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You’re Never Going to Write in Straight Lines
On being scatter-brained, unlinear, and kind of a hopeless wreck.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that Somehow You’re Sitting Here has been my white whale for a long time. While it’s not the first novel I ever started writing (I had a terrible portal fantasy back in Middle School that never went anywhere), it’s the first novel that I really wrote.
And it changed a lot between its various incarnations: it started as a tale of friendship rent apart by senseless tragedy, and my main character’s quest to find peace in that. It grew into a trilogy recounting their entire friendship, beginning to end to aftermath. Then it became a love story, beginning to end to aftermath. And then, slowly, it came into its current incarnation: pastor’s daughter, performing arts school. A little bit of Fame, a little bit of Footloose, a paean to the modern theatre kid.
I wrote it. I polished it with a mentor. I sent it out. I got some really good rejections. And then it fell apart. I shelved it for a while. And now I’m thinking about playing with it again — especially now that I’m part of a great group of writers (led by one of the editors I queried, actually! — but that’s a story for a different day) and I’m learning how to address my weakness: revision.
