The Arc of it All

Hi friends.

Galleys showed up this week for this sucker. I made a dumb unboxing video.

When I started writing in earnest nearly two decades ago I would have been happy to just publish one book, maybe two. I never would have thought I could make it to nine books. Nor would I have expected I would have written in different genres. All of it is uniquely challenging and interesting. I am grateful people let me try new things, although you don’t really need anyone to tell you to try new shit, you can just do it and see what happens. Anyway, it is part of the arc of my career now. Trying new shit.

Mostly I write novels. Novels are hard to write but also I know what a novel is. I know what a beginning, middle, and end feels like, looks like. I know that there are characters, and there are arcs. While I completely feel like I know how to write one, at the same time it always feels like I have pulled it out of thin air, which is both the scariest and best feeling.

I have also written one memoir, which is different, because it’s not invented, although I did have to invent the structure of the book, and carve out the kind of story I wanted to tell, and ultimately I figured out an arc. And I did have myself as a main character, and everyone I knew—family, friends, peers, teachers, and a few ex-boyfriends—as characters, too.

Now there is this book, which I guess falls under the self-help category? I thought it would be easy enough to do but it ended up being hard, because, and let’s all remember this, kids, writing a book is hard no matter what.

The challenging part was finding the arc of it. I’m not telling the story of anyone’s life, fictional or otherwise. But I was telling a story about being creative, how to start writing and how to stay writing, how to get out of your own way, how to forgive yourself for that what you have not done yet, and how to plan for the future. The internal structure of the book has to do with the beginning, middle, and end of a year of creativity. Once I identified that the book made more sense to me. Ah ha, there’s the story to be told.

And there’s no specific character in the book although it’s full of the amazing voices of more than 50 published authors, and, of course, there’s my voice, too. But I did not think so much of the character of us so much as I did of a character of someone who wants to write. This is someone at any stage of development as a writer. This is someone who is being thoughtful about what writing means to them. And this is someone who might need a little inspiration every so often, as we all do. I thought about all the little comments and tweets and slack posts and emails you’ve sent me and just the general energy out there, and then I wrote a book about all of you, all of us, for you, for us.

And now it’s a galley! And in four months it will be a book.

I am excited.

Pre-order it wherever you buy books, but particularly your local independent bookstore.

Jami

p.s.