by Julie Falatko
Welcome to Day Two of Storystorm! If it hasn’t happened yet, soon your world will be full of stories. You walk down the street and every bird, every dog, every odd-colored car seems like they could be the star of a picture book. I love this. Yes, the sparrow, the puggle, and the car the color of pineapple juice are there every day, but there is magic in suddenly seeing ideas, and seeing that they are everywhere. I get such a thrill from writing down all of these possibilities and figuring out what their stories might be.
Here’s how writing usually works for me:
- Write a persistent idea into a draft.
- Revise it a few times.
- And then: A significant amount of future-tripping. I imagine my agent telling me it’s the best thing she’s ever read. I picture what the book will look like when it’s done. I think about how I’ll feel when I get a call from an award committee. I dream about how it will feel to get a high five from Oprah.
While I do like the writing process, I also really like the part where I send the manuscript out and it’s no longer my problem. I like checking things off my to-do list. But I have learned I can’t rush it. Creativity isn’t an item to check off. I need to give the manuscript time. How much time? As much as it needs. Sometimes that’s a few weeks. Sometimes it’s years.
It’s like stories are artifacts we’re unburying, and some are fairly clean and close to the surface, and for some you have to dig for miles and clean off a lot of dirt before you even know what you’re looking at.
It’s a magic trick to take your invisible brain thoughts and form them into real words and stories. Of course it takes time.
Time lets me see what’s working and what’s not in a story. It’s only by letting a draft sit for a day, a week, a month, that I can understand what it’s trying to be and shape it into that thing. There are always parts that helped me get the story to where it needs to be, and then, three drafts and some time later, it’s obvious that part can be cut away. There are also always parts that stick out somehow, that take me out of the story, or just bug me. Often it takes a few drafts (and time) for me to realize that part is poking at me and needs to go. Time is what takes a manuscript from good enough to great.
At some point, the changes I’m making to a draft are small and insignificant (adding a comma, say), and there aren’t any more pointy bits that poke me when I’m reading or thinking about it. And that, finally, is when I send it out and (at least temporarily) get it off my desk.
I have a picture book coming out in June called HELP WANTED: ONE ROOSTER. I wrote the first draft of this book in 2012. It’s about a cow who is interviewing roosters for the rooster job at the farm, and they’re all terrible candidates. After many revisions, it got a book deal in 2014.
This is easy math. The book is coming out twelve years after I wrote the first draft, ten years after the book went under contract. When people say publishing is slow, they’re not kidding. So, listen: TAKE YOUR TIME. There is truly no rush.
As the years went on, I deleted characters who didn’t seem quite so funny to me any more, and replaced them with better ones. I worked and reworked why they were looking for a new rooster in the first place. I didn’t really figure out the ending until 2021—years after it was originally supposed to publish.
It took ten years from the first draft for the story to get fully unburied. I wasn’t working on it nonstop during that time—years would go by when I wouldn’t work on it at all—but it was always simmering, and the full plot of it didn’t really come to me until three years ago.
I never would have expected this book to take so long when I first got the idea. But I know that some books just take longer. And it’s always right to give them the time they need. So go forth! Write up those ideas! Some will flow right out of you, and some will take much longer, which is, frankly, fascinating. Why are they buried so deep? We’ll never know. But we are so lucky to be the ones who get to dig them out.
Julie Falatko is giving away a seat at her picture book revision class to one lucky Storystorm winner.
You’re eligible to win if you’re a registered Storystorm 2024 participant and you have commented only once below.
Prizes will be distributed at the conclusion of Storystorm.
Julie Falatko writes books for children. She is the author of several picture books, including SNAPPSY TTHE ALLIGATOR (Did Not Ask to Be in This Book), THE GREAT INDOOORS, RICK THE ROCK OF ROOM 214, as well as the TWO DOGS IN A TRENCH COAT chapter book series. Julie lives with her family in Maine, where she maintains the Little Free Library in front of their house. Visit her at JulieFalatko.com and subscribe to her Substack newsletter.
