Back last year in the wake of getting a contract for Looking for Home (that was sadly cancelled), I decided to go ahead and start on Book #3. I wanted to revise another old manuscript, so I pulled it out and reread it.
While reading, I realized it was such a fundamentally different kind of book than Hurricane Baby and Looking for Home. Southern, yes, but only Southern because it was set in Mississippi. The theme of the book was very different from the other two; it was a very contemporary story as well. No deep, dark, past secrets to explore, etc.
So I wondered if I needed to work to make it more Southern, more gothic, and more spooky. I decided I did. I went to work on the POV, the setting, the chain of events. I introduced a supernatural aspect to the book; I changed the fundamental theme; I changed the struggles of the characters drastically.
And a voice in the back of my mind kept telling me that it wasn’t going to work this way.
But I ignored it. For months.
I probably wrote fifty pages of new material. I started a new document in my computer called RANT just to dump all the angst I was having doing this work–talking about what I wanted to do but talking about how much trouble I was having doing it, too. I thought I was just suffering from writers’ block again.
After not fooling with it for the past three months while I wondered what I was going to do with my creative life and after taking the initiative to cut about two-thirds of the material, I now realize I was just trying to force a new vision on a book out of fear. I had wondered if I built a fanbase on historical fiction if I could pull off a move to something more contemporary. Wondered if what I had tried to do then would work for the market now.
I finally realized I was just trying to make the story something it wasn’t.
Each story is its own creation. I was not the same writer I was back in the late 2000s, but that didn’t mean that every book I wrote had to do what I had done in revising Hurricane Baby, either. I was allowed to write whatever I wanted to write. And if I wanted to still do a story exploring those themes that were issues in the 2000s, that was fine. Did that mean I could do it differently to account for changes in society? Yes. But it did not mean I needed to chase a “brand” at this stage of my writing life.
If the story wants to be something different than what you normally write, let it. That’s how you grow as a writer. Challenging yourself to do something you haven’t done before.
Book #3 (which I’m currently calling Our Little Secret as a working title) is going to be different from the other two. And now that I’ve accepted that, I feel excited to work on it again. Don’t write scared. That’s the takeway.
Happy writing!
Julie Liddell Whitehead 