My Writing Journey and Post-Baby Writing Update

I've always loved to write, and for as long as I can remember, I've dreamed of being a published author. My journey as a writer has been rocky, full of ups and downs and a few surprises.

Today, I want to share my journey as a writer, where I’m at now, and what’s helping me return to writing after having our fifth baby.

The Beginnings

I was an avid reader who loved all things books and words. I wrote and wrote in elementary school and middle school. I started many books I didn't finish, though I poured my heart into one fantasy novel I would lug around in a giant binder.

As I reached high school, some of my priorities shifted. I realized the giant book I lugged around wasn't actually very good and gave up my dreams of it getting published by the time I was 16. I kept writing, but I wasn't working on novels—instead, I was on my school newspaper (and got an article published in Deseret News), wrote a lot of essays for school, and when I reached college, I started my first blog. I also wrote a nonfiction book about date ideas, as I was going on a lot of fun group dates, which got published by Deseret Book. It was fun, but it didn't fulfill my dream of publishing a novel.

My Writing Gets Me a Husband

During my second year of college, I'd moved home for a year after a breakup with the boy I'd thought I'd marry. I was dancing and teaching dance, going to school, and working almost full time hours. Ben (the aforeamentioned boy) and I were talking again, though just as "friends" now (I was still in love, but would take the friendship) and he introduced me to NaNoWriMo. He was doing it and sharing what he was writing with me. I decided to write something as well, though I decided to do something nonfiction and more biographical. I started a project about my breakup with Ben and how I spent the summer becoming whole again after a heartbreak.

I started it, felt like it wasn't very good, and gave up on it. It was still up on my computer, though, and my younger brother read it and loved it. He told me I needed to write more because he needed to read more. Over the next month or two, I worked on it more until I reached 40,000 words. I was excited and shared the news with Ben, who asked to read it.

I was a little mortified! It was all about him! And he didn't even know that—I hadn't ever told him what I was working on. He'd been sending me what he was writing this whole time, though, so I gave some caveats and sent it.

I didn't know it until later, but he read it in one night and couldn't put it down. He later told me that he felt like I had put myself in the book in a very vulnerable way and seeing me in such an authentic way made him fall in love with me all over again.

Writing as a Struggle

Two months later, we got married and moved to Orem while we both went to school. It was a dream come true (and still is!). I was back to writing a lot of essays for school, leaving me very little energy to write anything else. But at least now, I was trying. I wrote articles, blog posts, and started books, but mostly focused on school. About a year and a half after we got married, I graduated from BYU and we had our first child.

Because I was finished with school, I so desperately wanted to write novels now, but having a new baby was exhausting and overwhelming. My husband and I started a writing group where everyone in the group wrote a short story each week to share with each other. It was a lot of fun and a great way for me to work my creative muscles even while taking care of a newborn. After a couple of months, it fizzled out, but I still look back at that writing time with fondness.

As our baby got older and started sleeping a little better, I turned my attention to writing novels. I watched Brandon Sanderson lectures and tried to write, but also struggled a lot with it. I'd never written, or tried to write, a novel other than the really, really bad one in elementary school. I had all these visions of how great my novel would be, but then I'd start writing and it would be terrible! I'd get discouraged, which would make me not want to write. On top of that, I started to have some postpartum blues (I didn't realize at the time).

I decided I would give up on writing fiction and focus on nonfiction. It was easier for me to write and I had experience with it. I wrote a few different projects and actually finished some of them, though none of them were publishable. It helped me with my postpartum struggles, though, rather than stressing me the way fiction writing had seemed to.

More Struggles to Write

We moved about three hours away to live close to Ben's family and Ben started his business. The move was really good for me and I went from being alone 90% without a car to being with people most of the time (we started off living with my sister-in-law until Ben's business made a little more). Being around people, along with warmer weather as Summer came, was really good for me and pulled me out of my postpartum blues. I kept working on my nonfiction projects, but once again also felt a tug toward writing novels again.

It was rough, though, to find the time and energy to do it. Our oldest wasn't even one yet and we found out we were expecting our second! It was a big surprise and while we were thrilled, we also had to adjust our idea of what life would look like now.

We got our own apartment, were saving up with intensity for a house, and had two under two for a bit. That first year with them was rough. As our two littles got older, I started a few different blogs and tried NaNoWriMo again. I wrote almost 20,000 words, which was more than I had ever gotten on a novel (other than maybe the one in elementary school). I wrote the beginning and the end, and just skipped the middle. Then I gave up, because writing the middle was very hard.

A Break from Writing

After my fail with NaNo, I focused on my blog for a bit, but it was getting no traffic. I mean, none at all. It was a homeschool blog that I had hoped to build up and sell nonfiction books to my audience with. When I shared my frustrations with my husband, he suggested trying YouTube (he had a lot of experience building an audience there and wondered if it would be easier for me to build an audience there rather than with a blog). I had never made a video before and honestly, hardly ever watched YouTube.

