The Heart of a Character

When the idea for Selkie Song first came to me, more than two decades ago, I saw the myth of the selkie as a powerful metaphor for sexual and romantic abuse:  a man met this enchanted fairy creature, a seal in the sea and a woman on dry land, and stole her seal skin, her deep feminine self from her.

This novel has undergone so many deep changes.  Early on, the main character was neither Ben, the young man who discovers the selkie, or Eloyn, the selkie herself.  A third character took center stage, and the story of Ben and Eloyn filtered through the then protagonist's consciousness.  Thanks to Louise Hawes, I realized I was protecting myself from the full impact of Ben and Eloyn's story.  The whole novel shifted.

Now it is shifting again as I revise, though in a subtler way.  (The earlier change dropped the novel from 250 pages to 90; then it grew again in the new direction.)  Now I feel like Ben's heart and soul are fully revealing his true self to me as I revise; some events later in the novel that never felt like he had earned them now flow in a more unified way.

I am grateful for the process of revision, for my experiences as a writer, and for the way both Ben and his story are coming into deeper alignment.

Revision

I just read the review of a novel that took its author more than twenty years to create.  The book received a wow of a review, which made me feel better since I first had the idea for my novel Selkie Song more than fifteen years ago. 

Selkie has undergone dozens of revisions over the years, some of the deepest innitiated by writers' groups or workshops I've attended.  I am in the process now of editing the novel to send to an independent press.  Inspired by the feedback at the most recent meeting of my current writers' group, Scribbling Women, I am looking at every word, every sentence, every paragraph and chapter through fresh eyes.  

One of my sister writers asked me to contemplate how I would tell the story of sixteen-year-old Ben Corbin and Eloyn, the seal woman he discovers and saves, if I were writing it for the first time now.  Ben is so different already from the character as I originally imagined him, I resisted my group member's suggestion at first.  Now I feel Ben's story opening up in a new way, and I am endlessly grateful.  

Will keep you posted on the journey of Selkie Song as it unfolds.  Wishing all of you a very Happy New Year!

The Last Chapter

This morning I've indulged in silence.  Phone unplugged.  No music playing while I practice yoga.  Except for the occasional remark to Gizmo, my whippet, when he got a little feisty on our walk this morning, I haven't opened my mouth.  Only part of that is due to my healing throat.

Today I'll revise the last chapter of Judith.  Chapter 45.  This revision percolated down into the depths of me, the way water soaks into dry ground and then deeper, through the massive stones into the water table.

I have not finished the revision process I plan to sit down with the manuscript in a few days and read it straight through as if it belongs to another writer.  After that I will take the pages (no doubt covered with proofreader's marks!) and make the corrections, start the further deepening or reorganization of paragraphs, possibly scenes.

But I needed to mark this stage in the process with a little quiet.  A quiet celebration. 

The Upward vs. The Downward Model of Reality

Yesterday afternoon, during a small, relatively burst of energy in the midst of Cold and Cough Mode, I sat down with the most recent four or five chapters I've revised of Judith.  Since I'd worked on several of those pages when I was coming down with the snurle, I wanted to double check for typos, word choice and more.  In other words, I was in a downward, fine tuning focus.

Big surprise.  Instead, I found myself reading those chapters as a whole.  They form part of the novel's final arc as events build to the crisis, Judith's confrontation with the general Holofernes.  At this later part of the novel, the chapters have grown shorter in reflection of the brisker, rising action.  I have worked on them chapter by chapter and scene by scene.  I did take notice of elements in need of finer tuning.

But I also had the opportunity, perhaps because fever had cooked and cleared out my brain, of recognizing how those chapters lead into each other.  Today I will take all my feverishly scribbled notes and start making sure the chapters form a sturdy unit.  I'm pretty excited and revived.

Slowing down (at least for the day)

At the most recent meeting of my writers group, I shared one of the first chapters that is not in the heroine's point of view.  Instead, the reader spends some time viewing the world from the perspective of Holofernes, the Assyrian general and Judith's antagonist.

The group made some strong suggestions to amp up the sense of what I'll call the general's "evil quotient."  While that does not materially change the manuscript, I need to spend some time today in his head and heart.  Afterward, I always feel like I need to take a shower. 

It also requires that I slow down, sit quietly with paper and pen to hand, and jot down what Holofernes sees, believes, thinks and (ick) feels.  I've actually done something I don't usually do today:  put off my writing time by writing emails, washing dishes, etc.  But the novel will be all the better for the progression of my sister writers' feedback, the consult with my character (little though I like him) and the eventual revision. 

Feeling the World Come Alive

I've finished the post-research revision on Judith. Though I took the manuscript with me on vacation, I truly took a vacation for the first time in years and did not touch the story (or give it any conscious thought) until the last day, when we had stopped to visit my writing partner in Virginia on the way back to Kentucky. For the first time in several years, Rita and I could savor our mutual feedback face to face instead of over the phone.

Back home in Louisville, I checked in with my characters, especially Judith herself, to feel what she (and her world) need to come fully alive. Over the last ten days I've been revising . . . the first chapter of the novel. One slow pass, page by page, to make sure each new character is visible as a physical being. Another slow pass to insure that each one is located clearly in space. A third--and a fourth--to allow Judith's sense of faith to saturate all she says and does.

