This past summer, my beloved puppy dog passed away, leaving a corgi-shaped hole in my life. My husband and I’d had her for almost as long as we’d been a ‘we.’ Together, we’d moved across the country 3 times and lived in 5 different apartments. We’d been camping up in the mountains and out on the beach. And we’d curled up on the couch with hundreds of books. So it was hard to get used to life without her.
Around the same time, I started working on a new book, replacing familiar characters with new ones. Then my computer died, taking some of my writing with it.
It wasn’t until my friend Edith, who I wrote with twice a week, announced she was moving that I recognized everything in my life was shifting. I was not impressed.
Change is hard. And it seems to come all at once, disrupting your schedule, switching the scenery, and upsetting the balance. This is just the way life works. To move forward, life must change. Sad or happy, it’s inevitable. And this is true with writing as well.
Except with writing, we’re inflicting the change on ourselves. We rearrange the furniture. Kill off characters. Add new ones. It’s the nature of revision, but at times I find myself hesitating. What if I mess it up? What if the things that are good about my story get lost? Sometimes the story seems so close to being right, that it feels risky to change it.
But we have to.
If we want our stories to be everything we’ve imagined them to be in our heads… if I want the chance to share that story with the world… then we have no choice but to step forward. We have to take our story apart and put it back together again, trusting that what we rebuild will be stronger than before.
And the same is true with life. I will always miss my puppy. I will miss Edith and typing away next to her at the coffee shop. I will even miss my computer, bulky and covered with stickers. But as pieces of my life fall away, I have to believe that what is left, that what is coming next, will be strong and beautiful too.