Whiteboard | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: Whiteboard | Previous Challenge Entry
By Hannah Gaudette
08/10/17
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Whiteboard

I was a water balloon ready to explode and douse my entire family. Complaints about this, whining about that. Pizza's too hot - Give it a minute, Josh! - or the vacuum is too noisy - Then turn the music up, Abby. Jam on the floor, cereal on the cat, the aroma of burning toast and more complaints.

I was becoming a dragon. Josh commented on the smoke coming out my ears. Teenagers.

Please, don't think I'm cruel for getting snappish. I'm a writer. And during that particular autumn, I admit it – I was stressed. A single mom trying to support three kids on her writing and house cleaning. The kids didn't show any support. All Abby could talk about was where her college fund was coming from if I couldn't afford her hair stylist. I was swamped. Drowning.

And then there was the deadline.

“Maddie, I told you – no later than the first. If you want any chance at that book contract-”

“Cale, I can't have the first draft done that soon. I'm busy.”

“Set your priorities. Your book, your entire career, or a new housecleaning client. C'mon, girl.”

You didn't lose your husband. I wanted to yell. To scream. To throw the whole blank-it-y-blank manuscript out the window. I had writer's block. Chronic. No known cure.

The murder, the evidence, the other evidence, the second murder, the chase . . . My eyes were weak and sore. The computer screen glared at me when I couldn't glare back. December first. That was the deadline, and I would never make it. The first book had been such a hit with our mystery peeps and YA pals, the market demanded more. My agent demanded more. My readers, my publishers, my kids.

My kids. I'd been neglecting them in the hopes of getting this stupid book finished, but I knew well the danger of getting to the place where you hate your work.

I swivled my computer chair and crossed the room to the opposite wall. My whiteboard was drowning too, drowning in scribbles and X's and circles and phrases. Keywords, character arcs, chapter notes. According to these scribblings, I should be at step five of the progression of this manuscript any day now.

So why did it feel like step one?

Maybe that was where I belonged. Back at the beginning. Re-outline. Add and subtact. Move the second murder up on the timeline to keep up suspence, give Vince a love interest?

My eraser flew, but so did my pen. I emptied the whiteboard and filled it up again. When the stark white was contrasted with the living color of bold new ideas, I stepped back, refreshed. The aimless scrawls on the board had come alive, full of purpose, as the whiteboard of this broken soul. I began my playlist, sipped some cocoa, and let my renewed imagination guide me. I had entered the zone, and with a profound sense of peace, I wrote on.

I was not so tense after that with the kids, or with the jam on the floor or the cereal on the cat. We went back to doing things the old way, the way we did when Zach was alive. The kids helped out, as I sternly decreeded, with laundry, with cooking, with cleaning. Not with big gleeful smiles, of course, but they got it. And as my whiteboard, I was renewed.

I haven't had to go back to the whiteboard with an eraser since, leastwise not with that book, the book I now place into the hands of the publishers while I look onward towards springtime. New life breaks forth all around us, and inside me, too. I am at peace with the stress and the kids, with my writing – and with Zach.

I sit with a notebook by the pond, sipping cocoa, listening to the symphony of birds, and discreetly jotting ideas. You see, I have this new idea for a book that I just have to write down . . .

Fiction

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