How Hard Could It Be?

Not very long ago, I knew nothing about publishing. Nothing at all. Then life gave me a few experiences that seemed to want writing down, and the idea for Sanctuary arrived. I remember thinking, how hard could it be? I had a story. I had a keyboard. People write books all the time.

Oh man, how wrong I was.

I should have known better, because paint had already taught me this lesson once. I taught myself to paint, and “taught myself” is a polite way of saying I made a great many terrible paintings first. Every canvas I’ve finished sits on top of failures and experiments, and most of them took a dozen coats before they were done.

My paintings also tend to linger. A canvas can sit half finished in my work room for months, watching me every time I walk past. I know exactly why. The next stage is always harder than the last, and one side of my brain is very good at finding something else to do. The other side, the stubborn one, keeps turning up anyway. Eventually it wins. Mostly. I still have many abandoned canvases, my orphan children, left to the dust.

Here’s the part nobody tells you. When I finally finish a painting or a craft piece, I’m usually not happy with it. To my eyes it looks terrible. I don’t stop because it’s done. I stop because I’m out of wits and have no idea how to make it better.

Then I show it to my family, and they love it.

I have a theory about this. To one of them I’m a spouse, to others I’m a son, to others a father, and I suspect that has something to do with the reviews. Maybe only partly. I’ve decided not to look into it any further.

Sanctuary was no better. I spent months and months on single chapters, writing, rewriting, and editing each one a dozen times. Apparently a dozen coats is just how I work. Storylines changed. The order of events changed. I created characters, shaped them, and killed them. If you had read my first draft, you would probably have closed the book after the first chapter. Even now I’m not sure it’s readable.

And yet readers on Goodreads have been giving it five stars. They aren’t related to me and have no reason to be kind, which makes it mean a great deal more. So I’m happy. I seem to have a new family, a reading one.

What surprised me most was how much the writing revealed about me.

We all carry triggers and beliefs deep inside us. Most of them never need to come out, because life never puts us in the situation that would draw them out. Writing does. As an author, I had to put my characters through one situation after another and work out what they would do, and how they would react given their mood, where they were and what was happening around them. Each time, something of my own came to the surface, beliefs I hadn’t known I held. It made me question a lot of the choices I’ve made in my own life.

How hard could it be? Very. I’d do it again, a dozen coats at a time.