Note to self

Write the story you haven't written with the words you've not used yet.

Dream every page alive.

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The things writers carry

Sometimes I carry my images with me, place to place, until the book I am writing is ready for them, or until I am.  The toting feels physical, material.  I stand straighter, breathe easier when I get the image down.

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Silence. Exile. Cunning.

Even if you take a drive—45 minutes, two hours from home—you may find yourself feeling refreshed again, a wise writerly friend wrote yesterday.  Most of all, don't be afraid of silence.  Silence, exile, and cunning is what Joyce advised.

(I love my friends.)

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On books past (and on saying thanks)

Yesterday, in preparation for the re-launch of this very blog (which will be happening soon), I did something I almost never do—return to books once written.  I was in search of a few words about each, and in going back, all the way back, over 12 books and five genres, I stumbled across the generosity of authors like Buzz Bissinger, Jayne Anne Phillips, Andre Dubus III, Rosellen Brown, Ken Kalfus, Susan Straight, Kate Moses, Katrina Kenison, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sy Montgomery, Jennie Nash, and others; I was reminded of the kindness and illuminating intelligence of reviewers whom I've never met and likely never will.

Whenever I could, wherever I could, I have sought to reach out, to say thank you.  But yesterday, I realized, I haven't said thank you enough to those who have tried to understand.  What I see.  Why I write.  How I hear.  What I want.  There's an I in each of those fragments.  That selfish, big, bolded I.  I stood where I stood, and others circled near.  You can't say thank you enough.

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Literary Inversions

So what would it take, you wonder (do you wonder?) to turn a YA novel into an A novel and an A novel into a YA novel, and to do both things at once to books you've worked on for years, so much so that, even though they have absolutely nothing to do with on another, they begin to float toward one another, and I ask myself (I do ask myself), What if Vin belonged not to Sophie, but to Kenzie, and what if Kenzie were not 18 by 30 and Sophie not 39 but 13?

(That was a question, or multiple questions, so I end it/them with the mark.)

Because everyone is one age at one point or another, and shouldn't a novelist know who their characters were, or who they will grow up to be?

Mind melds in summer.

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Losing sentences, holding onto story

I was nearly destroyed by my ten-year-in-progress manuscript yesterday.  The pacing was off, and I couldn't find a cure.

I sat with my old photographs, my boxes of books, my research.  I sat with all 240-plus pages half on my lap, half on the floor.  I sat, and I'm glad that I couldn't see my own face.  Frustration?  Bewilderment?  Exhaustion?  All three?  You're all washed up, Kephart, I said.

But then last night I slept a little (sleep is something else, I tell you), and when I woke I knew just what the problem was, a problem I should have discerned at once (this is me writing, I reminded myself, me, with the same built-in flaws, the same go-to tendencies, the same great love for landscape and sky when the point is, the point is, the story).  I threw pages away, pages and pages.  I was ruthless with every excess word.  I blue penned the book like its life depends on blue penning, and, in fact, it does.  The pace is back on.  The tension has tightened.  So much more is at stake.  I'm losing sentences like I always do.  I'm holding onto a new kind of story. 

Novels get harder as we push ourselves beyond what we know, my friend Alyson Hagy wrote to me earlier today, after listening to me go on about this book I won't give up on.  She's almost always right, my friend, Alyson.  She's definitely wiser than I am.  Because even though I've been writing this book for almost all of my published writing life, it is the book I've not known how to write, the book I've had to grow into.

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Working an old book new

Take a novel-in-progress, ten years old.   Call it ninety drafts, though you believe it's many more.  Take every original character out, but two.   Change the plot.  Change the genre.  Change the cast (save for those original two).  Keep only the landscape, and a scene or two with food.  Change the tense and change the tone.  Weave and dodge and braid.  Uphold the bulls.  Encourage the horses.  Explore Seville.

If you are still working on this novel it's because it will not let you go. 

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Talent?

Every now and then, someone will say, Oh, it must be great to have a writing talent.  

I think so, too.  It must be great:  To write like a dream, and to write with ease.

That, however, is not my life.  Today, for example, I cranked open an old book in progress.  There are lines in it that I'd love to blame on someone else.

Unfortunately, I wrote them.

