Write What You Learn

Around the time Solid Ground was released earlier this year, I penned a series of posts about my writing process and my journey to publication. The articles were published on various sites, but with lots of new readers and social media friends, I've decided to re-issue them on my blog.

Here's the fourth installment.

As I navigated my way through the first or fourth or twenty-second draft of my debut novel, Solid Ground, someone shared this Virginia Woolf quote with me.

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” 

Having “completed” my book (whatever that means), I can now say I agree. I wrote what I knew, and to some extent, I wrote who I was. I wrote what burned inside me, a tendency I imagine to be especially true for first time novelists, in whom all of those previously unsaid things have smoldered the longest. This isn’t to say a novel is always autobiographical (mine’s not, I swear), but that in some way, the stories we write are inextricably anchored to who we are and how we see the world.

I suppose I knew all along that my writing was intertwined with my identity, but then the damnedest thing happened as I wrote my book — I changed.

I wrote Solid Ground off-and-on for more than a decade, and over those years, I had many new and varied life experiences and qualities of mind. So, wouldn’t that change my novel? Does the story we write change as we do? Mine did.

From its humble legal pad origins to its still humble digital and print publication, the themes of Solid Ground evolved, and in some cases, came to mean the literal opposite of their original intent. As I reflected on it, what was most fascinating to me, though, was the realization that, even as the themes changed, the characters and plot of the story remained essentially the same.

Solid Ground has always been about Conor McLeish, a flawed but kindhearted gay man who, as he approached middle age, was worn down by the drama of coming out and the search for acceptance. In each draft of the story, Conor struggled with a truckload of childhood baggage, depression, and his tendency for self-sabotage.

From the early drafts to the eventual published book, what changed were not the key plot points or the sorry details of Conor’s life, but the lessons he takes from those elements. And those lessons, the story’s themes, if you will, changed for Conor because they changed for me.

Even the significance of the novel's title came to carry new meaning for me. When I first began writing the book, Conor's story was about a man's search for a future that's secure and stable, a man's desperate need to stand on solid ground. Years later when I finished the final draft, when Conor and I were both a decade older, the story was more about his willingness to accept an unstable and unpredictable world where the ground never stops shifting beneath his feet.

I don’t want to spoil the story so I won’t give away too much more about Conor’s arc, but I can say this: the book I published wasn’t the book I started writing so many years before. I always wrote what I knew, but over the course of time, my worldview evolved, what I came to know about myself changed, and I wrote what I learned.

Jeff's first novel, Solid Ground, is available in print and ebook 

at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online retailers.