For the past five years or so, I've been experimenting with gluten-free recipes. This was an early attempt at almond bread. I ground my own almonds into flour and baked them with cinnamon. Luckily, it had a lovely nutty flavor and a gritty texture that made it wonderful for toasting. When I started, I wasn't sure what the end result would taste or look like.
Writing is a lot like that. I have an idea of what I want to do, but I have no idea what all the "scene ingredients" will make. But, that's also most of the fun.
I've been planning to do NaNoWriMo again this year. Before I can be successful, I'm the type of person who at least has to have a loose idea in mind. Then, I was watching videos about plotting a rough draft. I was reminded of this simple method:
Start by writing a back cover blurb that would make you interested enough to pick up a book.
For those who have never tried this, I greatly encourage giving it a shot. Blurbs give more than just a description of the story. They convey a sense of the writer's voice, the genre, and the tone. When I wasn't yet bogged down by character details or plot points I wanted to include, this method worked well for me. Ideas poured in. I envisioned myself browsing for a book, reading back covers, until I stumbled upon this description:
Penn didn’t anticipate this phase of her thirties. Most of her friends have procreated and dissolved into the pits of breast pumps, food allergies, and daycare woes. Some of them treat her as an unpaid, on-call babysitter—guilting her into tantrum territory. Even her husband divorced her to seek a more motherly woman.
Penn’s done with it all. No more tolerating the age-old advice “you’ll regret not having kids.” No more potty-training incidents with other people’s rugrats. No more men who plot to give her stretch marks and eighteen-plus years of torture. No more divorce recovery group full of single parents. She sets out to create her own unique band of scorned non-mothers: Bunless Ovens.
What Penn finds is a diverse assortment of women, each with their own stories of loss. These new friendships challenge her beliefs and reveal a bitterness inside her heart that could break her closest remaining connection—her best friend who just told her baby number two is on the way.
This is an issue I've been struggling with ever since my husband and I decided not to have children. Most women my age have at least one child. This makes navigating friendships more difficult when I can't relate to the biggest part of their lives. I want to be supportive, but I can only chat for so long about the ins and outs of raising a decent human being(s). Any other topic I try to raise somehow returns to kiddyville. If other parents are present, I lose my voice entirely.
And I'm always fighting my inner voice that says, "Yeah, that's why I decided not to have kids."
Still, the goal of this book isn't to hate on parents. And I certainly don't want to cut out the majority of women my age from my target audience. Speaking into this issue will be a combination of humor, grace, and realism. My ultimate goal is to give a voice to those who also decided parenthood wasn't for them. Those who feel left behind by a culture with underlying expectations for women to do it all: successful job, pay bills, keep house, eat healthy, stay fit, procreate.
Many women "do it all," but I've never seen "it all" done well. Someone—usually multiple someones—suffers. My mother greatly suffered doing "it all," physically and mentally. It was out of necessity, not choice, but I was still robbed of having a relationship with her until recently. We're still working on it. Add in friends who looked at my kid-free lifestyle and thought "she has nothing better to do than babysit last minute," and I have tons of material through which I can work.
So begins my journey of turning Penn's experiences into absurdly funny but hopefully relatable material any woman can enjoy.
I'm sure I'll deviate from the blurb along the way, but that's part of the fun. I still have time before NaNo in November, so next up is querying Dawn Denied and Inktober!
Keep on smilin'!
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