Friday, January 11, 2008

still driving at night

I only want to write. And there’s no college for that except life.—Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.—E.L. Doctorow

So here I am, facing a new semester of my tailor-made “graduate school,” where the next class is: Rewriting Your First Novel.

It is exciting to sit with the bulky, edge-tattered manuscript on my lap, and say to my sister: Pick a spot, and I’ll start reading! It’s a familiar bulk, too. While I was editing manuscripts for Winepress and Zondervan, I always had at least one huge stack of pages, rubber-banded together, which makes this current stack a bit less daunting. (When I took my editing work to Barnes and Noble, I would sometimes take the manuscript out of my bag and walk it up and down the aisles, just to show it that it would, one day, be a real book, too.)

It’s a little trickier to believe that for my own manuscript. (Though maybe I should walk it through Borders one of these days? Couldn’t hurt…)

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Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 01/11 at 06:40 PM
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