Kind of a Big Day

I started my Friday tucked in the corner of my French café with J.K. Rowling, listening and laughing as her interview from last week played on my laptop.  She told a story in passing about the first book she’d ever made, when she was six, about a rabbit.  But before the conversation moved on, she said in retrospect what was important about that book was that she’d finished it.  That finishing a story was the mark of someone who truly wanted to write.  A renewed commitment to Dark Room flooded me.  It was close, but it wasn’t finished.  Not yet.  Not really.

Later in the day, after teaching, I sat again with my laptop this time watching my daughter in gymnastics class.  Next weekend, I am taking a class taught by Laurie Halse Anderson.  Each of the twelve students is assigned to a critique group of four led by an assistant teacher.  I’d received my critique letters from the rest of my group.  The critique letter from the assistant teacher arrived during gymnastics class.

What is beautiful about this letter is that it started to make sense of these other scraps of feedback I’d gotten along the way, feedback that had nagged at me because I’d had the same worries myself, really.  You know the worries I mean.  You know something is bothering you, you hope you’ve addressed it, but you’re not sure.  Then you get feedback and, even if it doesn’t offer suggestions you feel would help, it points directly at your nagging concerns.  So I’d come to the point where I knew certain things had to be addressed.  What set this letter apart was that it offered alternative approaches to the issues in my story.  It didn’t just say, “This isn’t working here,” but went beyond to say, “Try this, this, and this.”  Suddenly scraps of feedback I’d pushed to the back of my mind shifted and began to fit together like a puzzle; scenes of my story began to shift opening doors in places I didn’t know existed.  I only have to open them.  This is exactly why Jacqueline Woodson said, “Take classes in which the teachers and students are authors you admire.”  Just like when I went to the Highlights Founder’s workshop, Starting Your Novel, with Patti Lee Gauch and began to learn the mechanics of story building, I have a feeling I am going to learn exactly what I have been trying to figure out about pacing and threads.

There are voices though.  Voices that have said out loud through my own lips, “This novel is ready to go out.  I’ll work on it mid-October through December 31^st, and then the agent queries are going out.  It’s time.”  These are the voices who know the need for recognition, the need for others to affirm what you’ve been doing is valuable, the need to see something on the shelf, a reward for these ten years of work that are supposed to lead to expertise, the need to start on the next story idea.  But these are dangerous voices and artificial deadlines that have nothing to do with art.  “How do you ever know if you’re done?” my husband asks.  I think is has less to do with the product than with your growth as an artist.  If a piece is teaching you ways to grow as an artist, presenting doors to you, you have to go through them.  I have to go through them.  Do I wish I could predict a query mailing January 1^st?  You bet I do.  Do I wish Laurie Halse Anderson would say, “Why are you even here?  Let me call my agent.”  Of course.  But the fact of the matter is I’m landing exactly where I need to next weekend in Vermont.  In the hands of those I most admire, in the hands of teachers who will propel me onward.

I wish when I got back I had eight-hour days to gallop through the next phase of revision.  But I don’t.  I have two hours every morning, and then I have to go to teach.  Teaching has stopped me from writing before, but I can’t let that happen now, not this close, not with J.K. Rowling’s voice in my head saying, “What’s important is that I finished.  You see, I think that is the mark of someone who truly wants to write.”  I have to worry about art now.  I have to grow, even if more slowly than I want.  I have to finish.

Draft One to Draft Two

            This week was a writing friend of mine, who is reading my second draft, e-mailed and asked me this question: Now I'm curious….  This is a second draft, right? How much did you revise it from the first to second drafts?  Now, I spent two months of intense revision going from draft one to draft two, but for the life of me I could not remember what I did!  I’m not kidding.  Considering I’m about to launch into Draft Three, I thought I’d better get a little perspective on where I’d been.  I actually ran upstairs to grab my first draft.  It is printed out and kept in a three-ring binder with the following quotations written big in black Sharpie on the cover:

To my great relief, the first draft is fundamentally different than the second!  On the suggestion of another writing friend, I had also kept a process journal during my revisions where I wrote about my goals and questions for the story.  I found the following:

1) Huge attention to structure.  I moved from this map, which I did before writing my first draft:

to this:

This is when I’d written all the major events on index cards and rearranged them on my dining room table trying to cultivate some sort of wholeness and some sense of chapter.  Things got tighter, and I though I had the skeleton or bones of the story.  

2) A lot of questions about character.  Figuring out the heart of my two main characters was my doorway into grappling with whatever the white hot center of my story was.

