The Story of a Story: Writing A Book Like Planning A Trip

Can I let you in on something?

I want to write a book and share my world with you.

My nature is to hold the cards close until I have the full hand ready to play. I’d rather shoot the moon with a hidden smile or rummy with a straight face. I’d love to post this and say, “I have an agent!” or “I have a book deal!” or “I have a release date!” But today, in absence of anything at all definitive, I thought I’d show you my mismatched suits and wagers. A real life look before another shuffle and deal.

Remember ages ago, when I was dreaming of a plan? A trip around the world, an adventure of a lifetime. I whispered to a friend in a coffee shop that I wanted to drop everything and go. It sounded wild, a little reckless, and quite literally incredible.

See: How We Got Here (And How We’ll Get There)

I started my little blog and named it “twoOregonians” because even though I’d bought the domain name “tedandbethany.com” I didn’t quite want to attach our identities to the idea. Why tell coworkers and outer circle friends when so much remained up in the air? We had years to go before crossing the plane door threshold. 

I’m glad for that hesitancy, because somewhere along the way, I fell in love with the moniker twoOregonians and decided to leave it be. In our anonymity and in our identity as people from a particular place, we carried bigger themes in our packs, more than just the names on our passports: kids of long ago immigrants and indigenous people. Our own DNA carried the melting pot markers of ancient tribal ancestry extending back to time immemorial in the Pacific Northwest, and 19th century explorers crossing continents on foot and canoe and horseback to reach Oregon, and sturdy midwestern rootstock coming to call the Willamette Valley home in the middle of last century. We embodied much: a farm girl and a fireman’s son, taught to love the people and care for land, taught to appreciate our tight knit communities and grow into a life of learning.

I prepped for that 50,000 mile trip in big and small ways for years and years…and years.

I’ve been saying incredible things out loud to my people again: I want to write a book.

I’ve been writing a book.

I’ve been writing and drafting and crumpling up [digital] paper to toss in the trash.

I’ve written a proposal and sample chapters and query letters and chatted with agents and publishers.

I’ve re-written and re-shaped and returned once again to the mysterious blank page.

And I’m hovering now in the halfway: the space between dreaming a dream and reaching a goal.

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All this reminds me of the hidden hard work before our big trip.

See: My Library List of Travel Resources + Inspiration

I devoured books. I scoured the message boards and forums of the 2000’s era backpackers. I joined Twitter in 2008 and built friendships with curious people around the world. I plotted routes and researched average seasonal temperatures and exchange rates and common scams. I imagined myself in those far off scenes. I created my analog dream boards—three huge pieces of cardboard covered in white canvas, stuck with pins and tear-outs from travel magazines and brochures— in the days when Pinterest was just a wee babe of a thing. 

There were times in between the dreaming and the doing when it seemed we’d never make it off the ground.

There were times along the way where hoping and wishing begged for action.

The dollars didn’t save themselves. The inquiries about work exchanges didn’t write themselves. I paid for our leg from Rio to Barcelona 15 months before we stood in Brazil, because I knew the deal was too good to pass up, even if the path to reach the starting point was hidden in the underbrush.

My desire to go and see the world for myself—to connect invisible dots that might reveal a picture I couldn’t see from home—led me to slowly, carefully, painstakingly assemble and execute a plan to live a year of life from a thousand new perspectives.

Now I’m dreaming of another plan. I’m hoping to take my reader friends on a trip through 250+ pages, and I’ve again been deep in the throes of planning and research and sacrifice and hope, and also caught in the doldrums of wondering if I will ever make it off the ground.

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In learning to read, I learned to enter other worlds.

When I was tiny, my mom taught me to read, and she taught me to love reading. I remember the time she first explained that I already knew the sounds and just needed to learn the symbols. In that reassurance, my heart settled. She held up the flashcards, starting with the vowels: A-E-I-O-U (and sometimes Y). Shape by shape, she taught me to decipher what was right before my eyes, and to absorb new thoughts as words became alive, traveling from the page to my heart.

In learning to write, I learned to understand my own.

Later, mom handed me a pencil and taught me to love writing. I already knew the symbols, I just needed to to learn the flow of pulling the thoughts from my mind through my arms to my fingers as they pushed and pulled the yellow No. 2 Ticonderogas. My early black and white marbled notebooks filled with daily letters and weekly reports soon led to essays and stacks and stacks of journals, and eventually the clicking of a keyboard and the rush of heart through fingers to screen (instead of lead to paper) as I blogged my world of travel and food and life.

Now, I want to take you through a constellation of stories, to chart the world as it showed itself to me. I want to share a beautiful handbook to the waters I crossed and shores I slept on and meals that changed me from the inside out.

I feel wildly tender about being this transparent.

But if I’m going to share a book, I may as well share the process, right?

Truthfully, I’m only good at letting people in to a point. I write and share, then recoil and feel like living inside a cocoon. I’ve been withdrawn for a long while now, and the thought of emerging scares me. (Perhaps you’ll judge the little sleeping larva? Perhaps the dream won’t fly?) But perhaps if I tell you I’m hanging by this little thread on a quiet branch, diligently tackling the internal work and creative expression, then maybe you’ll be there to enjoy the art when I finally bring it to the world?

What’s the worst that can come of popping up again to say I’m working toward publishing a book?

After all, I peeked my head out back in 2010 to blog about a dream of a trip around the world, and then it happened. 

Maybe in a few years’ time I’ll be holding a copy in my hands, looking back at this post with the same wistfulness I feel reading the rest of these archives. Maybe selfishly this post is a mile marker for me.

In echo of my pre-trip lists of travel inspirations and resources, I want to share book writing preparations I’ve been making this past season: libraries and jam sessions and guidebooks and online friends and research and risks—and dreams of one day achieving the goal and having something meaningful to show for the adventure.

