I started this blog when I was eighteen. I'll be twenty-one soon. Those years have been a time of huge transitions. Major life changes, upsets, high points, deadly lows, and insanity. And I've been writing through it all.
Blogging and tweeting has let me find a cool community of young writers who face many of the same problems. As I begin to age out of this group and think of grad school, I'd like to share a bit of what I've learned. I've changed a lot during this time, and so has my writing.
And you know what? That's a good thing.
Rewind to when I first started writing The Book, back when I was fourteen and a high school freshman.
Thank God I did not finish and edit and shop this MS around when I was still fourteen. I couldn't have finished and edited it if I hadn't matured. And yet, I couldn't have started it if I hadn't been fourteen and rebellious and too ambitious for my own damn good.
I've always had a dark and morbid imagination, and I wanted to write this dark and morbid story. But I was too young to really do that justice. I had the violence down pat. Gore, brutality, hatred -- sadly, I had a pretty good understanding of all those things by the time I was fourteen.
Unfortunately, I was a novice in terms of knowing anything about love. The main romance was supposed to be this deep, meaningful relationship and blah blah blah, but all their interaction was cutsey and flirty. That's what I thought love was at fourteen. Oh, and sex? Nope. Nada. Even when writing about characters much older than myself, my mentality was, "Well, I never think about that, so my characters won't either. Because ewww." Sometimes I look back and want to laugh. My seventeen-year-old male protagonist never thinks about sex? My sixteen-year-old oh-so-rebellious female protagonist never at least considers it? Haha.
Now, thanks to edits by my college-aged self, said male protag runs off to join the army when his ex gets knocked up. Hopefully future readers will still like him because it's not actually his baby. But that little edit has literally changed the entire darn story -- from his character to his motivations and, ugh, everything. So much work.
So totally worth it.
When I was fourteen, I had him throw a rebellious hissy fit and run off to join the army because, I don't know, all the cool kids were doing it or something. Very Luke Skywalker. Very shallow. Very...immature.
While I don't bash writing when you're young, I will say that there are definite advantages to a more mature perspective. Five years from now, I'll look at things differently. My writing style will be different. That's just how life works.
I used to freak out because I would never finish and publish my first book by the time I was sixteen, like some of the authors I idolized. Now I'm fine with that. Publishing young might make you stand out, but in the end the book is the most important. Some people are ready younger. I wasn't.
And that's OK.
I didn't write fiction when I was that age. All of my writing was strictly non-fiction. Essays, speeches, letters to the editor of the local paper. (Gives you an idea of the kind of 14 year old I was...which probably doesn't surprise you.)
ReplyDeleteAny fiction of any significance I have written in adulthood, and yet I still relate to what you say here. True, more perceptions have remained constant in the last five years for me, than they would between the ages you talk about. Nonetheless, plenty of perspectives have shifted over the years.
In a way, it makes novel writing a bit more difficult. If it takes years to finish something, (my first novel, Flowers for Dionysus, is in it's 5th draft, and it's 4th year of existence), one might not feel as on fire about the story as they did when they began the rough draft. Then again, that could be an advantage...as you said that passing of time can give a certain distance that will allow for better edits than one can give in the heat of the newness of the piece.
I used to write poetry quite frequently. Several poems a week for a while. Then my perspective changed over the course of time, and I didn't feel moved to write poetry regularly for years. In the last few weeks, I've decided to go back to doing so for a while; I want to see how my changed impression about life during the interim will affect my poetry.
I know that's not the same as fiction, but it illuminates the same premise, I think.
The poetry point is right on, thanks for making that connection! Loved your post, btw. :) All this goes right along with how my poetry has changed as well. The main difference there is that a novel is a longer project that you kind of live with. Poems can be the same way, but it's a different experience.
ReplyDeleteThe passage of time can often be tricky to handle. You have to be distant enough not to cringe at all that stuff you wrote when you were 14 and want to toss it, but still close enough to and invested in the story to want to edit and revise it.
This will be my...wow, almost my 7th year on this project. I will admit, I've wondered, "Should I stop it?" briefly before. The answer is always, "No, I have something here, and I would feel bad abandoning it after all this time." Projects never really expire; writers' interest does. Mine hasn't.
I had the same young writer's dream as you - get published young, I think my goal was 13 at one point. Now, I am so glad that I never pursued publishing that young because my writing has come so far since then!
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear someone else who feels the same way! A lot of us who start younger feel like we have to get defensive about our writing because otherwise people doubt us. It's OK to admit we aren't perfect yet; no one is or ever will be.
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