Green Gables, PEI, where done was apparently better than fun.

I love talking shop with other writers.  So I was honored when fabulous New York Times bestselling author (and awesome friend/holder of #ebpower) Eleanor Brown asked me for a one-line piece of writing advice for her next blog on The Debutante Ball.

My contribution:  “done is better than fun.”

Pithy?  Probably.  True?  Absolutely.  I had to make up this phrase while writing The Heroine’s Bookshelf, in fact.  You see, long ago and far, far away I bought into the myth that a writer’s life is strewn with roses, that words flow like the champagne that follows each pearl on a long string of bestselling book releases.  Cue a great gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair when it turned out that writing, for me, seemed incomprehensible, mysterious and downright frustrating.

Turns out I wasn’t the only person who struggled to find time, will, and wherewithal to write.  Here’s an excerpt from a letter Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote in 1932:

No, I haven’t yet ‘tackled my adult novel.’ It is impossible under present conditions. I keep hoping I shall ‘have more time later on’ but ‘later on’ I have even less. It is all pretty well shaped out in my mind but I can not write it by fits and starts, as I do my Annes and Emilys.

This might discourage some.  After all, isn’t Maud decrying her lack of time or ability to work on the book of her heart?  But I find comfort in the latter…the knowledge that even this very canny and incredible writer wrote her most famous books in little snippets, pressing onward despite the early twentieth-century version of the taunting blinking cursor.  I am reminded that whether we love every moment of the process, we can create something that is worthy of love anyway.  At least that’s what I’m telling myself today.

“Marilla, isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”
Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

It’s that time of the year.  The time when your impossibly put-together friends announce that they are going to accomplish a Huge Goal in 2011 and then proceed to do so with a minimum of stress, pain, or evident strife.  I usually fall on the other side of the spectrum, looking toward goals but nervous about announcing them, doing what I can and lamenting what I can’t and somehow accomplishing a bunch in the middle.

However.

It has come to my attention that I’m in need of some next steps in terms of my literary career.  (I just almost typed that phrase, moved away from the keyboard, did some busywork, returned, and typed it slowly.  Oh, dear.)  Nothing earth-shattering…it’s just time I looked at what I really want, what’s next, and how I can get from Point A to Point B.

I was talking to a friend about it last night and she said “2009 you would weep over the Facebook status updates of 2010 you.”

She’s right:  2010 was a hugely productive, accomplished, and important year, and though it whipped me down it also built me up in many unexpected ways.  The best part?  Discovering my literary tribe through the readers, bloggers, book-lovers, reviewers, and allies flung all over the world…the people to whom I owe my greatest debt.  Now I get to take all of you into consideration as I ponder my literary future, too, and that is a privilege.

Anyway, my conversation with my friend reminded me that I have other allies, too…the women who wrote my favorite books and whose lives I was privileged to study and write about in The Heroine’s Bookshelf. As I look forward, I can remember that Charlotte Brontë wrote her way through grief and took an active role in her publishing career; that Betty Smith used her writing to catapult her out of the slums of Brooklyn and as a window back in.  My literary heroines spent less time agonizing over the direction of their careers than finding work they couldn’t not do.  Armed with that work, you guys, and a whole history of female writers, I think I’m well-equipped for a new day.

Footnote:  If you haven’t seen it yet, check out The Heroine’s Bookshelf as reviewed on the front page of The Washington Post’s BookWorld.  And stay tuned…I’ve got something really fun up my sleeve for February!

She was sitting there waiting for something or somebody and, since sitting and waiting was the only thing to do just then, she sat and waited with all her might and main.

Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery

The countdown continues…and today you can not only sign up to win a galley of The Heroine’s Bookshelf, but you can now turn to Jo March, Lizzie Bennet, and Scarlett O’Hara for advice to life’s pressing problems on The Roaring 20s.

But that’s not what I really want to talk about.  I want to talk about prequels.

See, in perusing the news over TBAQ’s October debut, I found a note that Before Green Gables, Budge Wilson’s prequel to Anne, has already sold a whopping 50,000 copies.

Can I get a whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!

Though I am sure Wilson’s readers love his book for good reason, the popularity of prequels never ceases to amaze me.  Mike has often been witness to my not-so-silent rage over, for example, the hideous monstrosity that is the Little House on the Prairie sequels, the bizarre reimagining that is the Little Women diaries for girls.

Here’s the problem with prequels:  They are produced by writers who will never, ever be able to recreate the inner landscape, historical context, or internal motivations brought to the table by the original author.  For me, prequels puncture part of the magic of the Heroine’s Bookshelf…the existence of stories that won’t ever be fully imagined or completed.  My imagination (shock!) or my historical research always had to fill in the tantalizing blank spaces, gray areas, and gaps left by my favorite authors…and I am very okay with that.

What’s your take on prequels?

Both.

This freckle-faced girl is Lucy Maud Montgomery:  Canadian, teacher, tortured optimist, dutiful preacher’s wife, “passionate friend,” and author of the beloved Anne of Green Gables series.

We’re hanging out for the next week as I plunge into the writing process, on which Maud had this to say:

For five months I got up at six o’clock and got dressed by the lamplight. The fire would not yet be on. The house was very cold but I would put on a heavy coat, sit with my feet up to keep them from freezing and with fingers so cramped that I could scarcely hold a pen. I would write my “stunt” for the day. Sometimes it would be a poem in which I would carol blithely of blue skies and rippling brooks and flowery meads! Then I would thaw out my hands, eat breakfast and go to school.

When people say to me, as they occasionally do, ‘Oh how I envy your gift, how I wish I could write as you do’, I am inclined to wonder, with some inward amusement, how much they would have envied me on those dark, cold, winter mornings of my apprenticeship.