End of Summer Reflections on Patience, Organic Evolution, Stakes, and Openings

 

Three years ago, in mid-August, my first historical novel debuted in the summer of lockdown. The launch situation was far from ideal, and those of us who were published that summer did the best we could with bookshops closed and no in-person events. When August 2021 rolled around and my second novel was released along with the paperback version of the first, my expectations weren’t high. Another eerily quiet summer, another novel comes out into the world with a whisper.

The summers of 2020, ‘21, and ‘22 were all about book release and promotion, so there was some structure to my writing/author life. It’s late August 2023 as I write this. Things are better now for publishing authors, and though I don’t have a novel in the pipeline, through two launches I’ve developed a community of fellow writers and supportive readers. I’m celebrating friends’ book launches and live events, and sometimes speaking, mentoring, and teaching.

While my first two novels were coming out into the world, I found it tough to begin a new draft. Here, I should qualify that when my manuscript sold in a two-book deal, I had a completed draft of the second and it was a stand-alone sequel. I have real admiration for authors who crank out a book a year. While promoting a recently published book, I needed to keep that set of characters fresh in my head so I could talk about them when questions were asked (even though all authors answer the same questions multiple times). We hone our sound bites, quips, our interjections of humor, and (especially with historical fiction) we can recall historical dates and events at the drop of a hat. It’s tricky, when you’re interviewed for 45 seconds on live radio and the DJ poses questions like: So, who stars in the movie?  The clock is ticking while you hem and haw, trying to remember the names of  any under-thirty actors. So I was reluctant to try to bring a new set of characters to life. Plus, the pandemic sucked the creativity from my soul for a while.

For the past year, I’ve been working on a third manuscript on and off. The most recent (fifth) draft is, at present, with an editor. So there’s that waiting-to-hear-comments time, which I am now really good at enduring, as well as the sense of relief that comes with completing specific goals. The fine-tuning of this novel has been slow going, and that’s fine. There’s no deadline. I’m surprised by how nice I’ve been about it—to myself, I mean. I’ve felt fortunate that I’ve been able to move at my own pace with this project. While I work well under the pressure of a deadline, I know now that I couldn’t have written this book in one year. The story needed time to germinate and develop. I like to leave room for historical research to shape my plot, and for my characters to surprise me. Don’t get me wrong, I do still feel a strong drive to get this novel to the finish line. I’ve learned—with no deadline—what my own writing process is, and also, that I need to trust it. That’s worth something, isn’t it?

When asked to choose, I’ve considered myself a hybrid Plotter/Pantser. I did a lot of historical research early in the drafting process, and that structured the timeline and supplied secondary characters taken from actual events. What really took a while was getting to know my MC. She’s been super cagey. I found that when I tried to write a synopsis or blurb, I had a really hard time nailing down exactly what the stakes were for her. That sent up flags, of course. When I began working with a professional editor on this manuscript in the spring, she pressed me to define the stakes and state them plainly from page one. Apparently, I needed to hear this. When we think about starting a novel, of course we have to come up with goals and hurdles for our characters. I think that we often know in our minds what a character’s arc is, but stakes can be moving targets. We can sometimes forget that we really need to spell it out from the get-go. So one goal of this round of revisions was to define stakes and concisely let the reader know what they are. As we use wooden stakes in the garden to prop tomato plants, so we need stakes to help our plot hold up.

As a reader, I’ve noticed that some novelists reiterate stakes by restating or rewording the same concept multiple times throughout the story. Such as: First paragraph: SHE WOULD AVENGE HER SISTER FOR BUYING THE SAME HANDBAG, ON SALE. Twenty pages later: AH, SHE THOUGHT, SMUGLY, I HAVE AVENGED THE BETRAYAL! MY SISTER’S GUCCI IS STAINED FOREVER WITH SCOTCH, AND IT SMELLS, TOO! Thirty pages later: SHE AND HER SISTER HAD NOT SPOKEN FOR TWO DECADES, EVER SINCE THE INCIDENT WHERE MARSHA “ACCIDENTALLY” SPILLED A BOTTLE OF SINGLE MALT ON TANYA’S DESIGNER BAG, PURCHASED AT 70% OFF AT NORDSTROM RACK, WHEN SHE KNEW THAT MARSHA HAD PAID FULL PRICE FOR THE SAME STYLE AT SAKS. I find this condescending, as if the author doesn’t trust me to remember for thirty pages. But many successful authors do this.

