Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, I wrote a novel. It’s kind of baffling and alien at this point, as though it’s a hard to remember dream, or it happened to another person. A lot of my writing feels this way, which I attribute to a successful flow state. That’s not to say I don’t remember writing much of Cherries. The places I wrote are ingrained in my memory, in no small part due to my habit of listening to music while I write, and often playing the same song on repeat (this is why I loved adding Youtube videos to my chapters—the songs were so integral to the atmosphere I tried to create). I wrote the first few pages of Cherries at the dining room table of my grandmother’s house, based largely on a daydream I had while listening to Pharrell’s Come Get it Bae. That break-up choreo that Lia and Callie have? That’s what it would be set to.
[ASIDE. I hired a freelance editor to look over Cherries on a whim back in 2018, by which point they suggested a lot of the material was dated. There was no Uber, etc. It’s definitely set squarely in the 2014-2015 window it was written. And while it’s probably fine that the book sits in the beautiful amber of a post-2008, pre-2016 world, I agree it can feel jarring to read a contemporary book that feels out-of-step with the day-to-day. I recently listened to a popular romance/women’s fiction book where much of the plot stemmed from the protagonist having dropped her phone in a bucket of water. There was a running joke she needed a better phone case. And because the book is very, very recent, I spent much of it wondering—what kind of phone can’t withstand being dropped in a bucket these days? It was the subject of whole-ass ads in 2016].
Sitting with and working with Cherries was one of the defining experiences of my 20s. I came up with a big chunk of the plot while on a long, winding drive through a mountain pass. I wrote in a giant king-size bed in my rental house, and on a sofa that belonged to a woman who never became my mother-in-law, in the passenger seat of a car on the way to ski-town where I would never ski. I wrote on my laptop and on my phone, even going so far as buying a small Bluetooth keyboard so I could write faster on the go. The last two chapters were written in an exhausted, cramped, flurried fugue state on an intercontinental flight. The End, I wrote. And then I stopped.
I can’t remember anymore what my plans were. I knew the book should be revised, and I also knew it was 50,000 words too long for the genre. What would it take to cut out a third of the book? Who would I anger, and disappoint? The story could remain the same, or similar, but what would I lose? The editor made their recommendations. I tried, eventually, and a few times, at that. I tried to cut the book down, and then I decided I should rewrite from scratch. I made it a few chapters in, but what I found was that I was writing more, giving more, instead of cutting, condensing, refining. Here are Lia and Callie backcountry skiing, and here’s a house party at Emi’s, and more and more. There was an opening chapter where Lia was in bed with a rando, because it was important to me that Lia have no guilt about sex, no hang ups about one night stands or her desires. Although Lia had plenty of flaws, I didn’t want her to be a character who felt bad about her body or fretted over her looks. I had enough of that in my own mind, and grew up with it in books like Bridget Jones’s Diary and co.
[ASIDE. This isn’t to say I didn’t like Bridget Jones’s Diary when I read it. Like Cherries, like all books etc., it’s a book of its time. But I am far happier with books by Talia Hibbert, Beth O’Leary, and Jenny Colgan these days, as I am with working towards an approach of body neutrality in my own life.]
The rewrite hasn’t happened yet. The revision hasn’t happened. I have purchased a handful of books on craft that sit unread, but they sure look professional on the shelf. I have signed up for one-off classes, semester workshops, prompt writing sessions and even an 8-month writing program. I can only hope they’ve improved my writing, but it’s something else entirely to talk about drive.
It’s an uncertain place to be.
*
Of late, I’ve been enjoying sitting in my backyard. It’s not a tidy, manicured space. We’ve let the grasses grow tall where they can, while they’ve gone yellow and brittle elsewhere. Half the yard is dust and dirt where the previous owner cut down a veritable forest of spruce trees. The bodies are gone, but the roots remain; or, perhaps less poetic and more true, the soil is still too acidic or somesuch. I gaze out at my kingdom as my black cat sits next to me. It’s his kingdom, really. I’ve been wondering what comes next. What’s the big thing I’m aiming for. I can’t say. It’s not supposed to be okay to stop like this.
So much of what I did in Cherries was talking to myself. I talked to myself about healthy relationships, about independence and trust, about moving past the wounds of childhood. About pushing through into connecting with the world. I was terribly depressed while I wrote most of the book, driving my energy into getting a chapter out in a few hours of work once a week, and then sitting in a stupor the rest of the time. But what Lia didn’t get to, and what I didn’t either, was figuring out what the rest of her life looked like. It was a story I wanted to tell, and which I felt like I couldn’t reach at the time. The revision of “book 1” loomed too large.
Before too long, it will have been 10 years since I published the first chapter of Cherries on Wattpad. It feels so strange to still be asking what comes next. But I suppose the biggest risk is to stop wondering, to stop asking at all. I hope, whatever it is, that I can share it with the people who found something to love in this book in the first place. Whether it’s more of Lia’s story, a better version of Lia’s story, or something else entirely. Something of this messy, frightening, challenging time. Because that probably deserves to be told, too.
I have so much to figure out still. It’s probably time to talk to myself a little more.
Ara James 