Coming of Age

My grandson asked me the other day if 5 was a baby number. When I asked what a baby number was, he said, "You know, if you're five are you still a baby?" He so didn't want to be considered a baby. And in all my Grandma wisdom (Yeah, right!) I told him no, five was a growing up number.

"What's a growing up number, Grandma?"

"It means you're not a baby, but you're not all grown up yet. You're still growing."

"See, J, I told you I wasn't a baby anymore." Yeah, he needed to convince his big brother he wasn't a baby anymore.

But the growing up number made me think about writing. When we first start out, we take baby steps by struggling with words and sentences, finding ideas and trying to weave this confusing mess in our heads into a solid story. We fall down a lot.

Now, I've been falling down for a good many years. Struggling, quitting, starting again. For whatever reason, I can't shake the writing bug. So about five years ago I bit the bullet, plopped my butt in a chair and started writing, not just when the mood struck, but everyday. Like a baby learning to walk, I kept stringing words together, studying, learning, submitting, falling, and struggling to get up again. But I'm still at it. Every morning, Every day.

And something happened yesterday that made me feel like I'd finally hit my growing up number. I dug out an old story and started rewriting. Now I have to admit that I hate deleting words I've already written, especially if I think they're "wonderful". But this story needed large patches of "tells" deleted and fed into the "show" spots. I also needed a theme.

Sounds stupid writing a story without a theme, doesn't it? Well, I have hundreds of them in my file folders, just little niblets with nowhere to go because they have no purpose or theme to guide them. Anyway, while I was fixing lunch for hubby, it suddenly struck me what the damn theme for the story had to be. "She'd finally found justice." The sentence popped into my head and I ran for the notepad and pencil before I lost it. Yeah, I lose thoughts a lot.

At the end of the day, my tells had become shows, words like it, thing, something, somewhere, became tangible objects for the reader to relate to, and cliches like 'whatever trips your trigger' became 'whatever creams your panties'. Sounds gross, but trust me, it fits the story.

There was a great sense of satisfaction when I typed The End to that story. I still wasn't sure if it was what the editor wanted but I knew that I'd rewritten a baby story into something that sang for me. I'd also realized that all the lessons I'd learned over the years had gone into rewriting that story. Stopping to think before I put the words down, changing what needed to be changed instead of clinging to those 'precious darlings', going through the story sentence by sentence searching for the perfect words. I'd hit the growing up stage of my writing and it felt good.

I'm not sure where I found this quote or who to attribute it to but it fits today's blog theme:
"All writers are essentially self-taught, and you need to be able to break down everything you read to figure out what that author is doing and how s/he is doing it."