On Never Giving Up

This summer I gave a reading at the Galiano Literary Festival. I read from my memoir in progress, for the first time. Before the reading, I thought it might be interesting to the audience to tell them how long I’d been writing this particular story. Turns out it’s been a surprisingly long time.

Fourteen years ago, I first attempted to write it as fiction, but gave up a quarter of the way, unable to subject my fictional character to what I’d experienced as a young wife.

Three years later I tried again. I wrote the story of my first marriage in epistolary form, as a series of letters to my young daughter. That time I completed the manuscript. But it lacked stakes and interiority.

Over the next few years, I drafted another memoir on my daughters battle with anorexia. Plus wrote several essays drawing on my experiences of my first marriage.

Nine years later, I tried to write a long form version again. Each time came back to the material, I approached the structure differently. In the years since that first attempt, I’ve learned a lot about the craft of writing.

And this last time, I created a memoir that worked. That’s when editing could begin, a process that’s taken almost two years so far. It was my fourth round of edits that I tackled the word list described in my Brevity essay and cut 7,401 unnecessary words from my draft. My editing journey continues. But hopefully I’ll move on to the next step soon. Querying. Wish me luck.

You can read the essay here.