These are books I’ve read, challenges I’ve embraced, risks I’ve taken, and resources I’ve found to be helpful so far…

Reading Other Writers

• Gracias! A Latin American Journal
• All the Colors We Will See
• In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World
• The Worrier’s Guide to the End of the World
• The Yellow Envelope
• A Place to Land
• Paris Letters
• All Over the Place
• At Home in the World
• A Moveable Feast
• Raise Your Voice
• Learning to Speak God from Scratch
• Still Writing
• Reluctant Pilgrim

Reading Writing Books

• The Elements of Eloquence
• The War of Art
• Several Short Sentences About Writing
• The Memoir Project
• Writing Life Stories
• Bird by Bird
• Writing Down the Bones (I’ll tell you now, the 30th anniversary edition audio book is the way to go—Natalie reads, interjecting a lovely mix of new perspectives between her original passages.)
• How to Write a Book Proposal
• Your Life is A Book
• The Writer’s Portable Mentor
• Writing Creative Nonfiction
• Guide to Literary Agents 2018
• Going on Faith: Writing as a Spiritual Quest
• Draft No. 4
• The Elements of Story

Cataloging Old Writings

I’ve revisited my Daily Travel Journal and old posts and unpublished notebooks and the memories that have stewed and simmered for years. I’ve combed through and re-worked and outlined and scrambled and unscrambled and rescrambled—and thrown out the dozen to start fresh.

Getting in the Flow

A little less than a year ago, I decided to jam on 50,000 words in 10 weeks to rebuild a writing groove. (See super tool Pacemaker Planner.) I started waking early to write before my real days start, and I started taking seriously the time needed to produce something worthwhile. I also bought and fell in love with Scrivener, and I’m never looking back.

Mining Writing Resources

• Mike’s Engage! Storytelling Course (also: his late night emails of encouragement and brainstorming)
• Kim’s coaching (she’s starting another nonfiction proposal course in a few weeks – just after walking the Camino with her toddler)
  
•  Alan’s A Busy Bum’s Blueprint for Writing (short and sweet and to the point, and practical)
• [Honestly, so many others podcasts, blog posts, etc. I already need a follow up post.]

Traveling to Connect & Learn

• Europe (specifically, #threemomsgotoeurope): feeding wanderlust, listening, reflecting, and bringing global lessons home to my own neighborhood. (I’m leaving on a red eye Wednesday!!)
• Festival of Faith & Writing: My April trip to Grand Rapids, MI to learn from fellow writers and readers, to connect with agents and editors, and to build a stronger writing community.

View this post on Instagram

Can’t even say it all. (Like, literally, I have to turn my phone off because I think the plane is finally taking off.) I’ll have to compose my caption on the flight to Denver and update the post on my layover ;) #ffwgr2018 /// Edited to add: the caption composition was forsaken, and the buried words are seeds for later…

A post shared by bethany rydmark (@bethanyrydmark) on Apr 15, 2018 at 6:40am PDT

Joining Writing Groups

• Manuscript Writing Academy (and their invaluable Ten Minutes with an Expert)
• The Business of Being a Writer
• Hope*Writers (I listened to the podcast for ages before finally joining the group, and I’ve made terrific writing friends. They’re only open to new members from time to time, but you can take the writer stage quiz to get initial details.)
• Leading and participating in small group Finding an Agent and Improving Writing Craft Hope*Circles 
• Co-founding Grammatical Foibles: our super team of non-fiction writers working to hone our craft and pursue paths to publishing for the sake of bringing life-giving work into the world. 
• Attending our A&E&B in-person meet-ups in Portland; swapping passages to read and critique and book titles to keep us going.
  

Voxing with Writing Pals Who Get It

Revival of the homeschool Latin flashcards: VOX! Voice/Sound. The best app for people like me who can’t quite deal with phone calls (agent phone calls excluded) but say too much for texts: Voxer. The connections and possibilities remind me of charming Twitter circa 2010 and the way real-life friendships spring up from digital hellos.

Chatting with a Literary Agent

Okay, not chatting. Talking for an hour on the phone and getting my hopes high and exchanging emails and then waiting in limbo under the crushing weight of doubt…then updating my curated agent list in preparation for future queries and wondering when the magic lightning of the perfect pitch will strike.

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It feels too late to turn back.

The perfectionist in me wishes I had something concrete and amazing to tell you. But I don’t.

This is my whisper to you across an imaginary coffee cup while I give you a peek at my notebook scrawls. I’ve been charting this course for a while. I have no finish line to celebrate and no art to show just yet, but the one certainty is failure in giving up before the end.

This is me waving my hand and saying, “Nope, not stopping.”

This book is coming.

I can’t tell you exactly when or exactly how (ugh, if only I could say I was XX weeks pregnant with a book baby), but much like booking that transatlantic crossing and publicly saying so, I’m telling you now how much I’ve already invested and that my ultimate intention is to get a published copy intoyour hands. (If you want one?)

If you’d like to cheer me on, I have three things you can do:

1. Ask me about my progress in ten or twelve weeks.
2. Remind me that slow work is worthy work.
3. Let me send you behind the scenes notes from time to time.

And actually, there’s a fourth thing you can do. You can leave a comment below (or email me at hello@twoOregonians.com). I always feel silly for asking, but I truly love to hear from you. You are what makes this more than just a blathering journal entry, and I thrill to hear that my words changed the shape of something in your world.

Maybe like naming this little home “twoOregonians” before I had the guts to say “tedandbethany,” this naming of my book before truly naming my book will be another happy roundabout route on the journey?

In any case, however it goes, thank you for being here with me!

xx Bethany

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