5 Lessons Writing in 2020 Taught Me
Cue the fireworks, the crashing cymbals, the confetti and the Veuve Clicquot: 2020 is, mercifully, coming to a close this week. It’s been…a year. We don’t seem to be able to agree on much anymore, but I’m fairly certain that we can agree on this much: we are all hopeful for 2021 and the modicum of peace it may bring.
But instead of focusing on the hellscape that 2020 provided the majority of the world, I’d like to reflect on my own personal positive takeaways. 2020 was like a year-long writing exercise. A test, of ability and strength. For many of us, it was incredibly difficult to get words on the page. For some, it provided time to actually finish that manuscript collecting dust in your hard drive for the last ten years. Whatever your experience, writing in 2020 was not like writing in any other year. Here are a few lessons I have learned from writing this year:
1. There is No Good Time to Write.
Are you ritualistic like me? Need to light a candle and have your coffee in its special mug, set at a perpendicular angle to your laptop, and ensure the house has been cleaned top to bottom, children all snug in their beds before you can get one blessed word on the page? Then 2020 was a rough one for you. With kids attending school virtually from the comfort of your very writing chair, and balancing your zoom-meeting schedule with your suddenly WFH spouse’s zoom-meeting schedule, finding the exact right time to write has been something akin to walking across a bumper-car race track, backwards, on your hands, while singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” and juggling with your left foot. In other words, 2020 was no friend to writers who enjoy ritual and routine.
Yet, somehow, over the course of a couple of months, I got down 25k words of a new WIP. It’s not a lot compared to what most people accomplish in that amount of time, and it might be more than some folks were able to get down all year (and to those people, let me say: I hear you. Writing was hard this year. Please see #4). But to me, it was something of an accomplishment against the background of my husband and I juggling two full-time jobs, infinity zoom meetings, and a…um…spirited toddler who was supposed to start preschool this year but did not, leaving us with no childcare. The only way I was able to get any words down at all was to revert to the “routine” I adopted during the days of writing with a newborn: throw out the schedule completely. Stare wistfully at the unlit candle for a moment whilst realizing that it will take too long to remember where you put the lighter. Squeeze your eyes shut against the mess in your peripheral vision that will take too many precious writing minutes to clean. And…just….write.
The chaos will still be there to order when you’re finished writing. The candle was just a prop anyway. The words are inside you, even if your coffee is balancing precariously atop half a dozen half ripped picture books and this morning’s syrup-smeared breakfast plate. Bless this mess: ignoring it means you can get some words down.
2. Write What You Want to Read.
Okay, I’m paraphrasing from Toni Morrison here, but the message is more relevant now than ever before. For those of you now experienced in querying during the Time of Our Lord 2020, the year doomsday drank some particularly noxious frat-boy cocktail and woke up breathing its lethal morning-after breath on the backs of our collective necks, you know how publishing can turn on a dime. So if you happened to write into a particular genre (say, dark fantasy, dystopia, or gritty realism) solely in hopes of capitalizing on a trend, it was a cold splash of water indeed to watch agent and editor twitter feeds fill up with exclamations of: Give me your rom/coms! Popcorn reads! Light and fluffy!
Writing into a trend is always iffy—the tide can turn on a trend in an instant, unpredictably, and nothing proved that more than the past year.
This year, I went searching for a particular sort of novel to read for pleasure and could not find anything like it anywhere. So, I decided, I would write the damn thing, despite the fact that it is a totally different genre and tone than anything I’ve ever written before. Let me tell you: I have never looked forward to sitting at my computer and spending time in a made-up world more than I have with this book, these characters. It is a joy and a privilege to spend time with them and I want to feel this way for the rest of forever, every time I sit down to write. Not only has this proved invaluable during a year when sitting down for any period of time to write is nothing short of a Herculean effort, but it’s also provided comfort and joy during a year when we are in short supply of both. So I say: write not only what you what to read, write what brings you joy, write what makes you giddy to show up to the page, even on the hard days.
3. A Good Critique Partner is Worth Her Weight in Gold.
Recently, a client told me that she had been gifted the following advice from a fellow (published) writer: get as many people to read your book as you can before querying. My client wanted to know if I agreed.
While I bit my lip, straightened my glasses, and searched silently for a mug of whiskey, I thought of how I might, delicately, say that I have never disagreed with a piece of writing advice more vehemently. Don’t get me wrong: I am in favor of beta readers, authenticity readers, critique partners. But not all readers are created equal. Seeking out readers with the sole motivating factor of volume, rather than quality, can be injurious not only to your writing, but to your desire to write.
