A Book Preview in Thirteen Quotes
or “here, have some darlings I need to kill”
Good morning, Blue Roomies!
My book manuscript is back from the editor, so I’m in a sprint to get the edits done by early March. Thankfully the book is in pretty good shape, with this amazing paragraph giving me the giddyup needed to get this done:
That said, I have a huge task before me: to cut about 15,000 words from the book. Fifteen. Thousand.
YIKES.
Cutting that much material will mean eliminating good stuff, a process known among writers as “killing your darlings.” Yeah, it’s gonna be a bloodbath around here. But I did find a great place to start, though it feels harrowing to do.
Whether I’m working on a book or not, I read widely and clip and keep tidbits that strike me as particularly wise or helpful. I’m like a mental magpie that way. Many of that stuff ends up in my books—I love weaving together others’ thoughts with my own.
Well, years ago I received feedback from an editor who called me out for doing that too much. Where are you in this? she essentially asked. Your readers didn’t pick this up to hear from [insert great thinkers here], they want to hear from YOU.
It’s taken me a long time to embrace that lesson, and I’m still working on it thanks to a combination of inner critic and imposter syndrome. I also know that while some people create like God supposedly did—ex nihilo, out of nothing—I don’t. I’m a synthesizer. Putting disparate ideas together to make something new (theological quilting?) is something I do, and do well.
Still, when you need to cut thousands of words, removing the words of the others seems like a good place to start.
To that end, the first thing I did was go through the book’s intro and twelve chapters and remove all of the epigraphs, the short quotes that help establish the theme of that section. I share them below. Consider this a little preview, a trail of breadcrumbs to give you a sense of the book.
I’d love to know which ones intrigue you, challenge you, resonate!
Steady on.
Since you were born gifted, you will never lead an ordinary life. Eccentricity is the first sign of giftedness. You are made one-of-a-kind, with all your oddities. They are arrows pointing straight to your giftedness. If you are seeking to be normal, I hope you’ll get over it. Normalcy is the enemy of giftedness.
—Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil.
—adrienne maree brown
What's it like to be normal?
To want what normal girls should?
God knows life would be easier
If I could be normal, then trust me, I would
—Katie Pruitt, “Normal”1
As a closeted teen, I prayed fervently to be normal. What I was really praying for is comfort. I didn’t just want to be normal. I wanted all the ease that comes with blending in. Queerness was such a battle that all I wanted was peace. Every hill made me crave flatness. Every insult made me crave quiet. Every shove made me crave stillness. Every reminder of my different path made me yearn for a forgettable life.
—Richard Morgan
Comfortable people tend to see the church as a quaint antique shop where they can worship old things as substitutes for eternal things.
—Richard Rohr
Is society healthy, that an individual should return to it? Has not society itself helped to make the individual unhealthy? Of course, the unhealthy must be made healthy, that goes without saying; but why should the individual adjust himself to an unhealthy society?
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Have people always been this busy? Did cavemen think they were busy, too? This week is crazy — I’ve got about ten caves to draw on. Can I meet you by the fire next week?... As kids, our stock answer to most every question was nothing. What did you do at school today? Nothing. What’s new? Nothing. ...Maybe we should try reintroducing it into our grown-up vernacular. Nothing. I say it a few times and I can feel myself becoming more quiet, decaffeinated.
—Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Depending on your relationship to the past and future, cure is either a fantasy, or a threat. Cure wants to undo me. To unmake me in the name of ‘healing,’ in the name of ‘wholeness,’ in the name of ‘health’.... Cure wants to remove, to erase difference. Cure wants people like me to not be people like me.
—Polly Atkin
He says, “Oh no, no, can’t you see?
When I was a girl, my mom and I, we always talked
And I picked flowers everywhere that I walked
And I could always cry, now even when I’m alone I seldom do
And I have lost some kindness
But I was a girl, too”
—Dar Williams, “When I Was a Boy”2
Harry Potter wasn’t a normal boy. As a matter of fact, he was as not normal as it is possible to be. Harry Potter was a wizard.
-JK Rowling3
I don’t need to be legitimized; I don’t have anything to prove. I want us to rephrase the conversation as: Are you ready to heal? And I don’t think the majority of people are ready to heal, and that’s why they repress us... because they’ve done this violence to themselves first. They’ve repressed their own femininity. ...They’ve repressed their own gender nonconformity. They’ve repressed their own ambivalence. They’ve repressed their own creativity.
—trans author and activist Alok Vaid-Menon
You who are in the field of psychology have given us a great word. It is the word maladjusted... I am sure that we will recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
To lend each other a hand when we’re falling... perhaps that’s the only work that matters in the end.
—Frederick Buechner
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What I’m Up To
The Art of Onward series for supporting subscribers continues with a post this week about how to write a letter from love.
I’m preaching this Sunday at 10:15, in person at Trinity Presbyterian, Herndon VA or via livestream.
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Link Love
My people are suing the current administration for infringing on the free exercise of our religion. Paragraph 23. 🔥
Find this one on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube. Wow.
Fun fact: song lyrics are hella expensive to get the rights to. So this was more of an aspirational placeholder anyway. But you can listen to it right now wherever you get your music!
Honestly, I wasn’t thrilled about quoting this gal, given ignorant and hurtful public statements she insists on making. So I’m not heartbroken that she gets cut.
And sometimes they are getting covered by the veil, like your post regarding Stonewall.
Yep. And ironically, listening to my author friends on "X", it seems as if even when using an outline, they are not satisfied with what they've written.
I'm a "modified pantser"; I know the general flow of the story, and what I call "benchmarks" along the way, sometimes I don't even know the end until way forward within the story.