Transformation takes longer than you think it will,
but not as long as you’re afraid it will.
I can’t tell you how much that frustrates me.
A friend once said to me, “I bet you crunch your lollipops.” Heck yes I do! I can admit it: I’m impatient. Sometimes, when I really want something, it’s accompanied by a loud rendition of “I want it now!” as sung by Veruca Salt (from the old Willy Wonka movie).
Well, not always.
But I don’t like to wait. If I’ve seen the outcome I want, I don’t want to have to wait what feels like forever for it.
This applies doubly to a transformation.
I know I’m not alone in this. If I was, the shelves wouldn’t be full of diet pills and books promising enormous weight loss in just days. Magazines wouldn’t crank out articles about getting organized in a weekend. No one would fall for get rich quick schemes.
Things are supposed to happen fast, right? Kel and I were just talking about that this week. Who is sick for weeks on end anymore? Isn’t that what used to happen in novels? Aren’t you supposed to go to the doctor, and get some pills that fix you right up in a couple of days?
There’s an outcome we want, and if it doesn’t happen RIGHT NOW we’re afraid it never will.
I think the only thing that’s somewhat exempt from this requirement of speed is pregnancy. We know it takes 9 months and so we accept it. It’s not like anyone sits there looking at a woman whose baby was born early and think, well she made a baby in just 7 or 8 months, so why did it take me 9? We worry if a baby is born earlier. We know that means something that needed to happen didn’t get a chance to occur.
Children are another case we allow for growth to take time. No one pushes their two year old to drive and date, right? (YIKES!) You might have heard the saying: the days are long but the years are short. I just had this reminder on Tuesday. My son gets weighed and measured each time he gets his allergy shots. Three weeks ago he was 58 inches tall. He’s now 59 inches tall. I hadn’t been able to tell the difference. No suddenly too short pants, no sudden burst of crazy eating. Just one inch taller.
And that’s how transformation is. We don’t see the little signs each day, until something happens that makes us stop and take notice.
The signs of change are small. That doesn’t make them unimportant.
Recently I was having a drink with a friend and she asked me how my book was going. I told her I was starting all over again. She gave me that semi-frustrated look a good friend gives you when they think you’re doing something silly that they know you don’t have to do. The thing is, I was able to look at my draft, and know it was a draft. I knew that I had clarified the plot, but that wasn’t all I needed to do. When I sent my first draft to a few people to look over (and oh, how anxious that made me!), many of the comments were about wanting more–more emotion, more of the character’s motivation. This time, I didn’t need anyone to look at it and tell me that I hadn’t gotten there yet.
The real kicker is that a little more than a year ago, it felt like I had somehow failed by not getting down to that level in my story the first time. Now…I just thought: well, I’m ready to go another layer deeper.
I won’t lie–I really hope it doesn’t take too long before I think it’s ready to launch into the world. But I can see now that I had to do a lot of work on myself before I could be emotionally ready to go dig deep into the emotions of my characters. Maybe other writers don’t have to do that…or maybe they do, and I just have no way of seeing the inner and outer work they needed to do to write their books.
It doesn’t really matter. This is my path, and my book, and this transformation from Tracy into Tracy the Writer is taking longer than I thought it would, but not as long as I’ve been afraid it will.
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Tracy
PS: Did you notice the little change in our posts this week? We’re freeing up a little time so we can have more time to work on the things we love. Look for our alternating Tracy is Playing with Beauty and Kel’s Adventures in Art posts on Fridays from now on.
















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