Alive with Process
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
I hung a bird feeder outside my window, and I wait. For winged company and song. For the feathers left behind.
I'm at work on The Heart is Not a Size, my fourth YA novel, writing in some final scenes. It is a melancholy business, finishing a book begun a few years back, knowing that soon the characters will be frozen into place, not knowing if I'll ever write such a book again. I never feel as if a finished book is truly mine. Books are mine when I am living them, when there's still room, and time, to discover who these characters meant to be all along. Who they are to me. Why I needed them in the first place.
Process is alive to me. It's what the writing me lives for.
2 comments:
Maybe this is why I seem to write something that always can have a sequel (and so far does!). I can't stand to let go. I thought I wrote a stand-alone and let Vivian (hip Writer Mama) read it and she asked if I'd started on the sequel yet. :)
I have this impression that you write things perfectly the first time through. Am I right?
Were there any feathers left behind?
Oh my goodness, PJ. You are MUCH too kind. I have yet to write a perfect anything. Once. That I am still at work at this, 11 books in, is a sign of a woman not yet completely satisfied with her work.
I write scenes, moods, weather, ideas. The stuff that needs work is the plot.
No feathers yet.
I am wishing I'd written a sequel to UNDERCOVER. Maybe someday I will. The paperback, due out next year, has a sequel of sorts tucked into the back pages. It made me misty to work on that.
This is a much too long comment!
I love that Hip Writer Mama.
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