The Writing Weasel

Sometimes they frame Roger Rabbit.

Writing is hard. I say this as someone who has been writing for fun since New Kids On The Block’s first foray into pop stardom and began writing professionally not long after their 21st century comeback. (You never forget your first boyband.) It’s hard in the way moving out of your parents’ house is hard: you want to do it but you’re not ready, yet you’re totally ready and you’re probably going to fail.

There is so much failure in writing. So many times that a word, a sentence, a paragraph sounded great one day but makes absolutely no sense the next. That’s what revisions are for. But losing your confidence in your writing is a different matter altogether. Revising your work doesn’t fix that; instead, you’re caught in a loop of reworking the same pages over and over again until you don’t recognize yourself in your own. And when you lose your self-confidence, you stop writing. For weeks, months, maybe even years at a time.

I started writing a young adult novel around 2007 or 2008. It was a lifetime ago; I worked in advertising and I didn’t have a kid. I would write in week-long bursts but kept getting stuck about a quarter of the way through. So I’d go back and revise what I wrote. My husband liked it, so I wrote a few scenes in the middle. And then I got neutral feedback (was it good? bad? indifferent? I still don’t know!) from someone whose opinion meant a lot to me. And even though I knew better, the weasel that lives in my brain told me that I was a trash writer with trash ideas and I should just give up.

My characters’ stories were always in my head. I spent every road trip, even jaunt to the grocery store and back daydreaming about them. Sometimes I’d open my manuscript on the computer, edit a few scenes, then close the file when I remembered I was trash. By this point, writing was my full-time job. Logically, I knew I was a good writer. But the weasel was weaseling and told me that I couldn’t write a full book and even if I did, it would be crap.

In 2019, my friend Betsy asked me about my book and why it wasn’t done. I told her the truth: I was scared. And she pretty much told me, “That’s dumb. You’re going to finish it right here, with me.” That fall, we met for two hours every Monday night at a coffee shop with terrible pastries. She did her own thing while I wrote.

I didn’t know where to start. I had the beginning and I knew what I wanted to happen at the end, but I didn’t know how to connect the two. So I started writing backstories for some of my tertiary characters. Stuff that would never see the light of day. Once I got rolling, I was able to write actual scenes for the book. I learned a lot of things that fall about my own best writing practices (no computers, small notebooks, fountain pens with fun ink), including the fact that I don’t need to write in chronological order. Writing whatever you want whenever you want is incredibly freeing. (Just make sure you have a good labeling system. I use letters.)

Within a few weeks, I was writing regularly at home. Which was great, because COVID happened and Betsy and I weren’t able to get together anymore. Still, I wrote. My office desk is always a mess and computers are distracting, so I wrote at my dining room table (still a mess, but I could clear a much larger workspace). Hours zipped by as I filled notebook after notebook.

I finished the first draft of my novel in the summer of 2022. It wasn’t a momentous occasion; I didn’t even notice it until a month after it happened. Working on my manuscript was no longer terrifying; it was a delicious treat that I looked forward to every day. And that was all because of Betsy. Betsy gave me a safe place—and a safe person—to write. She chased away the weasel. (She also prevented me from making my young adult magical realism novel about agricultural insurance fraud, but that’s another story.)

Betsy is one of the reasons why I opened The Wordshop. Everybody needs a friend at the table while they write. I miss my weekly dates with Betsy, but we go to McLain’s for breakfast every few weeks now. The pastry situation is much, much better.