I was walking from my apartment to my first class of the day and had just crossed the street that led onto campus. I heard a terrible sound behind me, quite beyond anything I could really describe, and immediately turned around to see that a car had struck a bike rider who was also crossing the intersection. For all my faults, I'm usually fairly competent in emergency situations, and while others froze and crowds gathered on both sides of the street, I ran back as fast as I could to the bike rider's side.
This poor girl was close to my age and in complete and total shock. She didn't appear to be physically hurt but was sobbing and shaking, mid-panic attack. Over and over, she gasped out between sobs: "Am I dead? Did I die? Am I dead? Am I dead now?"
As people watched, I yelled the standard and specific, "You in the blue shirt, call 9-1-1!" I took her backpack off her shoulders as she shook. Someone spoke with the car driver. Someone else joined me and tried to calm her down. We gave her water. We waited for an ambulance to arrive. We convinced her that she was not dead.
I had been working on NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month, which is a challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days. I was a senior in college and buried in capstone projects, graduation details, anxiety over the job I had been offered upon graduation, etc, etc, etc-- truly a poor season of life to commit to 50,000 words. I was also taking a "pantsing it" approach to the whole thing, meaning I had no plan, outline, or even idea of what kind of story I wanted to write. It was just something I had always wanted to do and talked myself out of every time, and even though I had the perfect excuse to not do it this go-round, I felt like if I didn't do it then, I would never do it. So I did it.
50,000 words is not meant to be a novel, but it is meant to be the solid foundation one would need to go on to write a full-length novel. I was meandering about with my daily 1,667 words, writing random paragraphs of pretty prose and attempting to connect them and see if a story would develop. I was hitting my word counts, but I wasn't making sense, and I wasn't seeing a story. When I saw (or rather, heard) the bike rider get hit by the car, I suddenly knew: this is what I want to write about, and this is my story. That was the catalyst that propelled my writing and gave me a solid idea and concept to write about. In almost no time, I conceived of a plot and characters and wrote, wrote, wrote.
I wrote my 50,000 words that month but knew I still had a long way to go. The "getting hit by a car" moment was a central plot point for a while until it was slowly removed through revision after revision. I love revising almost as much as I love writing. Writing is thrilling, terrifying, and freeing-- you just write, and you don't worry how good or bad it is. But revising-- oh, be still my perfectionist heart! You change and change and change things until they're as close to perfect as you can get. You kill your darlings and weep over beautiful writing that no longer fits, but you all but soar as you figure out better connections and stronger themes.
Without spoiling much, the catalytic "hit by a car" moment was eventually reintroduced in a different way, far removed from the prologue where it started. In fact, the first line of the novel for years was, "When I was six years old, I almost saw a lady get hit by a car." I thought it was the perfect first line-- different, intriguing, inviting-- and questioned my own sanity when I deleted it. The bicycle was lost altogether. No characters needed convincing that they weren't dead. The pages and pages that I dedicated to the topic were no longer necessary. It was simultaneously sad and freeing to walk away from the thing that had plunged me into this novel. The girl, originally named Taylor, changed to Cara. The nurse character, who she had heard being hit by a car, disappeared entirely from the story. The childhood swingset Taylor/Cara had been playing on during the car crash morphed into a walk with her older brother, Aaron, where they find a penny with a star shape stamped out in the middle. A pivotal scene that took place in an empty church broke into smaller sections, taking place in Aaron's bedroom and a cemetery. The grandparents who helped raise Taylor/Cara turned into a divorced set of parents with a kind and patient mother who resembles my own. The title changed from Coming Full Circle to The Sister about a month before being the publishing process. The story I published is completely unrecognizable from the first one I wrote, but it's all still somehow there, buried under layers of words no one else can read.
Five printed drafts of Coming Full Circle. Draft #6 is still in its binder and Draft #7 was revised on the computer as I formatted the manuscript.
I loved writing this whole thing, start to finish. I loved arranging my little digital notecards in my writing program. I loved filling out character analysis sheets from the workbook I found at a sale for $1 and figuring out what made them tick, which helped so immensely. I loved the painstaking effort of trying to finalize the plot with index cards spread out over the entirety of my bedroom floor. I loved printing my drafts at Office Depot and carrying them home in their cardboard boxes, feeling like I had an entire world tucked under my arm. I loved hacking away at bad sentences with my colored pens and delighting in finding just the right words to fix them. I loved having "AHA!" breakthrough moments when something suddenly clicked, and I realized why something had to be the way it was. I loved picking up on a trail, a metaphorical string of yarn, not knowing where it was going to lead but feeling so excited to write it out and see where it took me, as it so often untangled problems in the plot.
I loved that I accomplished something that 10-year-old Erica had always dreamed of doing but had nearly convinced herself she couldn't do: a full story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I loved that when I reread my own work, I didn't hate it.
My advice to anyone who wants to do the same is the eternal advice just about any other author would give, and advice I have been given by so many people who followed their own dreams: just start. It's not radical or new or hard to swallow advice. It's a little scary, but it's so terribly easy. In fact, it's easier than it is scary. The work will come in its own time. For now, just start.
P.S. I would be a bad self-promoter if I didn't share the link (yet again) to how you can purchase the book if you want to give it a read: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1793143293
Exposure, people!!
