Face Your Fears
Elle Groeman, the main character in Ripples, is finally relieved. No longer does her voice war with mine in my head. After a little over ten years, the final “The End” has been stamped onto her story so that there is no more guilt in my gut when I work on other projects. As excited as I am to dive back into them, I know my work isn’t done with Ripples. I have to sell it now. Forever. Because if I don’t talk about my book, who will?
(Please, talk about my book.)
But this post isn’t about next steps. This is about how I went from grappling with the appearance of my own mental health as a wee middle schooler by writing it into a fiction novel, to a college-graduated young woman with the confidence to publish that novel.
When people start writing, they often face the self-insert dilemma. This means you describe your characters as having your characteristics. Maybe you stick to making them look like you. Maybe you go a step further and make them use the word “like” a lot as a filler word, like you do. Maybe you give them your same fears, same dreams, same favorite cereal. You get what I’m saying.
Well, when I started writing Ripples in the seventh grade, Elle was a girl with long dirt-blonde hair, blue eyes, and rampant paranoia. She maladaptive daydreamed tragedies befalling her family members or herself. She pre-emptively second-guessed her every thought, every action, and every word. She still does some of these things to certain degrees, but she’s not obsessed with music as a form of escapism, and instead of maladaptive daydreaming, she hallucinates.
Of course, there are other differences, but the big picture is that Elle started as a crude reflection of how I viewed myself at the time. That showed in its early drafts as, every year, I changed her age to match mine until settling on sixteen. I was terrified of writing from the perspective of someone older than me, who would’ve had life experiences I hadn’t had yet.
I was convinced my very first novel was worthless after graduating from high school.
Did you know, according to selfpublishingus.com…
80% of the world’s population set out to write a book?
Only 3% of people who plan to write a book actually finish doing so?
Only 1% of that 3% get published?
That means that before I even started college, I belonged to a group of 2.4% of the world population. I had finished writing a book.
But that didn’t mean the book I wrote was any good. And instead of working on it to bring it to my new standards… I published it. I threw all caution to the wind, abandoned passion, and jumped the gun to teach myself the self-publishing process. I failed to connect the dots and apply the same care I took in writing the book to the rest of the publishing process.
I phoned in designing a cover, resorting to whatever quick tools Amazon KDP provides (never making that mistake again) and only contacting local bookstores for about a month or two. I didn’t have any social media presence and I hated talking about the book. I didn’t believe I could say anything about the book that would make people interested in it. I just wanted them to look at it and decide for themselves.
I gave up without ever really trying in the first place because I expected to fail.
That was 2023. I was in my second-to-last semester of college and eager to abandon Ripples forever so that I could focus on my first fantasy series, my first “real” books that I would do right by drafting, editing, hiring an editor, getting an agent, and publishing traditionally. The Touched Apothecary was my new passion.
Two years later, I grabbed one of my copies of Ripples off my shelf and gave it a read.
Oh boy, I thought. I have to fix this.
That was the end of that. I changed glaring mistakes, attained beta readers, received their feedback with re-ignited excitement, and applied that feedback to reach a true final draft, a correct finalization of Elle’s story. I’ve been ecstatic throughout the entire process. It has been five months of joyous alterations that make me proud not only in the writer I’ve become, but in the writer I started out as.
Elle is still a sixteen-year-old who is unsure about everything, desperately clinging to survival so hard that she doesn’t know what living is. But she’s not the only person in the world.
Elle’s growth is more accurately reflected because when I first wrote her, I was her, and now I’ve grown, so I finally figured out how to more accurately show Elle’s. I wrote her growth before I experienced my own. That’s why the first version never felt right. I had to write with confidence. For Elle, that meant I had to experience her story before writing it.
I’m not afraid. I know what to say when someone asks what Ripples is about. I will contact every bookstore on this side of the state and claim tables, fill the shelves. I’m on social media, posting daily about it. This time, more than my family members will read it. And I won’t feel embarrassed when they do. Instead of expecting a bad Good Reads review, I’ll hopefully await positive comments.
All the while, I get to do what writers love most and write again. Octavia, The Touched Apothecary, I’m ready for you.
