But that doesn’t take away from the pleasure of writing this, or from getting it right just the way I think it ought to be. From the pleasure of practicing a human thing, a human creative act, and piecing it together into a machine of thought and feeling that can move on its own, and be moving by itself, without revealing the effort that went into it.
At least, that is how I need to see the process, if I am to survive it.
I started writing Leatherbound Hands a little after watching Bridgerton, and the idea of Éomer falling in-love through letters was enjoyable and new and rich and fulfilling to flesh out. But like the stories I really love, I love the idea of a slowburn to the point of torture and the fic has taken on a life of its own. It’s now a monster of its own, the longest thing I’ve ever written, and not yet halfway done.
And writing it has taught me a few things: first, that I’m not the kind of longform writer who can freestyle a plot. I atually need a list of things to write per chapter, and a way to gather the ideas together, a way to organize them.
Second: that I am a very slow writer. I finished a chapter update for Leatherbound Hands and I’m about 7,000 words deep into the next chapter, but it is slow going. Because, third, the best ideas come when I can settle into the chest of each character. Plotting is harder for me to do, and it is plodding, teeth-gnashing work.
But, fourth, it is necessary work because it can save me from rewrites, and from having to trace details back and forth across the story. Longform is long — there’re miles of ornery details, and millions of things to keep straight to keep the story going.
Full of Grace has been rattling around in my head for so long that the actual, true answer is embarrasing to admit. There have been iterations of the story, broad strokes of it that I’ve now reworked or thrown away completely that it feels new and fragile, and old and clunky at the same time. Details of the world are clearer now as I worked through them, put them down on paper. But the story that I was trying to tell — friendship between two women trying to survive in a languishing world — has changed. It continues to change, to demand of me something more. What, I keep asking myself, do I want to read? What is pleasurable to write?
And I am trying to convince myself that taking the long route will fortify me for other books, other stories I want to write, whenever I become ready to write them. So I don’t want to save myself from the effort of figuring things out — if no one reads a single word from me, then the only real goal is to find pleasure in the writing.
