly punctuation! I learned very quickly that I am not very good with commas. I think I just throw them in every now and again. Thankfully Amy, and my niece Megan, have a pretty good handle on commas!
Amy ended up going through the whole story twice to make edits- God bless her!! I read through and revised at least twice and each time I would add in a little something new or change something and I really enjoyed this process as a whole. However, I could have edited and revised forever! I could always find something to change or reword or add or delete. I found myself getting very caught up in revising and had to make a conscious effort to just stop and call the story finished. This wasn't easy to do as there was something safe about editing and revising.
I think it was early June when I forced myself to stop and call the story finished. Reading through it just one more time, I was really satisfied with the final story. So now what? I hadn't really thought about the next steps, I was just happy to have it finished. Yet it didn't feel finished to me. A very small part of me wanted to share it with others, a small part that was beginning to grow.
Next time- How I got up the nerve to share it with more people.
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