Letter to Myself: Remembering What You Love About Your Writing: by Elizabeth Stark

This evening I will meet with my writing group to discuss the overhaul of my manuscript. Did it work? Is it better than the earlier version, worse or just different? What’s missing? What doesn’t make sense? What threads did I start and neglect to finish? Do they buy it? Did they love it? What will I do next?

Before I leave this afternoon, I intend to write a letter to myself about the book. This is something I recommend to my students. Before you get feedback on your work, make a set of notes about your own feelings about the writing. It is SO easy to lose sight of what you love about your book when someone else doesn’t love it. And, likewise though more rarely, it is easy to lose track of what you still want to fix about your book when someone else loves it.

I spent the past five weeks in suspense. The questions above haunted me. I genuinely felt I had NO IDEA if they would come back to me with praise or gentle disappointment, whether I’d be met with good news or a huge amount of work ahead. A kind email earlier this week assured me that at least one of my readers liked the book a lot, and this opened a pent-up stuck place in me that really did not know anything about this book I had spent hours and hours, days and weeks and years working on, working over.

That said, there’s a lot of work ahead of me no matter what verdict they return, and I want to have the touchstone of this letter to myself, to remind me what’s most important to me about my book, why I love it (even if nobody else ever did), and what vision I hold aloft as I labor, knowing I will never reach or replicate it, but that it lights the way.

What do you love about your project? What is most important to you about it, no matter what anyone else says?

Elizabeth Stark is the author of the novel Shy Girl (FSG, Seal Press) and co-director and co-writer of several short films, including FtF: Female to Femme and Little Mutinies (both distributed by Frameline). She earned an M.F.A. from Columbia University in Creative Writing. Currently the lead mentor and teacher at the Book Writing World, she’s taught writing and literature at UCSC, Pratt Institute, the Peralta Colleges, Hobart & William Smith Colleges and St. Mary’s College. She’s at work on a novel about Kafka.