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Monica Wesolowska Guest Blogs for 1st Books: Reading & Writing with Friends

14 Mar 2013|

Creation is mysterious. For years, I worked hard at my craft. I learned about scene and tension and climax. But rarely did a story come to me easily or satisfactorily. I revised my work into ruins. The tiniest fraction of my efforts got published. But still I wrote. Even after Silvan had died, and I’d grieved heavily and gone on to have two more children, when I went back to fiction, I still struggled to write anything that mattered.

And then one day, I was ready. It was time for Silvan’s story. By the end of the first day, I had 60 pages. By the end of three months, I had a first draft. Three more months to revise. Two weeks to get an agent. Six months to sell it. 18 months to hold my book in my hands.

10 years from Silvan’s brief life, 40 years from my first attempts as a writer, I have a first book. Though I may have worked hard at it, the truth is that Holding Silvan didn’t feel hard to write. I wrote it for Silvan, and I wrote it for myself, and somewhere between the two must lie the secret of writing for others.—Monica Wesolowska

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