by Lindsey Brackett @LindsBrac

The day after Thanksgiving, we chopped down a massive Christmas tree. I’m not kidding—it takes up half our living room.

It’s exactly what we needed right now. Pure, unadulterated joy.

Even if it did cause a bit of a family standoff when I told my husband and daughter I needed them to light this tree better than they did last year’s. After all, the bigger the tree, the better the lights, right? He looked at me and said if I thought I could do a better job, have at it.

Not an unfair reply, and one I didn’t take to heart since we’ve deep-dived on and off with the Enneagram the last few years as a way to better understand one another. He identifies as a Five and prefers not to waste energy arguing over the tree lights. Our daughter has typed herself as a One, the Perfectionist. So when I climbed up the ladder with my strands of lights, she raised her brows and asked if I was sure I knew what I was doing.

Before, I might have caved to their skepticism that I knew how to do this. After all, I’ve never strung lights on the tree, but I did conduct a YouTube search. Thanks to Very Merry Kim, I learned a few tricks about tree lighting that seemed pertinent when one is stringing twinkle lights around a 10.5″x8.5″ Frasier fir. I plugged in the lights and I strung them lit so I could see what I was doing. I went up and formed a triangle on one-third, and then I filled in the branches zig-zag style. Don’t worry, I assured my daughter who could barely contain the need to point out flaws, after all the lights are on it, we can go back.

Light Bulb Moment.

This is how I process life. I’m all-in for the big picture. I need to see everything before I can fill in details. This is why I love a good dump and stir recipe, a blank calendar that spans the whole year, and why it made total sense to me to string together nine light strands and then tuck in the cords.

This is why I write really terrible first drafts of novels.

See, I’m headed into revisions on a manuscript that feels like it’s taken forever to write. After almost a year of noodling around this idea, surely the 105K words I have should be good enough. But they’re not. They may exist, and I can see the big picture, but these words now need to be tucked into their best place. The spot where they can shine the brightest.

And I’d be lost if, at this stage, I didn’t have a framework to fall back on and lay alongside my work. When I lit my Christmas tree, I knew how I wanted it to look. So once the work was done, we took the time to tuck in loose cords, hide the plugs, and turn the bulbs so they glittered more brightly.

As writers, we have to be willing to do the same with our work. We have to take the words on the page and twist and tuck and coax so that the true story shines through. Which means, sometimes we might blow a fuse.

Turns out stringing nine strands of 150 lights together was not recommended by the directions. If I’d paused to glance through them first, I might have rethought my approach. Such is the same for my novel writing. I’m daunted by the task of editing because I didn’t take the time to consider certain directions while I was working. I didn’t review the story framework before I strung everything together and hoped for the best.

Lesson learned. The big picture is all well and good, but it’s also great to at least skim the directions on the twinkle light box—and your favorite craft book—first.

Recommended books for understanding novel structure:

Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody

The Story Genius by Lisa Cron

Story Trumps Structure by Steven James

Write Your Novel from the Middle by James Scott Bell

Lindsey P. Brackett has taught middle school, read radio obits, and directed musicals but her favorite job is writing women’s fiction inspired by her rural Georgia life and Lowcountry roots. Find her podcasting at A Rough Draft Life, stress baking on Instagram, and writing at lindseypbrackett.com.