On novel-writing and obedience.
Feb 20, 2025
Over the past month, I’ve worked on the line edits for my novel, The Bicycle Messenger, which releases in August. The book’s action spans more than seventy years, and parts of it were written in different seasons of my life, so I’m especially thankful that God in His infinite goodness created editors. For me, preparing this manuscript for publication has been a useful exercise in obedience.
Like most writers, I sometimes struggle to “kill my darlings.” We can get too attached to our work, cherishing and repeating certain sentences to ourselves until we can no longer recognize problems. (Hopefully, the short-form immediacy of Substack will help me out here.) To read one’s own manuscript and find such a cherished sentence pared back or even deleted can put us through the five stages of grief—even though we know in our heart of hearts that the editor is right. But that’s really just pride, and the cure is obedience. God does not give us the last word on our own work or even our lives. We need one another—we need Him to complete this work in us. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can bear fruit.
While some scenes had to be trimmed, others required cultivation. The novel opens in the 1970s, and to help ground the reader in the historical moment, I embarked on a joyful scavenger hunt through my own childhood. I watched clips of favorite TV shows like Mary Tyler Moore and Carol Burnett, ABC’s Afterschool Special and early episodes of Sesame Street. Kudos if you can remember an orange on Sesame Street singing an aria from Carmen! * By the way, did anyone else have that whiplash effect watching present-day Sesame Street with their own kids? The pacing has quadrupled at least!
Choosing children’s books to include was even more fun. My mother used to read us The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. Like Sesame Street, that picture of a little boy in a red snowsuit leaving blue footprints in the snow evoked urban wonders in my suburban Omaha childhood. Here in Wisconsin, we’ve had a dry winter, but last week, there were three snowstorms in as many days. As the first storm approached, I was reviewing a scene in which my characters step off a slow-moving bus late at night to walk home through the accumulating drifts, and by the time one of them sank into a hot bath, my wonder returned. For the first time since I can remember, I couldn’t wait for the snow.
There was nostalgia in this, of course. But rereading my own work with the editor’s subtle improvements produced an almost trancelike effect. The text was just different enough that it could surprise me again, and I found myself inhabiting the action and empathizing with the characters in new ways. The scenes I once tapped out at my dining room table have somehow taken on life and become a whole novel; little improvements in pacing have set off miraculous new effects, like snowflakes swirling down in the cone of light from a streetlamp. God is good. Obedience leads us to freedom.
*Good catch, Karen!
I thank my God every time I remember you … being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
Philippians 1:3, 6
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 