Writing skill, level up!

I've finally gotten to a place, as a writer, where I can view my manuscripts objectively through an honest critical lens and understand what works and what doesn't. And that's exciting for me.

With my first published book, which I recently published in October, I had to go through several revisions and passed it by a few sets of eyes. My editor and book doctor, Garrett Cook, did wonders for me with the first full novel I passed by him sometime in 2019, but it wasn't until I sent him Everything Is Wonderful Now that I really started to understand what made a book tick on my own.

Writing, to me, is a journey — an exploration. A story is organic as it unfolds for me and I do very little planning, which works well for my style and settles nicely with how my brain functions creatively. When a short story or a book is inspired by a dream I had, I look at the dream notes and take it from there. When a story springs forth from a random burst of inspiration, I jot a few things down and get to work. More notes will be added as I go, but otherwise, I discover the story as a reader would for the first time. I don't always know how it will end or what the twists will be until they come to me.

That kind of writing makes me feel alive. I get excited and I fall in love with the story as it pours out of me, and every emotional scene is raw and very real in the moment.

However, with discovery writing especially, not everything is going to work when the first draft is done. In the past, I got attached to my stories as they were and changing anything felt like pulling a tooth. Now that I've gone through the process of taking feedback, rewriting, taking more feedback and criticism, and rewriting again, I've learned what makes a story weak and what makes it stronger.

I'm currently working on the much darker and more mature sequel to Everything Is Wonderful Now, called Open Wound. It continues from where my debut novel left off, although a few years have passed in the storyline. I wrote it during a frigid week in January while it snowed heavily, and it only took me about eight days to complete the first draft.

I was still going through the throes of severe PTSD symptoms, another dissociative disorder I had yet to be diagnosed with, and trauma cycled through my head every single day without remorse. While stuck in a metaphorical liminal space in my head, what I like to call 'the void,' I worked with my alter Vexis to 'open the wound,' so to speak. We'd spent most of my life integrated, and I wasn't entirely aware of them or who or what they were for many years, but finally, they decided to work with me.

Open Wound is the culmination of that work we started doing, and it fit well into the memoir-like nature this series became. Many things were difficult to write about, so of course, I was very emotional and ended up with a first draft that had a good concept, but I realized that it couldn't stay the way that it was. It wasn't even meant to be the second book in my series, as it had started as a short story to work out a bad days' mood.

I went back to it months later. I fixed it up, checked for errors, reworded a few things, and let it sit.

More time passed by. A few months ago, I opened it back up and decided to tear it apart from the start because it just didn't feel right. And that wasn't something I'd been able to do by myself before.

There were bits and pieces missing, and I found that the short story I wrote about Vexis, my alter and one of the MCs in Open Wound, fit neatly in between the chapters to provide the backstory for them that was necessary. I split it up and slipped it in here and there, and then copied over the whole reorganized document to a new one.

Starting with the first chapter, I had to change the tense (first person to third person), and I threw out the bulk of several chapters. I changed and rewrote entire scenes. I completely erased all but a few paragraphs of a later chapter and wrote a new one. They will need another go-through. I've only got a few chapters left to edit on this round.

It felt amazing to finally understand without someone explaining it to me for once. Of course, that doesn't mean it won't still get passed through an editor and a few beta readers, and it will likely undergo still more changes, but I think this time it may be passed back and forth fewer times.

It's definitely not easy to rip apart and judge such an emotional and personal work, especially if it's your own. But with practice, and as you grow as a writer and learn to accept the good and bad feedback, you'll start to see what your editor and beta readers see.

No matter how good you get at seeing your own work critically, however, you will always miss things. There is no exception there. You're too close to your own work and you know how it goes, so your mind will plug certain things where they really aren't. But your corrections will become less and less once you figure it all out. You'll tell better and richer stories, and you can only go up from there.

It really is a long learning process, but when it finally clicks, you'll feel it and it will feel amazing.