Maybe Difficult Isn’t The Same As Wrong
I have been thinking a lot lately about advice. Specifically, about how I am maybe a little too good at taking it, which is funny because I can also be extraordinarily stubborn.
I do think it's important to listen to people. I want to learn things. I want to get better at writing. I want someone to tell me when something isn't working, especially if I've been staring at it for so long that I can no longer tell whether it's brilliant or complete nonsense. But I also have a tendency to hear, This might be difficult, and somehow turn it into, You probably shouldn't do this.
I did it with On the Edge of After. Before I published it, I spent a lot of time reading about how long romance novels are supposed to be, and mine was too long. Or, at least, the internet kept telling me it was too long. Once I knew that, I couldn't stop knowing it. Suddenly the word count wasn't just a number at the bottom of my document; it was a problem, and I started cutting.
Some of those cuts were good. Of course they were. No book needs every word its author has ever lovingly bestowed upon it, and I am certainly capable of using seventeen words where six would have done nicely. But some of the cuts weren't good. I removed things I wanted in the book because I was trying to get closer to the book I thought I was allowed to publish. I worried about pacing because I had been told romance needed to move faster. I worried about length because I had read that I should be somewhere around 75,000 words. Eventually, I worried about all of it enough that I published a version of On the Edge of After that wasn't actually the book I wanted to publish.
The slightly ridiculous thing, looking back, is that On the Edge of After doesn't even fit particularly nicely into one genre. Yes, it's a romance, but it's also a book about grief and friendship and politics and family and figuring out who you are when the life you expected to have disappears. Sometimes not very much happens because Merritt needs to sit at her dining table and be sad for a while, and I happen to think that matters too. So why was I so worried about making it follow all the rules of a genre it was already refusing to fit neatly inside?
I think the answer is actually pretty simple: I was scared of doing it wrong.
And this is something I do outside of writing too. Before I got Sophie, I heard constantly that huskies were difficult dogs. They're stubborn, destructive, escape artists, impossibly energetic and famously vocal. There were plenty of very good reasons being offered for why getting one might be a terrible idea, and then I got Sophie anyway.
She is, without exaggeration, one of the easiest and most wonderful parts of my life. I'm not suggesting everyone immediately go out and get a husky. Please don't do that and then email me when it eats your sofa. I'm saying that all of those warnings were based on real experiences, and they still couldn't tell me what my experience with my dog was going to be. I can't imagine my life without her now, and I hate to think that I might have missed out on her because I let someone else's difficult become my impossible.
Strangely, I have learned essentially the same lesson from houseplants, albeit with considerably lower stakes. I love calatheas, which the internet would have you believe are less houseplants and more tiny botanical hostages constantly threatening to die unless their exact demands are met. I have several. I love them. I also bought a zebra plant despite reading repeatedly that they're difficult, temperamental and dramatic, and she has been ridiculously easy to care for. Meanwhile, I have killed plants that were supposedly impossible to kill (alllllllllll succulents), so perhaps difficult isn't nearly as useful a prediction as we sometimes pretend it is.
Which brings me back to On the Edge of After. The version that exists now is roughly 99,000 words. That's long, I know it's long. I have access to the word-count button. But it's also finally the book I wanted to publish, and getting there has made me think a lot about the difference between listening to advice and allowing advice to make decisions for me.
I don't think the lesson here is that I should stop listening. If anything, I want to remain open to more of it. I don't want to become so precious about my writing that every criticism feels like an attack or every suggestion feels like someone trying to interfere with My Art. Sometimes people are right. Sometimes a scene needs to go, the pacing really is too slow, the plant really will die, and the husky really will eat your sofa.
What I'm still learning is how to listen without automatically obeying. There has to be some space between receiving advice and acting on it where I stop and ask whether it actually applies to me, whether I agree with it, and whether following it will make whatever I'm doing better. With writing especially, I think I need to ask whether I'm changing something because I genuinely believe the story will be stronger afterward, or because somebody has made me afraid that I'm doing it wrong.
I wish I'd asked myself that more often the first time I edited On the Edge of After. I'm trying to ask it now. I want to keep learning, change my mind when I should, and listen when somebody knows something I don't. But I also want to get a little better at sticking to my guns when it matters, because I have Sophie, I have my unnecessarily dramatic collection of allegedly difficult plants, and I finally have the version of On the Edge of After that I wanted to put into the world.
Maybe sometimes the thing everyone warns you about really will be difficult.
That doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't do it.
Peace, love, and inspiration,
Britt 💚
