The Unexpected Thing I Learned About Myself From an Old Manuscript

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I re-released my list of back titles as e-books this week because Canada Post is on strike (again) and I had removed them previously when I closed my Shopify account. It was time to get them back into the world and of course, it aligns well with what I’m doing here sharing my creative projects with the world. And it was in revisiting an old manuscript that I realized how far I’ve come.

I have previously released six romance novels, two separate trilogies that are set on the east coast of Canada. Each series features a group of friends that have anything but an easy time finding and keeping love, and the stories follow those chaotic, often serendipitous journeys. In prepping the book files for re-release as e-books with my distributor, I spent some time thinking about how I started writing these novels. And I dug out my original manuscript, which I’d written in 2020 for Nanowrimo and laughed when I read the summary page.

What I Thought I Was Writing Back Then

What if that yearning you feel for something different wasn’t a coincidence? What if the thing you were longing for was also out there longing for you? And what if your deepest creative desires weren’t just desires, but personified so we could understand them better? Is It My Turn Yet? follows a brother and sister through a difficult time in their lives as they converge on their father’s funeral and navigate the prospects of different lives for themselves. Alone in their journeys, but together at heart, they each set out to create something new and wind up finding unexpected joy, curiosity, pain, sorrow, and love. This ordinary story explores the extraordinary tapestries of life’s lessons that need to be learned in order to get to the other side of what our hearts really want. Told from the perspective of creative gifts waiting to be plucked from moments of opportunity, Is It My Turn Yet? will leave you wanting to make more time for the things you truly love and set a higher standard for your own life.

That manuscript became the framework for If You Met Me First and Heart First, featuring brother and sister, Carly and Jeremy. I wrote that original manuscript as an all-seeing creative entity. A little bit God, a little bit Big Magic. But the main character wasn’t actually Carly or Jeremy. They were the vehicles to tell Creativity’s story. Creativity was the main character. The book is terrible. It’s basically a biography of my life poorly told through the lens of wanting to do something else with my life.

I felt a cringe reading the manuscript back. I didn’t actually read it all. It was bad. But that’s what happens with first attempts at anything we do: they should embarrass the ever-loving hell out of us. It means we tried. The point wasn’t to write a prize-winning novel in 2020. It was to just write a novel. As with most things in my life, if I can just finish the damn thing, I can usually turn it into something better later.

But that book’s life was meant to be short because it sat on the hard drive of my computer for more than two years before I picked it back up and started dissecting it into what is now The Blurred Lines Series.

Writing the Future Without Knowing the Future

What’s great about the summary and the parts of the original manuscript I read is that they have nothing to do with the books that story eventually became. What’s great about it is that I was writing about a different life even before I realized I wanted a different life. I don’t mean to say that the books are based on my life. I mean to say that there’s an obvious theme in my life about returning to self, being true to what feels good and longing for something more.

More, as I’ve come to discover, doesn’t actually mean more things. It means more experience. And when I set out to turn that hilariously-bad manuscript into something that people might actually read, I realized I was going to need some help. So I talked to my friend and fellow lover of all things creative, and she pointed me in the direction of several writing books. I’d always hated the idea of reading about writing. Wasn’t it just easier to write? Apparently not. So I invested in the four books she recommended and got to work reading them, applying what I read as I went.

The Story Equation by Susan May Warren

I underestimated the power of this book in its simplicity and size. It’s a pretty small, self-published book that I rolled my eyes at, but actually got me moving much faster than I thought. The “equation” is gold and it helped me rewrite much of my work in real time.

Story Engineering by Larry Brooks

This book helped me lock in on the starting point. I assumed I needed to begin with the backstory, but starting the book at the last possible moment before something interesting happens came from the suggestions made in this book.

Rivet Your Readers with Deep Point of View by Jill Elizabeth Nelson

I wish I could say that this book helped me stopped writing passively, but its solid attempts at correcting my ill-gotten ways didn’t work. The book is great for helping you match tense and sentence structure, but I just can’t follow those kinds of directions. I recommend it for informational purposes and because I referenced it a lot despite not being able to implement much of what I learned.

A Writer’s Guide to Active Setting by Mary Buckham

This book helped me understand what not to do. It was a fulsome guide for choosing direction and understanding what was fluff.

Stories Might Write Themselves, But They Need Someone to Structure Them

It turned out, my friend was right about reading about writing. These books were all structured in a way that helped me frame my story and rewrite the pieces that were missing. What helped the most though, was not something I read in those books. It came from her advice one afternoon during one of our weekly Zoom calls. She told me if I was struggling with the characters to write the backstory for each character.

I took her advice and what came from that experience was not just a backstory, but the entire story. As in, I ended up using that backstory for Carly and her brother, Jeremy to frame the story for If You Met Me First. Carly’s backstory became her entire story and I abandoned trying to rework the original manuscript, going all in on this version of Carly instead. I zeroed in on just her. I wanted to know her and like her and have all of her dreams come true.

Using that framework, I was able to write Jeremy’s story, which became Heart First. And when I was at my desk on fire for weeks at a time, I wrote I’ll Go First, featuring Jeremy’s friend, Joel.

As a writer, I thought I was writing stories about women in love, but The Blurred Lines Series‘ main characters are actually the main male characters. The series is about three men who know each other from a variety of circumstances and they find themselves locked in tight with three different woman who come out of nowhere. Neither of them is looking for love, but boy do they find it.

I’d love to tell you that the stories just flowed out of me, but the truth is I spent weeks reworking those stories into what they are today. The first messy drafts poured out of me as I started to get a sense of what these characters were about and what they wanted to achieve. But once the writing was on the wall, so to speak, I had to work really hard to make them stories people could follow and would want to read.

I effectively taught myself how to write like that. Thanks to my creative friend and her book recommendations, I cut entire chapters, focused in on just the two main characters, and found ways to tell stories through dialogue. In my old manuscript, I barely wrote any dialogue. I struggle with telling a story, not inviting readers into one.

Writing Dialogue Moved My Stories Along from an Old Manuscript to a Self-Publish Trilogy

I discovered that moving the plot along with dialogue was my favourite way to write. I didn’t have to worry about what colour the walls in the room were. I wanted everyone involved to be focused on what the characters were saying, not doing.

If you asked me why that is, I could tell you with ease that it’s because words matter to me. Don’t say something you don’t mean. Be honest. Ask for what you want. All of these concepts and values came through in my writing. I made Tucker, Jeremy and Joel painfully self-aware and honest. I let the women be mysterious in why they were the way they were, but I went all in on the male character personalities and traits.

So to have a full-circle moment with these stories five years after I originally created Carly and her brother, Jeremy, is pretty awesome. It’s obvious that I write about things that are important to me. It’s not the characters that are important, but the journey they each take and how they show up. I just so happen to use smutty romance novels to share those values, which is such a fun way to do it. That old manuscript served me well and I’ll hang onto it. It’s always good to see how far you’ve come. And how much better you’ve gotten at writing spicy love scenes!

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