mary-masked | Yesterday I was GTAing in Piscataway so I used the train ride to look at an old manuscript. It was the first full novel I'd written, based almost entirely on my life. I submitted it to a few agents. I got one nice rejection, one mean rejection, and a lot of no answers. After the mean rejection, I did a pretty brutal edit of the book, really looking at what each scene did, and ended up cutting about half of the book. The problem with writing stuff based on your life is that life isn't lived the way stories are and often what is essentially the same scene will play out over and over. <br><br>I tried re-reading the book after that major edit but by then I was just sick of the whole thing so I put it away. I didn't know if I'd ever come back to it and I'd kind of made peace with that. Lots of writers throw away their first book. You have to learn somehow. But there were bits of the book that I'd always thought were REALLY good so when I found myself thinking about those bits again, I thought maybe it was time to take it out of the drawer.<br><br>Something magical happened, it was no longer *precious* to me. I didn't care anymore about what happened in real life. I didn't think it was vitally important that *this* happened on a roof and *this* happened in a car three weeks later. I felt fine jamming things together, taking things apart, restructuring the core story of it to make it a better story. So there's some hope for the old girl yet.<br> | Patreon