What was it that George H. W. Bush used to say, something about “That Vision Thing”? Well, I must admit that I’m having my own problem with “That Vision Thing” concerning my memoir Poor Relation, now roughly two-thirds complete. It’s not that I don’t have a vision for how it will all come together. I do, and it is crystal clear in my head. However, conveying that vision to others has always been and continues to be a challenge for me. Part of that difficulty is because the book has gone through a pretty major evolution as I’ve been writing it. It started as a book mostly about my mother, who gave up her two children from her first marriage before she married my father. But it has evolved into a book about my childhood and the impact that my mother’s decisions had on my family, and how I got from there to the happy place where I am now.
But those are big topics, and understandably, when people (i.e., my writing group) are reading a book that is not yet complete, they may wonder just how I am going to wrap this all up in a neat and tidy 300 or so pages. The answer is, I will.
But the fact that readers in my writing group are sometimes asking these questions alerts me to the probability that agents and others who will take up my manuscript will also have questions. While they will not be burdened with the chore of reading the 60 or so pages that I subjected my writing group to that I have already discarded, they will certainly have some of these same questions if I am not careful.
So, this is telling me three things: First, I need to be brutal in editing down the first third of the book so the reader gets into the meat of the story earlier. Second, I need to work on more clearly articulating, both verbally and in short written form, exactly what the book is about. And third, I just need to write, write, write to finally finish this first draft. I’ve been working on it for so long, and now that I do have the vision for how it will come together, I need to find every spare hour that I can to work on it, so I can finally make “That Vision Thing” a reality.
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