Full disclosure: I am the private sort. Perhaps even a bit superstitious. I have been known to ferret my manuscripts away in secret, allowing only a single person to read them before trying to Do Anything With Them. This past year, however, I acquired a new critique partner. Finding the right critique partner has not been super easy for me in the past. Editing is what I do for a living, people pay me to critique their work—it is a dream job, but it is a time-consuming one, and it has often left me in imbalanced relationships when I sought out critique partners in the past. But my current critique partner has turned out to be my perfect match. And having her in my life has shown me just how valuable having the right CP actually is. Because it isn’t just her uncanny ability to see the matrix through my unintelligible zero drafts, chapter after chapter (although she does that too). It’s also the way she motivates me to keep going. It’s the way she delivers feedback. The chosen vehicle through which we have chosen to deliver feedback to each other (the video messaging app Marco Polo, btw, which is not for everyone but has proven to be pure magic for us). I have come to know this about myself: I need someone who will encourage me in equal parts to offering constructive criticism. I need someone who will be excited about my writing on the days where I feel like I’m a hack who will die with thirty unpublished manuscripts languishing in the cloud. I also need someone who will call me on my shit when I’ve tried to take a shortcut or tried to, as one professor used to say, solve a problem with a quick-fix “plot bitch.” My current CP does that, and then some. Others might not find this as useful—some need a drill sergeant, some a cheerleader only.
This year, after nearly a decade of writing professionally, I found the perfect CP for me. Without her, I think I would have given up on this book before it even hit 5k words. She was worth the wait.
4. Give Yourself a Little Grace.
If you have not been able to put words on the page this year? YOU ARE NOT ALONE. This year has taken a toll on us all in so many different ways, and if that has affected your writing, it only means that you are a living, breathing, feeling human, which is what makes you qualified to tell a story to begin with. Treat yourself with the same grace that you would treat a struggling friend. Feel your feels. But remember, in 2021, there is someone out there who needs your story. Which brings us to….
5. Be Fearless.
The other day, I watched my son approach a group of kids on a playground. The kids were clustered around the top of the tallest slide. They were around eleven, twelve. They weren’t playing; they were simply standing around, talking, being boisterous and swearing a little and being loud in the way that only eleven-, twelve-year-olds can be at the top of the tallest slide on the playground with no intention of actually sliding. My son is two and a half.
As he approached them, he looked back at me, once. “Mom?” he said uncertainly. I nodded. “Go ahead,” I told him. “You got this,” my husband added. And without another look back, my child faced off against the group’s leader—a young girl wearing unicorns and rainbow leopard spots with more confidence than I swear I’ll ever possess in my life—and said to her, with the most beautiful, goofy grin, “C’mon!” Then, when she didn’t join him, he maneuvered past her and went down the slide on his damn stomach. God, I love this kid.
The second time he went back to the slide, you know what happened? The other kids parted for him. He thanked them and then went on his way, over and over. He must have gone down that slide twenty more times. Every time, the group parted for him. Eventually, they forfeited the space entirely. I beamed the biggest my-son-is-going-to-rule-the-world Mom Smile the kingdom over. You know what that was about? The reason they parted for him? It wasn’t because he was just so cute (but he is). It wasn’t because he was polite (but he was). It wasn’t because I was there, certainly (they could not have cared less, and I didn’t intervene). It was because he had confidence. He went for it. And they responded.
The only way to write is to throw everything you have at the page. Be confident, even when you don’t feel confident. Fake it ‘til you make it. The truth is: no matter how many books you write, you’ll never feel confident the whole way through. Each book presents its own problems and obstacles. Sometimes we learn from them, sometimes they defeat us momentarily, and sometimes it feels like we’re transcribing from characters that are there in the room with us, telling us exactly how it’s supposed to go. But fearlessness, the willingness to go all in even when you don’t know what it will bring, will see you to the finish line every time.
Don’t worry about the girl in the rainbow leopard print with a smirk like she’ll never grant you entry, not in a million years. Just concentrate on how it will feel to go down that slide on your belly, and let the world part for you as ascend the stairs to do it all over, all over, all over again.
Kate Angelella is the owner of and a freelance editor for Angelella Editorial. She specializes in developmental and line editing for YA and adult novels. Learn more about her here.