My Life Is A Rough Draft

I couldn’t put my finger on why I felt this soul-sucking depression on our way back from Brittany. I thought maybe it was the fact that I needed some alone time after two weeks of collectivity, or maybe that I was frustrated at being told to wait on certain things I was hoping for (told by God, of course, not by man). I thought maybe I was going through my usual bout of post-holiday pressure to catch up and do and do. Or maybe I just wasn’t feeling my best physically and hadn’t had – or made – the time to take care of myself.

But then I realised that no. I was depressed as a result of constantly putting my life and work out there in unfinished, rough draft form when it seems like everyone else is so amazing and … polished.

I should probably back up and explain. Over the past two weeks’ vacation I read three masterpieces: Glass Castles, The Help, and A Thousand Splendid Suns. It had been a long time since I read something that wasn’t either an escape novel, my favourite Georgette Heyer, or a book for review. (I love reading those things too, but this time I wanted to catch up on some of the books I have been meaning to read).

Anyway, these three books, as you know, are just magnificent. Every word is choicely placed, like apples of gold on settings of silver (to borrow from Proverbs). Each sentence is finely-crafted, sparking vivid emotions. The authors thank agents for believing in them, editors for pulling out the best in them, spouses for putting up with their bouts of insecurity. But we don’t see any of those stumbling blocks in the finished work. We see – perfection.

When you blog, you’re constantly putting work out in its rough draft form. It’s the nature of the beast. I don’t mean that it’s riddled with grammatical errors. It shouldn’t be, although I know a few of mine slip through. But when you write a blog post, it’s how you feel and think in that exact moment of time. It’s rare that you go back and change a blog post to reflect how you’ve evolved since you wrote it. Who has time for that? It’s a blog post! And there will be another one coming up tomorrow. 

It sort of suits my personality to blog because I churn things out at a dizzying rate, thrive on feedback (if I’m being honest), and am not such a stickler as to choose perfection over speed. I don’t think I’ve even written anything that I now wildly disagree with, but I know that I change all the time; I learn all the time. I’m never exactly the same today as I was yesterday.

So why is this suddenly a problem, and why the depression over it?

Someone criticised a blog post before I left for vacation, and another person criticised a different blog post the day I returned. It’s not that you can’t criticise my work – of course you can! (Although it seems a little unfair to get criticism when I haven’t earned a centime from writing in the past 9 years that hasn’t been immediately sucked back into the blog. I write for free, yo). But those criticisms were valid and could have been avoided had I slowed down to perfect my work before putting it in the public eye. It made me feel sheepish.

And then while in Brittany, I began working on editing my novel. By editing, I mean rewriting, changing things up, polishing. I feel I can do that now that my revised memoir is safe in Emily’s hands. My friend will slash away all the unnecessary words I could not bear to remove.

So I was redoing my novel, but as I read what I wrote, I couldn’t believe I had put these chapters up for public consumption in such raw state. I couldn’t believe I had submitted them to agents hoping for my big break. I forgot that I had blogged the first two-thirds of the book publicly for the sole reason of forcing myself to stick to a deadline with accountability because I had no idea if I could even finish an entire novel. I forgot that this was a rough draft, and not a polished one.

My writing is like the ébauches we saw in the Louvre. Remember? (Pronounced ay-bo-sh, it means ‘rough draft’).

These are Rubens’ preliminary sketches. They were only meant to get him to his finished product, not be the finished product.

The fact that they now sit in the Louvre, even in ébauche form is simply because it’s Rubens. Not everyone is a Rubens.

I published my ébauche of a memoir as if it were in finished form because I didn’t know better at the time. And now I’m abridging my memoir to fall within the normal word count (80-90,000 instead of 130,000). I’ll have a title and cover that looks more like a memoir and less like a Regency novel. I’ll promote it as Christian living, not as travel, even though there’s a lot of travel in there.

But in the meantime, a few hundred copies of my ébauche have been sold, thousands have been downloaded in the Kindle promotions, it’s sat on display in the American Library of Paris, it’s won two (money-making, not prestigious) awards, and has gotten 76 reviews. And all along I want to say – wait! That’s not the one I meant to show you. I can do better!

One of the criticisms on my blog was that I was too categoric when describing the French culture, an error that would not have slipped through if I had treated the post with more consideration. I think I’ve always counted a little too much on your leniency to allow the rough drafts to masquerade as a finished work. But I’ve certainly never presented myself as an expert on any topic, whether it be France or food (except maybe faith at times?) –

Have I?

Suddenly I’m not so sure. And now I’m frozen with thoughts of inadequacy regarding my writing (both blogging and books). I feel foolish and apologetic, and wonder if I will ever produce something magnificent. And this is what has been causing the soul-sucking depression lately.

I remind myself that I needed to self-publish a memoir (that would eventually require an overhaul) in order to prove to myself that I could write one in the first place. I needed to put my romance out there with unbelievable scenarios, overly-descriptive gestures, and stilted dialogue in order to convince myself that I could actually finish it. Okay. So I have a rough draft. Now I need to get to work.

Where blogging is concerned, I suspect that with the rash, overly ambitious, goal-oriented personality I have, I’ll probably always reveal the rough-draft sides of myself before they’ve been brought to a deceitful perfection. I’m sure I’ll keep eagerly presenting my best-effort-books to a yawning audience (I’m not talking about you, dear friends) in hopes that I might be recognised. I’ll probably go through my entire life doing things this same way, knowing me – stumbling over perfection in order to attain “achievement”. It’s a little embarrassing.

There’s a life lesson in all this, isn’t there? I think it’s that no matter how hard we work at filing away the raw edges, our entire life is a rough draft until we get to the end of it. That’s when relationships are polished into a masterpiece – or when they are revealed as a fraud. That’s when all the combined brushstrokes equate perfection, or when the entire sculpture gets lumped back into the clay. 

Soul-sucking depression and foolish insecurity be gone. Because it’s a level playing field in the end.

(Since I’m not going to write about it this week, I just wanted to let you know that I’m still plugging away with the ten minutes’ daily exercise. I missed four days in a row at the end of our vacation, but got back on track yesterday and some of the stomach muscles were still there! I’m trying to sort through the exhaustion and prioritise the to-dos. Thank you for those of you who check up on me, and those who let me know your progress. Mwah!)

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