Did you say you were writing a book?
Yes!
If you’re in my circle then I have probably had this conversation with you already and you’ve used your social filter to hold back one of three phrases:
“Dude, you are crazy.”
“Don’t you have enough going on in your life?”
“You can barely spell.”
All of these statements are true to the core, but it’s happening. You can read about the seed being planted by clicking on the “writing” tab above. That seed sat in my brain germinating for decades. Around New Years Eve as I was taking inventory of how I was spending my time I decided I’m watching too much TV at night and I want to be more productive with my time. I don’t consider myself an avid reader, or even a casual reader. Maybe part of that is the season of life having four kids and just wanting to decompress at the end of the night. Anyway, I wanted to change that so I embarked on this journey of writing some sort of children’s book that my friends believed that I had in me.
Now the unique thing that I bring to the table is that I can rhyme. It’s not rocket science to rhyme but it comes easy to me and relatively quickly. I would be no good in a freestyle rap battle with Eminem, but give me a few minutes to think about it and write it out and you’ll get something good. So I began the writing process with that goal in mind to write a relatively normal story in a unique way.
I spent a lot of time writing these really good narrative poems telling the story of this kingdom and the journey of these children. I realized two things:
I was forcing the poem.
I enjoyed writing the narrative more than I expected.
When I finished the first draft the story was probably 70-30 percent narrative to poem. That might not seem like a lot, but basically every major event that happened i was jumping into some kind of rhyme about it. It felt random. I had my friend Erin Smith read through it. Erin is a super talented writer, podcaster and photographer and overall amazing person that you definitely need to check out HERE.
She gently confirmed my feelings. i needed less crafty rhyme and more character development going on. During my first edit I rewrote the first seven chapters and I found a way to fit the rhyme into the story in a way that didn’t seem random. In fact it totally added an awesome element to the story. I whittled the ratio down to something like 90-10. It was hard to nix some of those poems but sometimes you have to get rid of the good to find the great.
What was great about that is that it enabled me to write more in regular narrative form which i found myself totally digging. It was easier than having to follow the rules of meter and rhyme and took a fraction of the time to get through each part of the story. The book began to grow deeper roots and I felt the freedom to take my time in certain descriptive places. Another cool part of the first edit was taking sections that I breezed through in the rough draft to muscle the story along and paint in some richer description and dialogue.
My point in describing some of this process is not to bore you, but it is to say that what I thought was going to be the “hook” of this book and the unique skill I brought to the table (poetry) took a back seat. It became something totally different. I though it might be a Shell Silverstein collection of poems and it has turned into a Narnia/Lord of the Rings multiple book fantasy adventure novel. By the way there is a map. Everyone has been pretty excited about the map.
Do you think I bit off more than i can chew with this first venture? Yep!
But it’s been fun.
