I've dreamed of being a novelist since I was three or four years old. My first books were written in Crayon on pieces of paper that I stapled together, and from there I graduated to pens, and finally handy-dandy word processors (I'm a huge fan of Google Drive). I've always written and I've always talked about being a writer, but for the first twenty years of my life, I had nothing to show for it.
I came up with an idea for a book during my freshman year of college, and I knew it was different than the draft I spent all of high school (literally ALL of it) working on. There was more depth, less of an emphasis on plot, and more of an emphasis on character. In December of 2017, I opened a fresh Google Doc and wrote the first chapter.
I remember thinking it was pure poetry. This was the book. This was the novel that would change my life. I was finally going to do it.
The new year began and then it ended. By June of 2019, I had a measly thirty pages. I remember telling people about those thirty pages and they were impressed.
"I could never do that," they'd say.
And yet, I still felt dissatisfied. I had this lingering fear that another year would pass by and then another and I would still have just thirty pages. I would grow older and older and my manuscript would stay the same length. And eventually, I'd be a bitter old woman talking about how life was out to get me and stopped me from achieving my dreams.
That June, I started an undergraduate creative writing program at my university. During week 1, I sat down with my mentor and told him that I wanted to write the draft in 3rd person instead of 1st. He said I should start over from scratch, and I decided to take his advice.
I'm so glad I did.
In a year and a half, I had previously written 30 pages and 15,000 words. In the month of June, I doubled those numbers. By November, I had a finished first draft. And now, eight months after that, I'm finalizing my fourth draft.
Langston Hughes once wrote a poem about what becomes of the dreams we defer. Do they dry up? Fester? Stink? Crust? Or do they weigh us down for the rest of our lives, heavy loads that pull our shoulders closer to the ground and our eyes towards our feet?
We tell ourselves "I'll do it tomorrow" and "I have time." But tomorrows become todays and then yesterdays. Time is not finite. It runs away from us every moment.
So let's be dreamers who do.
In my next post, I'll be talking about 5 ways I was able to write my novel in such a short period of time, 5 ways you can turn your dreams into action.
Stay tuned and stay lavender!
— Theresa
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