Growing Up is Hard to Do
I started writing An Uncivilized Yankee way back in junior high. I was all of 13 or 14, so to me a 16 year-old heroine and a 20 year-old hero were oh-so-mature. But over the 15 years it took to finish the blasted book, I grew up. Got married. Had a kid. A totally different life and way of thinking.
So I made Star and Travis a few years older, as befitted my more mature thoughts and ideas. But while they aged chronologically, their actions and thoughts remained young–they were still a couple of teens. I had had them characterized that way for so long that it never occured to me that their age and actions didn’t really add up now.
Now I’m going back through the whole shebang, looking specifically for this “immaturity,” and finding it far more than I originally thought. Not so much in Star, as she is still a teen, albeit an older teen. But Travis? Sigh. An unexpected result of taking too long to finish things, I guess.
Has anyone else experienced this? How did you handle it? Or did all of you finish your novels in a reasonable length of time 
?
August 6th, 2006 at 2:54 pm
Never worked on a novel that long.
Tend to work in swell foops.