Working Through Hell

I recently came across two quotations from men I admire.  Thomas Edison was speaking to the subject of opportunity and had this to say:

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

Sir Winston Churchill wasn’t speaking to opportunity, exactly, but I think his words can be applied to work along with a lot of other aspects of life.  Here’s what he had to say:

“If you are going through hell, keep going.”

Now, these two quotations from very different men, given at different times, and for different reasons were very important to me this week because they applied to me in ways I’m sure these learned gentlemen weren’t considering.  These quotations spoke, I felt, directly to my own writing experience.

I am in the midst of another edit of my current manuscript and this one happens to be a fairly significant project.  I’m making some extensive changes to the order of action and contemplating a pretty large change to the personality and history of my main character.  This, my friends, is big stuff for me.  It’s also really, really hard.  

I set aside the novel for a while because my husband and I were remodeling an older house and restoring it to “house” status after more than twenty years as an office.  Since the project was taking up so much of my time and energy, the novel slipped into the back seat for a nice rest while I demolished, patched, painted, built, and a variety of other hard things.  Smaller writing projects such as short stories and micro fiction could be fitted in to my schedule but I just couldn’t pull together the focus for the large scale work I felt I needed to do to the novel.  Now, however, the remodeling is winding down and I’m itching to get back to work.  So, I began to reread the manuscript and make notes to get back into the rhythm of that story.

Oy.

People, I did not like what I saw.  I had begun building in the changes to my main character and it isn’t working for me at all.  It put a hard edge on her that just doesn’t sit well with me.  I spent this past weekend fretting over this and trying to decide if I should take up this mess and fix it or if the time had come to file it in the back of the drawer and begin anew.  

Cue Mr. Edison and Sir Winston.

Anyone who has ever really devoted themselves to writing will tell you that it’s no joke.  It’s WORK.  Goodness knows, you don’t need me to tell you this.  You’re living it.  I think everyone who’s ever written can recall moments when they stared at a manuscript, trying to decide if it stayed on the desk or went into the circular file.  I reminded myself of this and had another look.  My manuscript has its overalls on and is ready to pick its way through the brimstone.  The question is, what do I plan to do about it?  Well, that manuscript isn’t quite ready for the bin.  I’m not entirely sure how I’ll fix it.  Yet.  But I’ve hauled out my own overalls and my asbestos accessories and I’m back at work.   

 Mr. Edison, Sir Winston, I thank you.

~Sandy