Help! I've Forgotten How to Write a Book!

Buoyed by my recent success (after a stretch of discouragement) in writing my most recent book, The Last Apple Tree, and selling it to my favorite publisher, I thought, hey, this was fun! I think I'll write another book!  

So I gathered up my trusty clipboard, pad of paper, and Pilot P-500 pen, and prepared to start thinking about what my next book should be.

There was only one problem.

I had forgotten how to write a book. 

Now, given that The Last Apple Tree will be my 63rd book, in a career spanning 40 years, plus my good-sized stack of unpublished and unpublishable books, you might think this is the kind of thing one would remember. Alas, you would be wrong. I believe it was Eudora Welty who said, "Each book teaches me how to write IT." But not how to write the next one.

Still, in case it might jog my memory, I dragged out the notes I had made when I was groping toward The Last Apple Tree.

They are, to put it mildly, a mess. I started out jotting down something I had heard on NPR about the origin of song some 270 million years ago. Ooh! And then I wrote random things like, "firsts and lasts" and "noise and silence" and "noise pollution" and "FINDING YOUR OWN MUSIC." Plus unhelpful questions like: "How can this be made kidlike?" and "What can children do?" 

Page 2 of the notes was not much better:

By this point, I recalled that my plan HAD been to write something about heirloom apple trees. So I wrote lines like "orchards involve planning for the future" and "man plants a tree that will outlive him." This was barely a start, so I wrote, "but who are my characters? what is their story?" Yes, these would indeed be useful things for an author to know! More random notes: "2 dif. families" - "quiet book - but: something big? some big loss?" 

On page 3, I start listing possible candidates for the "big sad thing": death, Alzheimer's, family shame, poverty, prison, bad thing in family history . . . 

The pages of notes continued to accumulate, with more questions I struggled to answer: "HOW WOULD THIS TIE IN TO APPLES?" "What ELSE is going to happen?" "What do each of them WANT?" and some encouraging comments to myself such as "I am starting to love this book!" By page 11 of the notes, I was urging myself to start actually writing the thing: "JUST START WRITING - PLEASE DO THIS!" followed by the crucial question: "but: where does the book BEGIN?" 

I did start writing, and I see on p. 14 of the notes that the writing is going badly. "MY WRITING TASK FOR TODAY  - figure out why I have so little interest in this book and how to fix it!!!" with a list of  "THINGS I STILL (think) I LIKE" and another list of "PROBLEMS WITH THE STORY - MANY!! Then, later on the same page in huge capitals: "HELP!!!" Then many pages headed "SALVAGING THIS BOOK" and" SALVAGING THIS BOOK, CONT'D" with the agonized question "SHOULD I THROW OUT EVERYTHING SO FAR?" And many sad-face emojis. 

I went on to produce a total of 51 pages in the same tiny, scribbly writing, over a period of months, as I continued going back and forth between actual writing and reflecting on what I had written and what I might write next. And then: I had a full draft! And my writing group, the Writing Roosters, read it and gave me heaps and heaps of comments, and I made heaps and heaps of changes! And then my agent loved it, and my editor offered a contract on it, and I've now done three more rounds of revision/edits for her.

So did re-reading these old notes help me remember how to write a book? Sort of. The main thing they helped me remember was that WRITING IS HARD! WRITING TAKES TIME! EXPECT FALSE STARTS! EXPECT A ROLLERCOASTER OF SELF-PRAISE AND SELF-DOUBT WITH OCCASIONAL DARK NIGHTS OF THE AUTHOR'S SOUL! 

That was helpful, after all. 

I might as well jump on that rollercoaster today.

Spring Comes at Last to Rainbow's End

Today is the first day of May! Hooray! So as I (almost) always do on the first day of a month, today I start a new life.

It's also a new season, as spring has finally come to Valley Lane in Six-Mile Canyon where I live with my True Love in a funky treehouse-sort-of-house called Rainbow's End. 

It was only this past weekend that the weather was so lovely that David and I could sit on the deck for much of the day. 

The hummingbirds have returned from their winter migration, so I filled the feeders we bought last year with nectar of four parts water to one part sugar, and we hung the new feeder for the pygmy nuthatches and Stellar's jays that we bought from a local bird store with the assistance of a pleasant and knowledgeable young man whose advice proved entirely correct on every point. What joy it is now to see the birds flocking to our bird buffet, as we sit with mimosas and David's fresh-baked sourdough bread spread with delectable fromage d'affinois. Yesterday two deer lingered on the hillside, nibbling the coarse wild grass that is now making the rocky cliff emerald green. Forgotten is the toil of shoveling those 66 steps from the January snows that refused to melt, or trying to drive up the steep, icy hill at Coffin Corner, and talking more and more often about "when we move back to town." We love it here, we love it here, we love it here! We want to live here forever!

So at the heart of May's new life: savor spring in David's arms.

But addicted as I am to productivity, I have two writing goals as well. First: produce a good draft of a book chapter I'm writing on "the library as a liminal space in children's literature" for a scholar friend's edited collection. I've already hauled home dozens of books from the public library, read them all, and taken 43 handwritten pages of notes about them. But now I need to make notes on the notes! And think of something I actually want to SAY! 

Second: start brainstorming ideas for a next children's book of my own. Some of my writer friends have dozens of ideas buzzing about in their feverish brains. I don't. I have little teensy scraps of things that might become ideas someday, but actual ideas come to me ONLY when I sit down with clipboard, pad of paper, and pen, and write at the top of the pages: IDEAS. Then, and only then, do a few pitiful ones start creeping out from their hiding places. I plan to spend all of May just gathering enough pitiful ideas that a few might grow into something that could become a real, live book.

Progress on both goals starting today!

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