The Story I Distilled With

When I pulled the two notebooks off my shelf and folded back the cover of each, what I saw surprised me.

Even though it’s only been a handful of years since I filled them, the penciled handwriting is already fading.

Yep. Pencil. I was not the most resourceful writer when I started The Exile. Somehow I didn’t foresee that graphite, unlike ink, would have a tough time remaining intact for posterity. But of course, I was fourteen at the time.

What fourteen-year-old thinks about posterity?

The fact is, there were a lot of things I didn’t think about at fourteen when I began the novel.

I know the big thing these days is to plow through and finish manuscripts quickly, but in this case, I’m glad I didn’t. There is so much that teenage Shiloh would never have incorporated in the telling of this story that became crucial parts of the final product. Not that I was writing the first draft for six and a half years, but the revision process took a solid three.

If you’ve read the book (or honestly, even just the first chapter) you know there are some heavy elements. Elements with which I had no personal experience. The first time I wrote those scenes depicting clan brutality, I had very little help other than what my research told me—and the sound of Delta’s voice in my head narrating it.

Years later, I still have no experience with some of those themes, but what I do have is exposure.

I have met victims of abuse. I’ve heard their stories and the impact those events left on them.

Some of the themes I am now acquainted with personally. The death of close family members. The struggle to explain away events using my own neat little paradigms, afraid to face the fact that my preconceptions don’t always match reality.

A lot of life happens between our teenage years and our twenties. In a way, the story and I grew up together. What started out as almost entirely speculative writing became informed by my own life experience and exposure, making the characters more human, the themes more full, and the story more real. There are still plenty of elements in The Exile that could have received more depth if the process had taken ten years, but we have to draw a line somewhere!

Here’s question I’m left with at the end of the writing process: how do you know when to start the story you’re burning to tell?

Last week I compared a story to a bottle of wine: the longer it sits in the bottle, the richer it becomes. That analogy fits for many of my novel and script ideas. I’ve deferred sitting down to write them because I haven’t considered myself mature enough to adequately handle their scope and depth—and so they’ve been percolating for years.

But in some cases, the story might be more like a block of cheese than a bottle of wine: apt to grow moldy if left on the shelf for too long.

So how long is too long of a wait? Do we run the risk of the ideas growing stale?

Do we wait to write until we feel we have enough life under our belts? Or is there something about the writing process that actually matures us along the way?