3) I started many days free-writing to a prompt as a way to explore the characters.

4) The majority of my day was spent rewriting from beginning to end, and when I got stuck I often realized the solution to my problem had appeared in my prompt/free-writing that morning.  So I invented a lot more of the story, like putting meat on those bones.

            So Draft One was about creation –making something that wasn’t there before, risk taking, and following intuition.  Draft Two turned out to be about structure and what the characters had to teach me about the white hot center of the story.  In Draft Three I want to tighten things structurally so that everything points at the white hot center (which I now understand better…thank you draft two).  I imagine this is how sculpting feels –uncovering the story gradually, first in broad swaths and then in finer detail with each pass.

            Have you had any revision revelations?  Love to hear them!  Talking shop always teaches me something.

Threads

Sometimes the idea of holding an entire novel in my head seems overwhelming.  If my draft-three novel were a tapestry, I just know there would be a lot of dropped threads and holes!  So when I’m reading some of my favorite YA authors, I marvel at how intricately each story thread is woven through.  They know just when to go back and let us know how the relationship with that supporting character is going.  They know just where to pull an old thread into the scene I’m reading.  They leave me breathless… beautiful how they tied that in right there!  And, sometimes, they leave me doubtful that in my own story I could ever possibly remember to pull the subtler threads through and tie them in at just the right spots.  So, I did what I usually do in these cases.  I took my latest favorite –Sara Zarr’s How to Save a Life, and I studied it, closely!

            First I took two days to reread the novel.  As I read I took notes.  For each chapter I jotted down in order the major events.  Admittedly, this was a little tedious.  I would never want to do this on a first read.  But it gave me so much good data to work with, and it made it very easy to flip back through the story and study it.  Warning: spoilers ahead!

            Second, I reviewed my notes and jotted down what I saw as the major threads.  Here’s what I came up with:

            Jill                               Jill & Mandy                                                  Mandy           

                                                adoption

loss of dad                                                                        baby’s father?/pain from abuse

                                    relationship with mother

                                    (trust/home/family)

Dylan & Ravi                                                                                       Christopher & Kent

                                    who she will be

                                    (relationship with each other)

Then, I literally went back through my notes shading them with colored pencils to color code these threads.  Here’s an example of what my notes look like for one of Mandy’s chapters:

Mandy:           While buttering toast, Mandy recalls mother’s incessant talking,

her need to breathe, and Robin’s e-mail

                        She thinks, Maybe I could be a mother.

                        She tells Dylan about her missing father & her mother

                        Dylan tells her, Your mom got a lot too = me, Mandy!

            Here’s what I learned.

            In interviews of some of my favorite authors, they refer to the 13^th draft, the 20^th, and I’ve thought, What on earth are they going over so many times?  After this exercise, I could totally see how it would be VERY useful to take an entire pass over the novel for each thread or character.  It really is too much to hold in my head otherwise!  What I think I will do is chart the threads in my own manuscript as I did with Sara Zarr’s novel.  Then, I will take a day to read through it pretty fast looking at just one of my threads.  I will be asking myself questions like:

1) Where do I see opportunities to weave that thread back in,

     in order to deepen the story’s meaning?

2) Where do I need to slow down and explore this thread more?

3) Is the development of this thread moving along fast enough?

Then I’m going to go back to he beginning and do it all over again for the next thread, and so on.

Something else I noticed about threads: when I was color coding, there were some events in the story that just couldn’t be considered one thread, no matter how I looked at it.  For example, at one point Ravi gets Jill to open up about how she’s doing with the death of her dad and Jill ends up totally insulting him.  On the surface, this could look like a Ravi thread.  A closer look tells me this is more to do with Jill’s loss of her dad, but it also has a lot to do with the kind of person she wants to be.  Those three threads just can’t be separated here.  What this taught me: the threads affect each other.  If the story is working, at some points the threads become so intertwined that they cannot be extricated from each other.  It reminded me that, when I do these passes over my manuscript, I can be looking for opportunities where one thread has an impact on the others.  It’s something I knew, but when I tear things apart to see how they work, it’s nice to see the bits naturally returning to the organic whole.  It’s nice to know that intertwining threads may be a sign my story is deepening.  It’s also a good reminder that sub-plots which don’t affect the central conflict need to go.

I kind of hate the idea of picking apart some of my favorite novels like this, but at the same time it’s like opening up a watch and discovering how the clockworks function inside.  The clockworks are their own kind of artistry.  In a way, understanding them makes these stories even more beautiful.  And the big bonus –it’s helping me fine tune the machinery of my own story!