Basically since I can remember, I’ve wanted to write a novel. The first one I wrote was in middle school, a glorified short story that basically stole its entire plot and characters from the novel This Lullaby by Sarah Dessen that I was obsessed with. I typed it up and printing it from my mom’s computer and then hole-punching a file folder so I could bind the pages together inside with ribbon. In fact, I still have it, stored with several dozen journals I filled when I was growing up. I used to be much more prolific than I am today. I think that happens to a lot of us with our creative passions as we get older.
Then in college I wrote an actual story that was long enough to claim the title of novel. It was an eighty thousand word love story about a young guy who sees his ex’s name in a wedding announcement, so he drives cross country to South Carolina to crash the wedding, only to discover a different woman who shares his ex’s name, and who is secretly dreading being married. Spoiler alert, the guy ends up falling in love with the woman’s angsty and misunderstood younger sister (a lot of angsty and misunderstood teenage girls have shown up in my writing over the years, I wonder why…), and there’s a happy ending for the older sister too. I kept a draft of that novel on my computer for years until it crashed suddenly and I was unable to recover it, so now it’s lost. It makes me think about all the words I’ve written throughout my life that I didn’t think were worthy enough to save, words that I would like to have the option of looking back on now.
Anyway, last year I set out on a similar mission as always, to write the first draft of a novel. The first draft is the hardest part for any perfectionist, and I often lose my nerve at the first sign of trouble in a story, when I realize some plot point doesn’t make sense or a character I thought I liked actually kind of sucks. I stop writing for a few days and when I come back, the draft is stale and I can’t get back into it, and it gets abandoned in favor of my next idea.
So this time my first draft started in a notebook. The notebook is small, only 65 pages, and I carried it with me for months so that I could take notes on my ideas whenever I had inspiration, or free time. I re-wrote an old short story that I posted on this blog back in 2020 (can you guess which one?) and fleshed it out. I added characters and a more detailed setting. I wrote down possible endings so that I wouldn’t get stuck trying to figure it out as I went. I filled 65 pages with plans before I started my draft, and now 8 months later that first draft is done. I wrote the last word yesterday.
Now I’ll start work on the revisions. I’ve graduated from file folders and ribbon to a red 3-ring binder that’s been sitting on my desk reminding me of the work I need to finish. That’s also why I haven’t had much time this month to write a more thoughtful blog post, but I wanted to remember this moment. It’s been almost ten years since I graduated from college and lost my way with my writing, and now I’ve finally come back to it and it feels SO GOOD. I’m celebrating the small victory of making it through a complete first draft, one that I’m actually excited to keep working on!
I don’t think this novel will be for anyone’s eyes but mine (and probably Bobby’s because he’s earned it at this point, listening to me gripe about writing the damn thing for the past year). It’s not quite ready for other people, and probably never will be. But it’s a start.
Sometimes I remind myself that if I wrote one novel every year for the rest of my life, I could write another fifty (maybe sixty? Maybe seventy?) novels. It’s a good reminder to me whenever I think that it’s too late to become a novelist. I still have so many words left to write.