book #4
Welcome to the Sunday post.
The germ of the idea has been sprouting for years now. After a number of fits and starts, I think I've got a little tail of growth, little beads of green on a vine, popping.
Back when I had an agent, I was working, at her encouragement and direction, on a book proposal. I've written about this before. Since I terminated with that agent, I've worked with a freelance editor, and I've also struggled alone, a lot.
I've hit some lulls in the writing of this book. Since I'd never written a book proposal prior, and now I had one that ultimately didn't get me anywhere (and, other agents rejected it), I started pulling away from the structure I created. As soon as I allowed myself to pull away from the structure I'd already set up, things started becoming clearer. Some different directions I hadn't clocked before began to glow, illuminate.
Since working with an editor last year, I've ultimately taken apart the book and put it back together again. It went from twenty chapters to seventeen chapters, and today, it's at fourteen. The chapter titles—and the contents—have radically changed. Some of the preconceived chapter subjects are things I'm working on as sort of essays-related-to-the-book but don't necessarily need to be in the book. A couple of weeks ago it still looked like seventeen chapters so I wrote a notebook page of seventeen dates--the challenge would be to write a chapter at a sprint on each of those dates, just to get the bones of the chapter on the page. This worked for the first several dates. Then I used one of the dates to think more deeply about the content of each chapter as they stood and one of those illuminations happened, and I ended up combining a couple of chapters and ultimately changing all the names or signposts of the chapters to more accurately reflect the updated direction the book started taking.
All of this feels fertile. It's been good for me to disengage from the structure of the book proposal that no longer served me. Ultimately I may end up rewriting the book proposal, either for a future agent query (doubtful) or to get myself deeper into the material, to be able to describe the concept more concretely (likely). It's not a straightforward narrative and the proposal always felt like I was trying to fashion it into one. Once again, I'm reminded that I have a long, slow process that also gets put on hold because of life's obligations, and my own concerns, doubts, and sideways manner of working on projects (or, everything).
As I write today, I've scrapped the list of dates to do writerly sprints. I've been maintaining a log of writing process to help me keep track of how much time I spend on the book or other writings, with notes to help me remember day to day where I'm at with the project as a whole and what I've been doing exactly this whole time. This log has been extra useful in reminding me that I'm in fact working and thinking about it quite a bit, even if I don't log the time spent thinking about it outside of specified writing dates.
I'd call my near-weekly visits to the ocean part of my process. Sometimes I'm watching a film or a tv show, and the way the narrative is unspooled reminds me of something I can bring back and experiment with in the project, this book project or the other ones.
Another thing that has helped this process along is doing less. I wrote a little post-it note with monthly headings and the one project for each month that needs to be completed. January: focus on the Tin House Writers Workshop group's work. February: facilitate workshop and work on taxes. March: focus on the road trip we're planning to take. April: work on the project that is due June 30th. May: focus on my birthday. June: finish everything related to the project due at month's end. And in between, I'm supposed to also be working my day job, writing my book, reading, exercising, parenting, keeping in touch with friends, sleeping, etc. That's more than enough. And if I said no to you because I'm booked out until June 30th, this is why. This is how I plan to operate, forever.
The next progress report on this book will come at the end of June. It's hard to imagine where I might be, seeing as how I have this unrelated deadline looming. But I hope that having given myself April to meet the June 30th deadline, I will be able to devote some time and energy to the current book project.
I'd love to hear your process, too, especially if you're mid-project. Share in the comments, or reply to this message. Maybe this will be an upcoming extra feature--other artists describing where they're at in the process, what has been helping. At least for me, this always feels like news I can use. I hope whatever creative projects you're working on are going swimmingly. 🏊🏽♀️