Over the past two days, after two agent rejections with excellent feedback and a long conversation with two beta readers, I cut 10,000 words from my 67,000-word YA novel manuscript. It actually felt a lot like surgery. Like removing an infection, the one I created by written throat-clearing, wandering around while searching for the way to start my novel.
In the past two weeks, I've been asked so many questions. Why is this YA? It doesn't have anything supernatural in it, is there even a market for that? Why should we like your narrator? Why does she like her friends? Why do they like her? It has a spiritual component -- are you afraid of being labeled a Christian novelist?
Um.
And so? The cuts.
No more navel-gazing on the part of the narrator. More plot. More obvious metaphor. More romance. But the primary conflict remains the same, and even though it doesn't have vampires or werewolves or even really rich girls, I still believe in it. It's the story I want to tell, the story I hope will enable some girl somewhere to hand it to her parents and friends and say, "This is exactly how it feels. I need you to read this. I need you to understand."
I think I am getting there. One reader has already remarked that my descriptions brought back memories of her own, and I know this experience is one shared by many, many women. And it's being experienced by probably millions of girls right now. Sometimes it ends badly, sometimes it ends well, but it never ends without leaving a mark on the girl. This novel is the outcome of the mark anorexia left on me. I need to tell this story. I know there is a market out there for it, I just need to write the novel well enough -- to make it a compelling balance of plot and character development and narrative arc and emotional pull -- to get it into the hands of that girl somewhere out there who really, really needs it. I know her, just as I know my narrator -- who is not me -- but I couldn't write this story if I hadn't lived her pain. As a writer, though, I have the ability to change her outcome, to test her in ways I wasn't tested, to let her make mistakes I did and didn't make and to watch her grow.
I think what I cut out was my part of the story. Now it's all hers.
And I just have to come up with the scenes that were missing before, link up the transitions, strengthen the voices, bring the funk. It's exhausting.
Do I think there's a market for this type of novel? Yes.
Do I think I will find the agent who will believe in it and sell it? Yes.
Will it take ten years? Maybe.
I would really love for this novel to be out in the world by the time my daughter hits her teen years. It's definitely not a middle-grade book, and maybe with some changes it could be an adult novel -- but I want it to be YA because those are the years in which I read all the books that changed my life. I've read a lot of great fiction since then, but the books I read in high school helped me question and define who I was going to become as a person. I don't just want to entertain. I want to plant the seed of questioning: Why am I doing this?
That's the answer I'm giving myself.
