I’m a paper person. The whole world of computers and social media does not come naturally to me. I have a hard time organizing my writing this way. What I mean by this, is that my current Word document for my novel has over 250 pages. This may sound good, but the problem is that since I don’t write from beginning to end, it becomes very difficult to organize the document, to remember what I have.

There are doubles of sections, random notes and pieces written in different tenses throughout. Even different names for characters appear as I start to go through the pages because over time I have changed some character’s names. It’s a very messy method.

When I open my file these days, my first reaction is to close it back up. TOO MUCH STUFF! What I keep meaning to do, is to get away for a few days, in a place that has a big open floor (with no dogs running around) and take all 250+ printed out pages and start sorting. This may seem tedious, and it is, I have done it in the past. But bringing it all back to paper form, to touch my book, cut it into sections and rearrange it, and dive into every nook and cranny that I can’t see on the computer, works for me.

Do what you need to do to make peace with your writing and find your way.

WRITING PROMPT: How do you find peace with your writing? In life?

Last week in my Young Adult Fiction writing class, we talked about Point of View. We discussed the importance of keeping to a teen voice and having teen appropriate stakes. And then we looked at developing the setting, adding details and how to keep the action going, and the one thing that I noticed is that everybody does it differently. And that is what is great about writing. Yes, there are the basics, but each person makes the story their own. Usually, YA is written first-person (present or past tense) or third-person limited, but not always. And in our class we decided that whatever POV a writer chooses, they simply need to do it with purpose. With authority.

When I was writing my memoir, Back on the Court, I wrote the first draft in first-person present-tense. It felt right to me. (It took me about eight years, but it felt right). I liked the immediacy, the way a reader would be in my head, feeling what I was dealing with at the time, and hopefully relating to it in a way that could be helpful for them if they were struggling in life. And then one day I had an instructor from one of my classes tell me that they thought my book should be written in past-tense, so I spent probably four months switching it to past-tense, and making many changes to the story as I did. When I was all done with the transition to past-tense, I decided that I didn’t like it, but I did like many of the edits and changes that happened during the process.

I spent another several months switching my manuscript back to present-tense. And though I wouldn’t recommend this lengthy road to a finished manuscript, just know […]