BryonySeries Throwback Thursday: It's the Challenges that Form

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

It's the Challenges that Form

Most of us like  to hear praise and encouragement; there's no doubt about it; and most of us enjoy standing on the pinnacle and gazing down the mountain at the conquered rocky slope, and I am no exception.

However, it's the dark, solitary, teeth-gnashing, gut-wrenching, clawing-through-challenges--despite, doubt, pain, loneliness, weariness, failure, etc.--that press, shape, and mold us into the people we are continually becoming and striving to be.

So when I encounter those circumstances in my life--and I have experienced one or two--and I'm uncertain whether I can or should keep plowing resistant furrows, and assuming the task is in the will of God for me, I grab a symbolic looksie into the mirror and ask myself one question: How badly do I want this?

It's no secret I'm a technological and software dummy. During the early editing and formatting stages with Bryony, shifting text, and the perpetual resetting page breaks, was hugely frustrating for me (an understatement).

One night, after I had already missed bedtime by hours and would greet the day by delivering mountains of papers wayyyyy too soon, and my flaccid attempts to halt the shifting again failed, I absolutely cracked.

Clutching handfuls of manuscript, I flew down the ladder, screaming, "It's wronnnnnggggggggg," to anyone in earshot. Timothy and Rebekah were hanging out in the kitchen and talking, but paused to gaze at me as if I had gone insane.

After a few minutes of ranting, raving, foot-stomping, thumping Timothy's back, and a spewing of colorful language, I marched back up the ladder and began resetting page breaks (Keep in mind this was a six hundred page manuscript). Rebekah was right behind me with a stern, "Go to bed!"

And my equally terse reply was, "Not until I make a dent." And I stoically reset another break.

Months later, I shared that scene with my book designer, Serena Diosa, and she, bless her, laughed heartily and offered to show me a simple technique to prevent shifting text. What an insightful moment. If only I'd had that information at the beginning, I could have avoided hours of mistakes. Yet, the incident was a valuable one for me because I was truly considering quitting altogether.

What stopped me? I really, really wanted to take this project all the way to the conclusion. I didn't want to just see the promised land. I wanted to stand on it, walk through it, claim it, SEIZE IT!

So, I started over.

Today, that scene is often replayed in my household. Whenever someone encounters a problem that appears too big to handle, a hurdle so enormous the goal no longer seems worth it, I only have to say, "Page breaks," and then ask the question, "How badly do you want this?"

Now someone in the throes of distress might prefer a bit of warm and fuzzy coddling and a soft, "There, there," and there are appropriate times for meting it out, for applying the soothing salve of, "You can do this," and "I believe in you," etc. But when you've lost your footing on a perilous ledge, a sweet utterance is not the solution.

Sometimes, what a person wants and needs are completely different. Too often, we leave behind an undesirable situation, only to repeat it, with different circumstances and people, perhaps, but our pattern of approach and behavior, even with slight modifications, is too predictably similar to produce the end we desire.

When an individual is battered and banged with defeat and discouragement and on the verge of abandoning the prize, tauntingly in sight and still so elusive, the needed remedy is really to quickly bandage up those wounds, deliver an unkind nudge into the nether regions, and harshly remind the person the consequences of forsaking the quest.

May you always have both kinds of people in your life, those that comfort, buck up, and applaud you, but, most importantly, those who command you out of the cozy places to meet, head-on and with open eyes, the awaiting destiny.

Lazarus might have felt blissfully peaceful inside the tomb, but Jesus' firm, "Lazarus, come out!" opened up an unbelievably new existence for the man.

You will stumble through dimly lit, uncharted territory. You will kiss the dirt. You'll greet uncertainty. You'll take wrong turns. You'll grow increasingly aggravated and pissed off at the circumstances and the people shoving you forward, at the ones offering dangling carrots.

And yet, it's really the only way to reach the joys of the peak.

So, what's on your "bucket list?

How badly do you want it?

Page Breaks

Despite incessant, over-the-shoulder nagging from my sixteen year old daughter that I was way past my bedtime, I grimly reset all the mesed-up page breaks for the first few chapters. I just HAD to make a dent in repairing those flaws before I could sleep.

For the next ten days, I ruthlessly reset those breaks page by awful page, printed each one to check margins and copy errors, and reset and retyped when necessary. I held my breath when I finally e-mailed my manuscript to Cindy Grady, WriteLife’s managing editor. I'd never make a living as a copy editor.

I spent the next two months catching up on homework, features, press releases, and Staked!, the third novel in the Bryony series. My inbox was often full of cover drafts and interior images from Kathleen. The book was coming alive!

In the meantime, my children caught a mild form of the writing bug. Daniel, 14, started a werewolf story, and Rebekah, 16, worked on her historical romance. Timothy, 19, began a story detailing the adventures of a pedantic old man whose is world is turned topsy-turvy. My twelve year old niece sent me chapters of her novel as she completed them. At the end of April, round two drafts arrived, along with a two-page letter from the editor that worked on it. I was pleasantly surprised.

Happily, I made the adjustments, added the requested scene, and sent back the manuscript within three weeks. I devoted the next couple of weeks, including all of Memorial Day weekend, to finishing a draft of Staked!

The First Cut is the Hardest

I’m not certain when the first round of edits arrived, since we don’t use the front door much in the winter. One of the kids had opened it on a Saturday afternoon in January and there was my manuscript, packaged and propped against the door.

A list of suggestions accompanied the copyediting. To my relief, those suggestions did not include deletions or plot changes, nothing that drastic. I focused on the mistakes. My husband Ron saw only the positive comments, especially, “A series would sell.” I couldn’t wait to get to work.

The editor wanted to deeper character development in two supporting characters. I was also instructed to deepen scene descriptions (I had focused more on action), use longer sentences, and to eliminate “wordiness” (a general, persistent fault of mine).

Then, an interesting thing happened. I had spent months learning to tell a story in novel form and even more months perfecting it. When I sat down to make my first, official change, I felt like a surgeon operating for the first time, except that I was also the patient. That first slice into my manuscript was the most painful. The rest were substantially easier.

The biggest error I made throughout the manuscript was style confusion (AP vs. MLA) and it was HUGE. The second, not as pervasive, but very embarrassing, was that some of my carefully set page breaks had moved.

It took eight weeks of daily work before Bryony was ready for its second send-off. I set it aside for several days and scrolled through it. I found copy errors and straying page breaks. I cracked.