"I-I can't go on," Beneficia cried.
"What if told you that you can?" Pyrà asked gently.
– The Bard of Bryn Doon
I can’t tell you how many times I cried out “I can’t go on” while writing The Bard of Bryn Doon. But unlike the Beneficia character, who doesn’t say “I can’t go on” until she has nearly reached the end of the story’s journey, I began saying it near the beginning…and I never stopped. The emotional dredging involved in getting the story out of me was that extreme.
Not only did I want to give up on this book while writing it, I wanted to give up on all books!
It’s true that every one of my books has stretched me in some way. There would hardly be a reason to write them otherwise. But with Bryn Doon, I always felt at the breaking point, like a rubber band that would snap if stretched another fraction of a millimeter.
Nearly a decade ago, a fellow writer reviewing my Acts of Surrender memoir said, “I don’t know anyone who has risked more, given up more, to be a writer.” I revisited that statement often the deeper I got into The Bard of Bryn Doon. As I did, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the risks had been worth it, whether I had given up too much.
Yet once I completed my final read-through a few days ago, I was blown away by the power of the storytelling, and I had to concede, if reluctantly, that the emotional upheaval had served a constructive creative purpose. A week earlier, The Bard of Bryn Doon’s first advance review had proclaimed it my “best book yet” and I hadn’t believed it. Now, to my amazement, I was certain of it.
Ironically, The Bard of Bryn Doon was not a book I expected to write. When I finished The SunQuest, the third book in what I was then calling “The Q’ntana Trilogy,” I considered the story complete. I couldn’t see how there could possibly be more.
Then one gray February morning in 2019 when I was still living in Portland, the glimmerings of a new Q’ntana story thrust themselves into my awareness. Was there more?
I was skeptical, but I have learned to trust that my stories are smarter than I am (something I point out in all my books for writers). So I sat down, listened and began to scratch out an opening scene. And when I heard Pyrà remind Kamela that “there’s more to every story,” I knew that I had no choice but to keep writing, so as to discover what more there was to this one.
Of course, had I known in that moment just how much the story was going to challenge me — creatively, emotionally and in just about every area of my life — I might have been tempted to walk away. Tempted, perhaps. But I doubt that I would have acted on the temptation.
There’s a scene in The StarQuest, the second Q’ntana book, where Q’nta and her questing companions find themselves in “The Coil,” a twisting tunnel where they are forced to face their deepest fears. To her astonishment, Q’nta discovers that her greatest fear is not that she won’t see her son again (they’d been separated earlier in their journey) or that she will fail on her quest. It is that she will lose her stories, stories she has already allowed grief and resentment to stifle.
“Your stories are your heart and lungs,” she’s told when she’s deep inside The Coil. Your stories are the blood and air that course through you, giving you life… Without them you are barely alive… You were alive once upon a time, Q’nta. You can be once more...if that is your choice. Is that your choice?”
I thought about that StarQuest scene a lot as I slogged through the emotional quagmire that was the creation of The Bard of Bryn Doon. I thought, too, about the one time in the past when I walked away from writing, from my stories.
I had been working on stage musical (yes, stage musical!) adaptations of The MoonQuest, The StarQuest and The SunQuest, and the emotional toll of revisiting those stories had been so intense that I announced that I was giving up writing. The work was too hard and the rewards too paltry.
My final act would be to edit and post an interview I had conducted with New York Times bestselling mystery author J.A. Jance. Then, I would be done.
Here’s how I tell the story in The Way of the Fool: How to Stop Worrying About Life and Start Living It... in 12½ Super-Simple Steps! It’s part of Step #9: “Don’t Give Up.”
About 30 minutes into our recorded conversation…I tell Jance how much I love that she never outlines her books because I don’t either.
“‘I have to sort of step out with faith,’ she says, ‘that if I can write the first sentence of the book, I can eventually get to the end of it.’
“‘Shit,’ I exclaim to the recording. The moment Jance talks about the faith that carries her from her first sentence to her last, I know that my ‘strike’ is over. My creative and spiritual lives have always been inextricably linked, and both have been built on a solid foundation of faith.
“As Jance’s words echo in my heart and mind, I realize that if the deepest part of me has determined that I am a writer and that my writing (and all that derives from it) is the most important part of my being, I can’t walk away from it. I can’t give up. I can’t abandon my faith and I can’t stop surrendering to it.
“I am a writer. Period.”
It was incredibly difficult to hold on to that as I was writing and revising The Bard of Bryn Doon, especially when financial challenges showed up to exacerbate the emotional ones. That was when I counted up all the times the word “trust” showed up in the manuscript: 78!
And if that wasn’t a powerful enough message for me, there was this…
There’s a phrase about trust that shows up in all three of the original Q’ntana books. It goes like this: “You either trust or you do not. There is no halfway in between.” When it wrote itself into The StarQuest after its initial appearance in The MoonQuest, I suspected that the message might be as much for me as for my readers. When it wrote itself into The SunQuest, I was certain.
It shows up three times in The Bard of Bryn Doon!
Here’s the thing about trust… If the story were easy, I wouldn’t have to trust. If the story made sense, I wouldn’t have to trust. If I always felt as though I could “go on” with the story, I wouldn’t have to trust.
Trust is the only way for Beneficia to “go on” in The Bard of Bryn Doon, as it is for each of the other main characters in that story…as it is for me in my story. For it isn't only about trusting the story that's writing itself through me, it's about trusting the story that's living itself through me. And as I have learned and over and over again, the story knows best.
The Bard of Bryn Doon releases worldwide on August 18. But you can preorder the paperback today from my website (signed to you, if you like) and you can preorder the ebook today in Kindle, Apple Books and Google Play stores (links are to the US sites). Both versions will be widely available after August 18. (By the way, the fabulous cover image is by Kathleen Messmer.)
For all I insisted, while writing Bryn Doon, that I would never let myself be put through this again, the book’s final page is an ad for a fifth installment in the Q’ntana series! 🙀
I don’t what it’s to be called or what it’s about, but if this new book is going to be out by the end of 2022 as the ad proclaims, I’m going to have to get on it pretty soon! And despite my reservations about diving back into the deep inner bumper-car ride where my stories, fears and other emotions collide, the lesson of my J.A. Jance experience, as it is the lesson of so many of my life and creative experiences over the years, is that is that I can’t not.
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