On one of the last posts here I wrote about my sudden (only several decades in the making) insight that revision needs no rushing, and in fact requires us to slow down. Now, as I live that, I cannot describe the joy of switching off my internal clock, the sense that I need to hurry in any way. I am a voracious reader, but for the last ten days or so my character's reality leaves me no time and little interest for other writers' stories. (Though I am compiling a list of books to read when I step out of the cave. Whenever that happens to be!)

Awakening

It's been a challenging couple of months. The car broke down three times. I've been unwell twice, including my present head cold. The computer broke down, as I believe I mentioned before, but all is well now. And I realized I've worked non-stop on Judith since well before I left for the research trip back in April.

A more important realization has unfolded over the last couple of months, something I've known for years but only with my head or my brain. Now I comprehend it with my heart, or my full consciousness. Something like that.

I realized that every time I revise a manuscript--or every time I've done so up until now--I've believed "this was it." It. The final draft. But as I've worked through this very special revision, which integrates the research from my week in the library, I am recognizing that there is more yet to do. Another revision probably won't be enough. I can glimpse Judith and her friends, her neighbors and enemies as they grow more fully into themselves and into their world.

They're just not there yet. How many manuscripts have I written now? A dozen at least, from children's book manuscripts, murder mysteries, the memoir and more. Yet I feel I'm only beginning to understand the old maxim, "Writing is revision." And revision is seeing again, more clearly.

It feels like I've outgrown (or at least broken through one layer) of the familiar writer's urge to be done. To have written instead of being inside the writing. I'm happy to be here.

Research and Revision

Four of Judith's forty-four chapters revised to date. Incorporating the research involves reading what exists and noticing the sometimes hundreds of tiny moments per page that could come into sharper focus. Some shifts or additions are subtle, like changing the description of one character's coarse, difficult hair from a comparison with "dill" to "anise," the name used for the herb at the time.

Other revisions require threads of change that will weave through the entire novel. Every time Judith or anyone else offers a prayer, for example, I need to consider not only the words used but the feeling beneath the words. Every change brings me closer to the spirit of my character.

I resisted the thought of writing an historical novel for years because of all the research involved. Now I delight in the process. Can't wait to share her story with the world.

Re-re-re (Not a reference to Aretha Franklin)

In the midst of a reread, re-see, revise of a novel I started more than a dozen years ago. The story has gone through four major overhauls, the most recent eighteen months ago. A publisher is interested, so I'm fine tuning, and finding a few places where that deep revision cut out some connections between or within scenes. A character on her feet in one paragraph, then in a rocking chair the next. Not too many frightful continuity skips, but enough to make me pay attention.

It's interesting revisiting the story, though. I really love these characters. And for the most part, it really feels done at last.

Time Off

One of my favorite chapters in Lawrence Block's Telling Lies for Fun and Profit--an excellent writer's guide, older but not outdated by any means--traces Block's protracted "time off" from writing. He owned and worked in an art gallery, and at once point took a hiatus from writing that lasted a number of months.

I rarely let a day pass without putting fingers to the keyboard and/or pen to paper. Today is one of those days. I've done a good bit of revision lately, my own and for/with other writers. Time for a recharge from all that revision. There's a big difference between an intentional break and writer's block. But for now I'm not going to describe the difference except to say the first provides rest and the second stresses.

I'll let you know what written fruit the day bears next time.

Additions and Issues

Now that Love is the Thread is on my publisher's desk, ready to start the transition from manuscript to galleys, I've been re-reading Selkie Song, my YA novel, with a mind and heart open to growing some new scenes.

Selkie was in the hands of a literary agent for nearly a year. He suggested edits and revisions that tightened and improved the manuscript. The narrative has a smoother, more powerful flow now. Even though the agency ultimately decided not to represent me, I'll always be grateful for the suggestions. But as I read the story afresh, I am seeing possibilities for a few new scenes, ones that link the story in a fuller way, as well as some additions to several existing scenes.

Though I am not altering the novel's core, just listening to the needs of the characters and the logic of narrative, I do not think I would have recognized these openings without the agent's criticism first. (Another author suggested some of them about four years ago; I couldn't glimpse even the possibility back then! So I'd better thank her now, too.)

I'm also in the prep stages for the next issue of Memory Stick, my zine. Although the stories for each issue are new, the format--the framework--remains the same. Cover, Table of Contents; a book review, a brief, amusing anecdote for the back cover. And a theme for the particular issue, from romance to embarrassment. Today I'm recognizing parallels between the ways that a book manuscript becomes galleys becomes a first edition of a book, all the same story and yet subtly (or not so subtly) different from each other, and the ways a zine changes from issue to issue and yet still remains the same. Selkie Song has always been the story of how a magical creature changes an ordinary boy's life, and vice versa. Memory Stick is always a way to share family, personal and ancestral narratives. A transient publication like a zine, and the longer, slower process of a book--both go through additions and editions. It's all a matter of finding the strongest framework and the clearest story flow.