But I decided to look into it.

That's when I found BookTube. I got very into it, right as we moved into our house and found out at the same time that we were expecting our third! Our oldest turned 4 a few months after we had our third. It was a crazy time, but we also loved it.

I got into BookTube and focused on that instead of writing. I loved it. I loved making and editing videos and I loved the community. I worked at it all through my pregnancy and for a while afterward.

My First Novel

Our third was a great sleeper from the start (and we'd already gotten my older two sleeping really well) which gave me a lot more capacity when she was still very young. When she was a few months old, I began to think about my desire to write a novel. Even though I struggled to actually finish a novel, I still had that dream living inside me and I didn't think it was going to go away. I felt like I needed to find a way to make it a reality, and the first step was to figure out how to finish writing a novel.

I decided to give myself some support and accountability by creating a writing group. We would submit 500-1,500 words a week and meet up once a week to go over each submission. I had an idea that I brainstormed with my husband. My writing group consisted of my sister-in-law, her husband, a friend of hers who wrote, and an acquaintance of mine who wrote.

Being in a writing group really stretched me and also really helped me. I needed to write each day or I'd have nothing to submit. I had to submit work that was embarrassingly bad. But, I got feedback that gave me direction, which in turn motivated me to keep writing, and I got feedback that was positive, which was really encouraging on my hardest days.

I had the hardest time getting through my first draft and I drastically underwrote (I think my first draft was around 40,000 and by the time I was ready to send to beta readers, it was around 80,000). I had a goal of 500 words a day and some days, I barely got 150, but I pushed through and got it written. I found I loved the editing process more than the drafting process and also learned a lot about myself as a writer. It wasn't the greatest book ever, but I was proud of myself for completing my first novel and grew a lot because of it.

A Failed Second Novel

After everything I'd learned from my first novel, I thought my second novel was going to be way easier. In some ways, it was. I was better at brainstorming, it was easier to sit down and write (though I still had my days), and our writing group was fully established. It had changed some through my first novel—two members had dropped out and my husband had joined. We now had four members, consisting of myself, my husband, my sister-in-law, and my aquaintance (who is now one of my closest friends). Since then, our writing group has remained solid and we work really well together.

I had decided to tackle an idea I was really excited about, a retelling that involved two points of view and a heist. It was a hefty project to take on. One viewpoint came out with hardly any effort and the other one (the one involved in the heist) just wouldn't work. I tried a lot of things with it, but I never quite got it right. At about 20,000 words, I decided to shelve the project. Contributing was the fact that we had our fourth baby. He did not sleep at all those first few months and it was hard to get back into things with four kids.

Exploring Writing and a Second Novel

To help myself get back into writing, my husband and I set up times that he would watch the kids while I wrote. I came up with eight different ideas for novels and during my writing time, I wrote one or two scenes from each book. It was a way of exploring characters and finding out which ideas were going to work best.

I finished writing all the exploratory scenes I wanted to, my fourth was getting older and I was able to get back into more of a schedule. I picked one of the scenes to develop into a full novel.

It was a good experience. For one, I learned that just because I had learned a lot with my first novel, it didn't mean my second novel would come easily. I also had an experience where I was away from the kids and Ben for a few days and got a lot of words pumped out. It was eye opening to me, to see how quickly I was able to draft away from the kids. Normally, I am a very slow drafter. This novel took me two years to write (through homeschooling and our fifth pregnancy) and ended at over 95,000 words. While I still have a long way to go as a writer, I was really happy with the first draft and was proud of it. It was a big improvement from my first novel.

Where I'm at Now

After finishing my second novel, I was a few months away from having our fifth child. I took a break from writing as I prepared for the birth and then it was time to adjust to having five kids while homeschooling. This was a harder transition than I thought it would be, and it took me awhile to get into writing.

I first started with some writing exercises, which went really well. I then started brainstorming on a novella idea I had. It was a YA fantasy heist and I realized in the brainstorming phase that I still am not ready to write a heist (though I want to someday!).

I decided I needed to do something easier, so I started a romance novel with three different perspectives. It was an idea I got from my writing exercises that I was excited about. I wrote a few scenes, but was having a hard time getting myself to sit down and write. Talking it through my husband, I realized that I was still trying to do too big of a project and was lacking some direction with it.

What I've been working on the last few weeks is a middle grade fantasy novel, a very very loose retelling of The Wizard of Oz. I currently write for ten minutes a day and am writing it for my kids—and am planning on reading it aloud to them. I'm having a lot of fun with it. Ten minutes a day is just the right amount of time. I make progress on my project every day, but I also have the time and mental energy for it each day, despite our fifth being a year old and homeschooling the older kids.

That's where my writing journey has taken me so far. I know I have a long way to go before my dream of being a published author of novels comes true, but the journey has been a wonderful one so far and I am enjoying where I am.

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