Writing fiction — the magic’s all tied up in the details

Posted on | June 22, 2009 | 12 Comments

Despite the thirty-six fast-moving and unrelated balls I have in the air right now, I’m thinking about my novel again. The characters keep whispering bits and pieces to me as I build bamboo trellises and snake cotton string through ferny leaves to support the tomato plants. Lucy tells me more about her uncomfortably strong feelings for Charles, who is old enough to be her father and is married to boot. Henry wishes he didn’t look exactly like the father he never met because he hates seeing his mother’s eyes cloud with confusion and longing then morph into forced cheerfulness when she’s looking at him over her coffee cup some mornings.

I hear dialog while I’m squatting in front of the wall of snow peas, reaching, grasping and picking, and making hardly a dent in the harvest. James snarks at me with his know-it-all idealism that if I did a better job of motivating volunteers, I could be doing something more interesting, like building a pizza oven, or writing this novel. Lucy stands behind James rolling her eyes at his back and wondering how she’ll manage to make herself stay with him when every breath he takes is like dust in her eyes and a rock in her boot on a really long hike.

My life and the story merge in quivery shadows and rays of light slanting through the trees. The past few days it’s felt as if I have a crowd of people around me while I work, but I’m the only one who can see them. If you stood at the edge of the woods and watched me, you’d see me bent to my task, swiping my hair out of my face with a sweaty forearm. You’d hear me talking to myself out loud like your kooky Aunt Myrtle.

At the root, I know what the book is about, but I haven’t been able to translate it from my head and heart onto the page for such a long time now. Fifty thousand words and the story barely moves an inch. How does it happen, this taking of a basic idea and turning it into 250 or so pages of an engrossing tale? How does one make a story about renegade farming during a modern global depression engaging enough to hold the interest of someone who doesn’t care one whit about farming or food security?

My questions and their answers started to gel this week while I’ve been reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Now, I didn’t notice the Oprah badge on the cover when I picked it up off the New Fiction shelf at the library, so I unwittingly broke my promise to ignore Oprah for the rest of my days. In this case, it’s a promise worth breaking.

You guys! This novel is everything I want mine to be. It’s a story about people and place and choice and consequence. It’s about nature and nurture. It’s about redemption (thank you for naming that part about my novel, Barry). Here’s the thing, though: it’s also a story about breeding and training dogs—a topic that interests me just about as much as… oh, let’s be honest here… it interests me not in the least. Dogs? I really and truly couldn’t care less.

Still! I cannot put the book down and have turned pages as silently as possible late, late into the most ridiculous late hours of the night while Chris snores next to me. The details about breeding and training are so skillfully woven into the character development and so precisely advance the plot that I don’t even notice how much I’m learning about something I never even wanted to learn about in the first place. It reminds me of Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer. I learned more about biology and botany and ecosystems than I ever cared to while gobbling up the words in that novel. Once again, I am utterly smitten and fascinated.

And this is the really cool part: ten days ago I wrote down in my journal that I want to understand what’s missing in my writing. The next day I went to the library and grabbed this book off the shelf. Oh, man you guys. The magic that’s going on lately is giving me the shivers. Later I’ll tell you about the offer I just got for space in a restaurant kitchen to use for the pizza business. Oh, wait. Never mind. I just did.

So, this is my goal. I want this story about Lucy and James and Henry and Charles to fascinate, and I think I’m beginning to truly understand how to make that happen.

And yes, yes, I know…I need to sit down and bloody well write. You’d better believe I’m bringing my laptop with me when I travel east and am letting Miss Lila have her full-immersion Pink Gramma Carol and Grampa Steve summer while I sit in the shade and write.

***

(I just counted it up, and today I knocked 11 action items off my to-do list–two of them towards starting my pizza business–and tomorrow I am rewarding myself with writing time in the morning. I will finish this novel. And it’s going to be good. After all, the story’s just sitting there waiting to be told.

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