Writing doesn't follow a path

Hi friends,

I thought I had carefully made each reservation as we headed out on our 2020 summer vacation, braving the COVID waves to remain self-contained in our family travel trailer. I had checked each of our Colorado locations to ensure they were still open and ready to greet us. I checked my email reservations for the two Texas state parks that we would have to stay at on our way from Houston to the Rocky Mountains. We were ready.

Except I had made a mistake. A big mistake. I had checked the days when we would be stopping through central and west Texas, but I hadn’t checked the dates. I made reservations for one week after our initial travel dates. When we arrived at Lake Arrowhead during a downpour, we discovered my mistake. Thankfully both of our planned stays were able to squeeze us in at the last minute, salvaging the start of our pandemic vacation.

Robert Burns wrote “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” John Steinbeck used the line as the title for a novella about the collapse of a dream. And it is a lesson I’ve learn over and over again as a writer.

I am a consummate planner. In my teaching life, I will plan entire three to four-week units to ensure I know just exactly where I’m taking my students. When we plan our summer camping vacations, I don’t just mark out where we will be staying, but highlight important points of interest and calculate the number of miles between stops. I plan out our meals so I can ensure that we are fully stocked for each meal on the road. I maintain our family calendar with each practice and event carefully shared with my husband and children. I make checklists to keep me focused on the plans, often writing down more than I could ever reasonably achieve in a single week.

I hate to deviate from a plan, and when plans don’t work out just the way I imagined them, it usually puts me into a foul mood. But events happen that throw off my lesson plans. Kids get sick and we have to change schedules. Weather has forced us to change our camping plans completely. In short, life happens and learning to accept that can sometimes turn a disaster into something even better.

This is true of our writing as well. Accepting that the plan needs to change can transform us. What have I learned over the years?

Writing Is About Discovery

Like a lot of writers, I would write even if I weren’t getting paid for my writing. Why? Because writing is my processing tool for the world around me. I often don’t know what I think about an issue or event until I sit down to write and reflect on it.

We also don’t know what we are capable of writing until we sit down to do it. I tell my students this every time they sit down to write long research papers; they quickly discover that the process of compiling new information writes the rough draft for them. I’ve never considered myself much of a poet, but when I’ve forced myself to sit down and write structured poetry as examples for my students, I’ve come up with some decent work. I recently started writing short stories again, more than ten years after I wrote my last short stories for graduate school. I’m enjoying the process and learning that I can write about more than just my own life. It’s fun and new and invigorating in ways that blogging sometimes isn’t.

And because writing is about discovery, our initial writing ideas will often take a life of their own. Characters will tell us the story they want us to tell instead of the story we started with. When writing a memoir piece we might find ourselves remembering events that we buried deep inside. The people who we thought would appreciate our work will ignore it while strangers will track us down to tell us how much our words meant to them. We pass our own discoveries on to our readers.

Life Happens

When I started my first blog, I really thought I would just focus on the many years that my husband and I would spend working on our fixer-upper. I imagined an HGTV-like future where we could eventually present our finished masterpiece to the world and I would have documented every step of the way. 

Within months, I wasn’t just writing about the house; I was writing about parenting, culture, teaching, and everything in-between. Our lives kept changing and my writing had to change with it because I was usually writing about our lives. Eventually, with all of the writing that I found myself doing about our camping travels, I sat down to write a camping memoir. Then life got busy with littles and teaching and I had to put it to the side. I joked that I needed time to just be able to write, but then when I lost my teaching job and I suddenly had all of the time in the world, the grief and fear froze me in my tracks. The work was just too painful to return to. I had to wait for time to heal some of the hurt before I could pick up the writing again, and by that time I discovered a better path forward.

With families and careers and the tasks of being human, life will get in the way, but our writing will always be there for us when we return to it. And sometimes that time away helps our writing age and mature with the new experiences we bring to it.

Unreasonable Timelines

A few weeks ago, my husband and I spent over three hours installing an “easy” shower system in our new bathroom. The selling point for the attractive system was that all we needed to do was snap the single corner into place and screw the whole unit into the studs behind it. But the portion of the house we were working in is at least 70 years old. The floor needed repair. The walls aren’t perfectly square. After spending several hours fighting the house and each other, we finally completed the task, but there was no way I was installing tile on the floor that night. Our Saturday to-do list was suddenly completely scratched, other important tasks set aside for another day.

We still got the tile down and the toilet installed before my in-laws spent the night at our house for the solar eclipse, but the rest of the timeline is getting spread out just a little more as we balance desires and realistic timelines.

I’ve discovered the same is true in my writing life.

Remember that camping memoir I started working on six years ago? I had this ambitious goal of completing the whole project for indie publishing during this year’s two-week spring break and being ready to publish in early June. Except I didn’t spend enough time planning and promoting the Kickstarter campaign that was supposed to pay for the independent venture. I didn’t give my editor enough time to really do the book justice. I launched the campaign before my cover artist (also a teacher) had time to finish his incredible design.

I was being unreasonable and I had to humbly accept that maybe I had been pushing to complete a project that wasn’t quite ready to be out in the world.

Now my cover art is almost complete, my editor is working on the manuscript, and I have a proofreader lined up. I’ve accepted that I will be spending my summer vacation preparing for and promoting the launch of my book instead of pushing out a book before it is ready. And I’m going to be ready for a new Kickstarter launch in May. Humbly accepting that I was being unreasonable in my expectations and starting over will hopefully make my writing, and the reception of that writing, so much better than it would have been.

You Find a Better Way

Just as writing itself is about discovering who we are, the longer we are in the writing world and the more connections we make, the more we discover about the business itself.

As I’ve said, I’m a consummate planner, but as a writer, I’ve also learned to evolve with the work. I’ve tried different types of content on my blog and then have moved on when I realized it wasn’t working for me or my readers or both. I’ve committed to social media trends and then stepped away when I realized that it wasn’t helping me grow as a writer. When I initially published my first book, I did everything through KDP. As I learned more, I decided to republish using IngramSpark so that I could open myself up to more readers. My initial decision wasn’t a mistake; I didn’t screw up. Instead, I learned more and discovered a better way for me. Therefore, I had to change the plan.

I’ve had to learn to be open to different paths over and over again as a writer. I’ve learned that being flexible and willing to change the plan makes me a more intentional writer and improves my completed work. I’ve learned to let the writing talk to me. This is how we grow. This is how we create community. And this is how we make our mark on the world.

We just have to be willing to accept that our plans might “go awry.”

So what did you think?

• What’s the biggest detour you’ve had in your journey?

• How did you get past it, or did you go around it?

Let us know in the comments.

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