So I’m working on a companion story for my faerie book.
It’s the back story of the love interest, who’s half-faerie and half-human. He was raised in Faerie by his faerie father, and only went to Earth later as a young man to learn about his human heritage and meet his mother.
The first thing that happened was that the character refused to simply go talk to his mom like he was supposed to. I started the story when he was thirteen, first finding out from his father that he’s not a full-blood faerie. I sent him more or less straight to Earth, planning of having him make a few friends and then go talk to his mother. He went to Earth willingly enough, dragged his feet a little, but away he went. He chatted with humans and wandered bravely around a strange city that scared him. He made friends. But when it came time for him to go meet his mom, he panicked and ran. No matter how I wrote it, no matter which angle I came at it from, the poor kid’s stomach clenched, his heart pounded, his throat dried up, and he ran the other direction as fast as his legs would take him.
I get it. I looked for my half-sister years before I actually got up the guts to talk to her. There was a weird comfort in knowing that I knew how to find her when I finally got the nerve to talk to her. So my main character found his mom, even laid eyes right on her, but wouldn’t go speak to her. Not for years. Of course he wouldn’t. Makes sense to me. But it turned my short, less-than-100-pages companion book into a regular-sized novel. And it took more like six months to write it instead of a couple of weeks.
The second thing that happened was that I forgot some of the mechanics of the original story.
I wrote the original story, edited it, published it, then wrote another novel, edited that and published it. Then I sat down to write this story. That’s a bit of time between books, so I forgot some of the details from the first book. Mostly world mechanics, like how faeries operate, powers they do and don’t have, what passes for logic for them. I knew some broad strokes, but some little things were evading me. So I had to go back and re-read some parts to get the stories to match up.
One of my favorite things is going back to re-read my own work and finding really fun or clever stuff that I forgot I wrote.
It feels a little — well, a little masturbatory, if I’m being honest — but reading something that makes me laugh, or a clever turn of phrase, or a character coming up with a plan that I don’t recall coming up with — it’s really gratifying.
I wound up sitting and re-reading several more scenes than I really needed, because I was so pleased with how the whole thing turned out.
Now don’t get me wrong, I have certainly stumbled across scenes or turns of phrase that make me cringe, too. That’s not a proud moment, knowing that something I didn’t do my best on is out there in the world, where anyone can read it. It takes a lot of teeth-gritting not to fix it right there and then, and re-publish the whole book just to get that one sentence or scene down how I want it. But I also know that if I’m going to continually fix and adjust every story I write every time I see a small problem, I’m going to keep myself very busy doing just that and I’m going to go insane. It took me a while, but as long as I’m not looking at a glaring error, I just chalk it up to experience and move on.
But the cool thing about going back and finding neat stuff I wrote that I don’t recall is that I’m learning to trust myself. I still have to make sure I’m pushing myself as hard as I can to come up with the coolest ideas I can and the most interesting plot twists I’m capable of. But I’m learning that if I’ve really pushed myself, if I’ve really dug deep into my world building and my character development, it’s going to be okay.
For a long time, I was pretty sure that my best wasn’t good enough. Years and years, more than two decades, I could always find something wrong whenever I re-read my own stories. The fact that I’m starting to find more good stuff than bad is encouraging — I’m actually getting better.
Dare I say it — I’m actually getting pretty good.