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On works in progress

Returning to a book too long in progress (after letting it sit, after repeatedly letting it sit) is like walking into a stranger's parlor.  The words don't feel like yours, the pacing surprises, you agree to agree with the flow (you're being polite).  Then, of a sudden, you've slammed into a wall.  The wrong thing is happening, wrongly.

You take your pen.  You strike through pages.  You take lemon with your tea, and intervene.

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Ageless

In my travels, I found this tree—split and chunked away from itself, crooked and ungainly, and still capable of green. I felt myself a kindred soul. Leave me be for just an hour, ask nothing of me, and I stir inside with story. I don't know how old I look to the world outside. When I am writing I feel ageless.

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Forgive Me...

while I burrow in, while I stay where I am, with this novel. This adult novel that has in fact found its way, that has opened itself to me, then opened again, thanks to a recent conversation with an oh-so-smart editor. I am in the final third of remaking it. I have eight chapters to write; I am obsessed. I had planned to apply this Sunday to real life—to weeding my garden, to trying a new recipe, to folding the clothes, to checking in with all of you—but: there are five women, two eras, an asylum, a Book of Thoughts, and a kite. There's a lost lover named Vin; he may be coming home.

They have found me. They've let me in.

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Moving Past Self-Doubt, Toward Final

I have spoken, often, of this book that I have carried with me through a decade of rework, reconfiguration, enough half faith not to give up on it entirely, but still. Tears have been shed. Papers tossed across the room. Favorite sections and characters hacked out all to preserve: What?

The mood and the flavors and the dust and the flamenco and the carnations thrown from the rooftops of Seville.

I have spoken of this book, and oh, I have fought with it. You want to know where self-doubt lives, in a writer like me? It lives in the books I don't know how to finish, in the sentences that seem marred, in the static of first-person present, in the over-stress of conjunctions.

A few weeks ago, close to what seemed done to me, a very special reader read the book. She encouraged. She had questions. Ever since—through the throes of snow, client work, and a fever—I've been working to find answers, to move through the text one more time, to move through it newly.

I was struggling with rhythms as I made plot changes. I was mourning yet more favorite passages lost. I was intrigued by the introduction of two new characters—brand new and ultimately welcome. Finally, I thought, I was getting somewhere, and this morning, I rose again at that strange, sacred hour, to read the whole book through.

I think I've gotten somewhere.

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Enormous Frustrations and No Such Thing as the Real World

Sometimes writing is just so hard. This morning I would almost say it's too hard. The only hours I have to give to it are the hours I should be sleeping. I force myself to my desk in the 3 AM dark, and nothing works, the rhythms are off, I can't get my footing, I ask myself, Have you not worked this very page at least four dozen times before? Should you not already hear its music? Don't you get it? Can't you? What is it going to take? I read a page or two from a novel I love, the work of another author who has what I don't feel I've got, and I say to myself: Well. That is writing.

Frustrated, I turned to my blogging friends for succor and discover this—a review of No Such Thing as the Real World, the HarperTeen collection to which I contributed. I am no less frustrated with my writing self today. But thank you, My Friend Amy, for reminding me that sometimes the stories are within reach. Thank you so much.

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Writing like Dancing

I have, as some of you know, been working on the same novel for the past decade—one that takes place in southern Spain. It's never been about getting the landscape right, the details. It's always been about the plot. Were I to speak now of all the transmutations that plot has gone through, you'd think that was the story itself.

But it's not, and at long last, the book is in hand. It is altogether, in one place, and here then, here now, is my favorite part of writing: the calm that comes from knowing that a fortifiable structure is in place, the joy of doing more to broaden and deepen the themes. This is like dancing when you finally know the steps, and all you have to do is hear the song.

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Show me a little tenderness

Sometimes, all the elements of a novel you've been writing seem to be in place (voice (not just the characters' voices, but the novel's).check; character motivation.check; momentum and suspense.check; leitmotifs if you're into leitmotifs.check; etc.) and you say to yourself: There it is.

Then you look back and you realize that the novel's been lacking something that doesn't get taught, and perhaps isn't even always valued, but it matters a whole lot to you. I might use the word "tenderness" to describe this thing. The heart blurring the boundaries around the head.

