Sparking a Book Idea: Part IV

CONTINUATION OF THE PREVIOUS THREE POSTS IN WHICH I GROPE TOWARD AN IDEA FOR MY LATEST BOOK

I had my idea fairly well worked out on many pages of handwritten notes. (By the time I was done with the entire draft, I had accumulated 28 closely written pages of dialogue with myself.) I had decided on the form for the book before I even began thinking of an idea. It was to be a verse novel, my second attempt at this enormously pleasing literary challenge. For those of you unfamiliar with the verse novel: it's a novel with all the usual requirements of plot, character, setting, theme, etc., told entirely in free verse. Most of the poems in mine aren't longer than a single page; some are just a line of two - a fragment of thought, a single image, a moment captured.

Now I had to write the book.

I write for only one hour a day, timed with my cherished cherry-wood hourglass.

Because I adore writing verse novels so much, when I am writing one I call this my "hour of bliss." On my to-do list for the day, it appears simply as "bliss." My typical daily harvest of words produced for this latest verse novel (written by hand) was three or four poems - some longer, some shorter. Some days, I produced just one poem; other days, perhaps five or six. Then (and this did take an additional untimed half hour or so), I typed them up (doing quite a bit of editing as I typed) and printed them out.

The next day my hour would begin with reading over yesterday's poems and making more edits and corrections. Then I'd write the new poems. With this system, I never lose momentum on a book and also never suffer burnout from overly intense productivity. Slowly, steadily, the pages pile up. 

On some days, I realized that I needed to think more before I could proceed. I NEVER think thoughts about my writing in my head. NEVER! I think them ONLY on paper, with pen in hand. Sometimes it seems to me that I have no inner life at all because I do all my thinking about my life - wrestling with various life challenges - on the page as well. 

I started this new book (working title, The Silent Stars) with notes made on August 14. I see in my calendar records that I spent five more hours on the gathering and groping process before writing the first page of the actual text for the book on Friday, August 28. I wrote the final page of the full first draft on Monday, November 9. There were numerous days I didn't work on it because other projects demanded my attention, such as revisions for my editor on the previous verse novel (working title, The Lost Language). But I logged my hours of bliss with considerable regularity. Toward the very end, I have to confess there were a couple of days when the story was so gripping to me, its author, that I allowed myself TWO hours of writing bliss. But I'm reluctant to tamper with a system that has worked so well for me for decades: an hour a day day, no more, no less, pretty much every day. This first draft ended up at 227 pages and 27, 210 words (a novel not in verse would have more than double that word count for the same number of pages - one reason that verse novels are popular with reluctant readers, as well as with readers who value their more literary style).

Reading it through when the full draft was done, I made only a few changes at this stage, because I rely so heavily on feedback from my writing group. Mainly I pruned early mentions of story elements that ended up not not materializing as significant later on. For example, Clover can't have a dog of her own because of her father's allergies; this is why her relationship with the dog who has a tragic accident in the story is so important to her. In one poem Clover started to have some resentment toward her father for this reason, but this just didn't fit the way their relationship unfolded, so I dropped that poem. Clover's language arts teacher begins every class with a poem, which always resonates uncannily with what is going on in Clover's heart at the time. But I decided to limit myself to mentioning in detail only one of these poems, because it's too expensive and cumbersome to get permission to publish quotations from poems that aren't in the published domain, and I didn't want this teacher to share only familiar chestnuts from the past, so a couple more poems got the axe. Clover and her father are stargazers; now was the time for me to research which constellations would be viewable in the early evening in October and November. 

My writing group will read this tweaked draft at their December meeting. Then I'll make changes accordingly, perhaps a lot of changes (my writing group is loving but TOUGH!!!) before sending the book to my agent to see what he thinks.

It's been a week now since I finished the full draft, and I have considerable post-partum depression. My days feel so empty without my hour of bliss. I have plenty of other work tasks to do, including an overdue academic project; these provide their own satisfaction once completed, but they aren't blissful, and it's bliss I crave. 

So I need to start groping toward my next book. I feel daunted by the task, but I will re-read these four blog posts to remind myself exactly how I did this before and encourage myself to believe I can do this again. 

       

Off to start a new round of musings now....