Writing can be fun; we all know it or we would not be doing it. But it can also be about as pleasurable as sticking a No.2 pencil in your ear until it bumps into the gray matter inside your skull.
I think the creation part is what is fun, creating worlds, fleshing out characters, pouring your emotions and thoughts onto the page, that’s the fun stuff. But then when all that is done, the real work starts. Maybe someday I will be like those famous writers who just come up with the idea and pawn the hard work off on someone else. Of course, doing that is the easy way out.
After the experience of putting The Sweet Sixteenth on sale as an eBook, I decided that I wanted to do it again. So I put my current WIP on hold and went back to a story I finished last year. After rereading it, I decided it needed a rewrite if I was going to actually put it out into the world. It was a good story, but I had a couple agents tell me it was just too dark. Was it too dark, or, was I just presenting it that way? It is a dark concept, but it’s really not a dark story. Certainly it has dark moments. Either way I could see it needed something, and none of my beta readers could really help.
I was not sure what to do with the story; it was too good to go into the scrap heap, so I did the un-fun thing. I rewrote the entire story and put in the paranormal twist I wanted to in the beginning. I resisted the urge because at the time the concept did not seem to fall into place, it seemed like a paranormal twist was secondary to the story. Then during the first rewrite a new twist came to me and everything fell into place.
The problem is that the rewrite that was supposed to take a couple weeks has turned into a couple months and growing. Sculpting all those old storylines to fit a new twist can be maddening. Nevertheless, I could take any short cuts. The new rewrite was so significant the title no longer even worked, so that was another obstacle to tackle. I’m not really good at titles, if I had to do it all over again I’d probably change the title of almost everything I’ve written over the years.
So now, Revenge of The Taken is almost ready for it’s eBook journey. My point to this ramble is that the hard work part of writing, can sometimes lead back to the fun part of writing. It has been a lot of run doing what I thought was going to be a hassle. If I never put in the hours on this story, and plunged through the hard part, it would have never gotten to this point and I might have given up on it altogether.
Writing can be fun, but also hard work; when the two come together it really illustrates why we all keep doing it.
