A Good Sign

Growth

I hear it's a good sign of growth when you can look back at your old writing and see it needs a lot of help.  I am finding that's very true.  I look back at some of my early stuff and wonder where the life and power is.

But I'm also finding the same can be true when I look back at books I loved as a child.  I'm rereading a novel I read over and over when I was younger.  That book shall remain nameless, but I'm finding that the writing is flat, lifeless, drones on, and could really use a good edit.  I even found a few typos.  I look at the world of published books and often find the same is true of what's available today.

On occasion, though, I find that book, that writer, that makes me go, "Wow, I wish I could write like this."  Fresh metaphors, potent verbs, and very very few [if any] adverbs or to be verbs.

A Role Model:

When I first read the Harry Potter series, I was like so many others, wowed by her writing and the way the characters leaped right off the page to become someone near to everyone's heart.  Then I read some reviews, most notably Stephen King's critique of Rowling's generous use of adverbs.  I also learned more about writing myself.  I recently reread the series and saw how Rowling personifies that growth.  Her early works are still good, vivid, and engaging.  But they grow and mature until, in my view anyway, they become quite literary and something I could see teaching in college one day.  Her symbolism, metaphor, and allusion are all impressive.

Incidentally, the fifth Potter book reviewed by King in his article [#orderofthephoenix] has totally changed for me since I learned what it is to mourn deeply.  Unlike those childhood books, this one has gotten better.  The first time I read it, Harry seemed angry, so much so that I ceased to understand him.  Then I lost my baby, and I understood Harry so much better.  Harry personifies grief in his anger.  He is angry at more than Umbridge and Voldemort.  He's angry at himself for outliving his mentor.  He's angry at the universe for continuing as normal when everything for him has changed.  For me, the fifth book has become the thestral of the series.  Before, I couldn't see it.  Now, I can.  It has become if not my favorite book then a close second.  

Maybe one day, when I revisit my early works I'm looking to publish soon, I will see how I've developed as a writer.  It's possible they will get better in my mind, but I hope not.  I hope I grow enough that I see all the flaws.  As has been said before, if you're not constantly improving as a writer, maybe writing is not the field for you.

My Journey

My Childhood Writing:

My name is Tamara Copley.  I'm an LDS writer.  

My first love took the form of unicorns and dragons.  Okay, maybe not my first love.  But my first love after my family and cats included the paired genres of fantasy and fairy tales.  My gateway drugs from a very young age were Disney princess movies, the early ones, and the "Serendipity" series by Steven Cosgrove.  The series features cats and other mundane animals but also unicorns, sea creatures, and dragons, all with vibrant illustrations and lavish descriptions.  When I found the true love of my life in sixth grade, starting with Anne McCaffrey's "Dragon Riders of Pern" and plowing through anything with a remotely fantastic cover, I felt like I was in heaven. 

In high school, I started what I liked to think of as my writing career, with a complete novel at the beginning of a series and then in undergrad, with the complete novel at the end.  I'd share a thumbnail sketch of series-not-written to anyone who would listen.  I wrote bits and pieces of novels and short stories and fantasized about my future as a fantasy writer. 

But before I even got past the editing phase, I began to realize my stories had no depth, no complicated characters nor substantial meaning.  They had a few schticks like alien telepathic shapeshifters that became cats, but I had not brought anything new or unique to the genre, and the words remained flat on the page.  Then when I got married and had two kids, who love fairy tales, Serendipity books, and above all, dragons, I got so excited to share a piece of creative world.  Only to have the kids act bored within a couple of pages.  I knew I wanted to be a writer but wasn't sure this was my calling. 

When Everything Changed

And then my baby died, and the world I had known before crumbled.  For more on that, refer to my other blog, Alamanda's Place.  This blog isn't about that but about my experience and reflections as a writer.  All desire for stories about dragons and shapeshifting cats faded.  This is not to say there aren't amazing authors of brilliant fantasy out there, who could take their pain and make it the foundation of brilliant fantasy.  But I found as I tried to assemble the pieces of my life, it just wasn't me.  I didn't know how to move my fantasy past the words on a page into the kind of life-changing, heart-touching writing I needed to do now.  

Now What?

So I looked at the kinds of writing that would help me figure out how to explore meanings and weightier themes.  I started a book about mourning.  Maybe I'll go back to it when I feel like I'm ready.  But five years haven't given me enough great insights to fill a book like that.  One day, maybe my husband and I will team up on a book about our joint mourning experience, but not yet.  First, I decided to write a book that would help me process my experience in code, with the distance fiction provides. 

So what could I write that I could finish and that may help other people in my native tongue of fiction?  Teachers always say write what you know.  So what did I know?  I knew how to be a Mormon woman who has experienced pain.  So I wrote a book about a Mormon woman who experiences pain.  Romance, too.  But the real story grows out of pain. Hers is not exactly my pain, but it's close enough that I feel a kinship, a connection, with the protagonist, or rather protagonists, since my draft is from two perspectives.  But I started writing, and it flowed.  It took about a year for it to wrap up and more than that to turn it into a novel worth reading.  But I'm in the polishing stages and will soon be attempting to submit for publication. 

A Writer's Path

My best advice to budding writers like me, or better yet, stalled writers like me who have been trying to bud for a long time, is rethink your path.  If you're a writer, you are driven to write.  But what if you're stalled because you're writing in the wrong place on all the wrong things?  If you're writing in the wrong field?  Everyone gets writers' block at some point.  But if you've been blocked for as long as I have, maybe there's a reason the block is there.  Maybe it's time to try something new.  Just a thought.  

And maybe one day, I will revisit my home genre when I have something meaningful to say there, a new vision.  But in the meantime, I can write about people who love fantasy like I always have, people who aren't necessarily the most socially savvy or the physical personification of perfection.  But that's what makes characters fun for me is not that they are perfect like a fairy tale princess from early Disney but that they are imperfect and human like all of us.