You can't write tenderness while sitting at your computer when (even on a Sunday) client work is rolling in. You have to walk away, into silence.

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Get the character moving

There I was (had for so long been): on page 44 of my Seville novel, stopped and going no further. The tone was working, the characters seemed alive, the momentum was building, and then, smack—I was up against a wall.

Page 44 was a misery. I couldn't move forward at all.

But yesterday a client canceled a conference call, and suddenly I had this gift of two unexpected hours in a day that had begun in a corporate rush at two a.m. Two hours, and even the construction crew down the street had stopped banging against whatever it is they've been banging against, and I took out that mean and haggardly page 44 and hovered.

Suddenly I understood what had been wrong all along: I'd had my character sitting when she needed to be walking, when she needed to be going somewhere. If she moved, the plot would move. If she moved, I'd be forced to slice page 44 free of its lovely lull of detail.

I'd written the lines that I next excised more than ten years ago, clung to them for a decade. Yesterday, I gave them up, stood my character up, had her trail across the cortijo courtyard in a rising storm of dust.

Page 45.

It can all seem so easy, in retrospect.

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Novel Submission

Here's the thing about submitting a brand-new novel to editors:

You don't know what will happen.

My first novel for adults has gone off today to a handful of editors, thanks to my agent, Amy Rennert. The very best thing for me to do right now is to keep that novel out of my mind. By paying attention to clients. By focusing on my YA Seville novel. By making room in the world for the two books due out in 2010 and room in me for the books of others. By continuing to plumb recipe books for recipes I can manage, and by keeping the house nutsy-quality clean. By dancing. By laughing. By gathering my dear friends near, and chilling.

What will be will now be. One must live in the meantime. Tonight I'll watch 500 Days of Summer, something I've long wanted to do.

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This Happened

The rain came and came. I might have gone out, but I stayed in. I sat on the couch and not at my desk, and I closed my eyes, and I thought. The issue was, How will I finish this novel I'm writing? What is the final scene, and how do I get there?

I hadn't asked before because I needed not to know. I needed the making of this novel to be urgent, powered by wanting, by uneasiness, angst. I needed to wake to not knowing, to that desire to find out, and I did, I woke to that, but most days I could not work, and the novel was a dreamscape, the novel was a stagger.

Today: rain and silence. Today: courage. Today, all by myself, I knew. I saw the final scene. I saw one way to get there. I opened my eyes and I wrote not a line. I will carry the scene with me now, until I find the truest words.

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Moon Rising

I was the original girl workaholic—taking a motley medley of jobs as soon as I could, in any place that would take me. I remember the stink of the mimeograph machine at a life insurance company. The presents I failed to wrap well at The Mole Hole, a Hilton Head gift shop. The catering gig and the library shelves at the University of Pennsylvania. I was working up through my sixth hour of labor, and whenever my baby slept I was back at the machine, spooling through the corporate newsletters I wrote for a freelance dime—CompNet News, one was called. A Rohm and Haas epistle called, I think, Rohm and Haas Quarterly. A bevy of pieces for the Hay Group. Exciting stuff.

I was always working.

This summer has slowed me down. The economy has left its mark on us all; certainly it has impacted the boutique marketing firm that I run. I know that I need to start worrying about this in a more active and effective way, but somehow I've loved the just-being-alive time not working like I once worked has afforded. The new friends I've made. The new dance steps I've learned. The new novel I'm writing. The long conversations with my son. And these few days in Hilton Head. I've had the moon and the sun in the palm of my hand. I've had herons not minding my portrait taking. And just a half hour ago I watched the moon slip away above the head of this straight-spined palm tree.

I watched it, and I cried for the fact that I took the time to see it.

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Work in Progress and the Hummingbird Arrives

After a difficult night, a page was born, and I was scrolling through the book again, as I do, looking for clues to next moves, when from the corner of my eye I saw a hummingbird hanging in the window, as if from a puppeteer's string. I had been waiting all summer long for this elusive bird, my longing pinned to the trumpet vine that my father helped me plant by the front door. But the hummingbird came at me from the north, and she came not alone but with a friend. She was silver bellied and green backed, dragonfly colors, and I did not take her picture, for she did not stay long enough for me to garner her permission. I photographed the screen instead. The moment in time.

Gifts. Each day lived.

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