Wait; gain

I saw my first author information sheet more than a few years ago. It asked questions about the main characters, what they looked like, the setting of the story, and what I wanted my cover to look like. To say I didn't know about any of that would be an understatement. I knew who the characters were, what they looked like, but I knew so little then about covers that it may as well have been nothing. When I finally got into rounds of revision with the cover artist I began to understand the difficulty of two people trying to share the same vision. I understood what my theatre friends told me about artistic collaboration, and why it was it important, and how it could be so difficult. And that was way, way before anyone broke down for me why some covers sell, why some don't, and what a reader is actually shopping for when they're scrolling through images that represent books they might buy and read.

Today, after days of scouring portfolios and reading reviews and re-reading the book and thinking about telling images, I reached out to an artist in hopes that we might have some productive dialog. Very little about the cover, but more about style. What I was trying to achieve and how I wanted to go about revealing that to potential readers. Before even getting into what a cover needs to include to convey an idea, I realized that even if I only wanted my cover to be an image of an apple, there would be a million ways different ways of even thinking about presenting the fruit. Background, no background, color, ripeness, wetness, lighting. Is it a photograph, is it water color, is it digital. Light tone, dark tone. Is it on its side, decaying on a rotten park bench under failing street light, or is it standing proud in the sun on a carefully placed picnic plate? How do I want the viewer to feel about the apple?

And that's kind of emblematic, I guess, of where I am now and where I was. I'm thankful for the growth, and for an opportunity to more precisely display it. The revisions have been sweeping and pervasive. There are some things that I wish I could change that I can't, because they have become intrinsic to every other part of every other story in the setting, but there are things I am very gratified to be able to improve on. Something I didn't realize I'd learned until I noticed I don't do it anymore is a phenomenon where how I feel about an idea or topic bleeds through into the rhetoric, despite whether that storytelling is valuable to the story. I think I maybe finally understand why one should not publish their juvenalia. When learning something like how one writes, one is also very likely working out the kinks of their world view, also. How they feel about hot button issues, and what they believe to be right. Those can be motivating and focusing, but a writer needs to be able to do whatever the story needs to be better, including getting out of its way. Many, many times, I find that once the story gets full enough, one of the first things that needs to go is the author themselves. And there were times during this process that I could see myself in the scene. It was nice to fix those moments.

So, yeah. Plans. I think all of this has been a continual learning process, but here lately it feels like I've come to realize so much that my progress before was almost the same as standing still. But I guess that's the difference between looking at a photo taken last year and a photo taken a decade previous. I look at how much smaller I used to be. And I smile.