Here are a couple of excellent opening lines where the stakes for the MC are declared right away. Both examples tell the reader immediately what the character is invested in.

People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.

—Charles Portis, True Grit

I will always be indebted to my MFA faculty advisor at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Jacquelyn Mitchard, who made her students read True Grit. I began grudgingly, thinking to myself that I’d already seen two movie versions, and this novel was a western and it had been around for a while. Well, one page in and I became an instant convert. There is just so much good stuff to be gleaned from Charles Portis’ novel. IMHO, the movie versions just don’t compare to Portis’ pages. The narrative voice of Mattie Ross is clear and razor-sharp—the stilted diction, her lack of contractions. (BTW, if you’re a fan of audiobooks, Donna Tartt narrates True Grit brilliantly, and the recording includes a fangirl essay by Tartt that also appeared in The New York Times in 2020, following Portis’ death). Here is a fabulous 2018 article by Emily Temple for Literary Hub, about Charles Portis’ “perfect” opening paragraph in True Grit.

Here’s another effective opening, from the preface of Jeannette Walls’ recently released historical novel, Hang the Moon:

The fastest girl in the world. That’s what I’m going to be.

I decided this morning. It was the best kind of morning, sunny but not too hot, white clouds that looked like dumplings way up in the bring blue sky, birds chirping away at each other, and little yellow butterflies dancing around. I’d buttoned up my sailor suit and was buckling my shoes when the door opened. It was my daddy. The Duke. That’s what everyone calls him.

Walls’ MC Sallie Kincaid defines her goal in the first line. At least, her goal for that moment. Of course, stakes alter, intensify, and change altogether as a novel’s plot spools out, and that’s fine, too. Like Mattie Ross, Sallie’s voice is defined and consistent.

In July, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jeannette Walls at a live event in Charlottesville, Virginia, for our local indie bookstore, New Dominion Bookshop. I ended the interview with a lightning round of questions about her writing style. Question one was: Plotter or Pantser? Jeannette looked confused for a nanosecond, then asked me to define those terms. I mumbled something, and she again thought for a moment, then said something—to the effect of—she preferred to view writing style as George R. R. Martin does, dividing writers into Gardeners or Architects. Okay. So yes, I felt a little irrelevant at that point, after Jeannette eloquently explained Martin’s theory and labeled herself a Gardener. (As for the rest of the interview, things did go uphill from there).

Afterwards, I searched for the quote from Martin, and found it on Goodreads:

“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.”

― George R. R. Martin

To continue on down the garden path with the metaphor; part of my revision process this spring and summer has included work on writing craft. I’ve been diving back into favorite craft books and articles, as a gardener might seek specialized knowledge applicable to tilling one little plot of land in hopes of a bountiful harvest, free of weevils and borers. The process has been enriching. Finally, by late July I felt like I didn’t know if my changes were improving my work, and it was time to pause and get some feedback. When we think of allowing plot and character to emerge “organically” we can also tie that to gardening. If we have the time to allow characters and plots to evolve naturally, in their own time, then maybe they are nurtured by what’s already there in the ground of our subconscious. When I talk about my MC being cagey, I mean she’s surprised me as I revise, and her personality is a lot more complex that I originally realized.

Summer is over, and now, I wait to hear what my editor has to say. I’ve planted the seeds of this story, weeded out overpowering subplots, and harvested and nurtured plot buds that sometimes withered, but also sometimes turned to flowers. Simultaneously, I have, literally, spent the summer gardening in my yard, which is my favorite meditation. I look forward to moving ahead, when and if that happens for this story. I’ll do my best to be patient, both with myself and my character. She’s evolving too, and I hope she’ll bloom spectacularly.

What were you writing this past summer? What are your goals for fall?

Will I see you at the WU Unconference in November?