by
The
subject for this blogging cycle is the
corn maze of writing, or how often our plans for our novels get hijacked by
characters who refuse to adhere to our initial plans for them. Sound
like raising kids? It kind of is. One of my friends once attended a parenting
class in which the instructor passed out plants. “You’ve got a fern,” she said to the first
mom. “And you’ve got a cactus,” she told
dad number two. “Every plant is
different. They require different things
from you and no matter how much you wanted a daisy, you got a rose with thorns. Your job is to adapt.”
In writing, when I start a novel, I’m
thinking at the level of plants. I’m
quite happy at that point if I can see the forest for the trees. I have assumptions about people in general
and a think about my characters as somewhat generic, somewhat predictable
people.
At this stage, they’re like infants,
somewhat uniform creatures whose needs are the same the world over. As they grow up, or as I begin to figure out
who they are, they start to differentiate themselves. All good, all part of the process.
Except, just like kids, they can
surprise the hell out of you. Just like
kids, they can derail what seemed like a sensible plan. As they take on definition, they begin to
stubbornly hold out for the very thing you didn’t even know they wanted. (You
didn’t even know anyone would want
such things.) You find yourself backtracking, rewriting, throwing out large
sections and scrapping grand ambitions.
It’s painful. It’s
irritating. Most of all, it feels like
you wasted your time. Like if you’d just
known better, you could have prevented all that and gotten the story right the
first time.
The
only consolation I can offer is that such push and pull between the left
brained “helicopter” vision of an initial idea and the intuitive process of
putting oneself into the body and brain of an imaginary (but also real) person is, I believe, inevitable.
Better yet, knowing it all ahead of time might just ruin the book. After all, some really famous writer whose
work I love but whose name, gender, era and genre I’ve forgotten said “If you aren’t
surprised, your readers won’t be either.”
In
my process, there've been facets of each of my protagonists that kept evading
me. In EVERY ONE SHE LOVED, I knew what kind of car each character would
drive from the get go. Except for
Lucy, who is, arguably, the central character of the novel. She’s an artist and bed-and-breakfast
owner. She’s raising her murdered best
friend’s daughters and trying not to crush on their bereaved dad, whom she’s
known since college. In that story, I
didn’t figure it out what kind of car went with Lucy’s personality until I’d
written several drafts and gotten to the end of the book. And when I got my answer, I also knew exactly
what was going to happen that would pull all of my loose ends into place.
In DIANA LIVELY IS FALLING DOWN, I knew Diana’s younger son would have
a gift with numbers, but I couldn’t see how that would play into the
story. And I truly didn’t know what
would happen at the end. Would Diana
leave her overbearing husband despite his threats to ruin her children’s lives
if she did? Would her eldest son,
Humphrey, a handsome teen who spent way too much time nurturing his mother the
only way he knew how (by helping her with housework, cooking, sewing and making
things nice) would Humphrey turn out to be gay or straight? This is a question he’s not dared to ask
himself, having a stepfather whose masculinity announced itself in
cruelty. I won’t spoil the ending by
saying how things worked out, but it would finally come to me three years into
the writing process that William’s gift with numbers would unlock several plot
levers, cascading in an ending where these two questions are finally answered. This trait of William’s, which nagged at me
because I couldn’t see its use, this too finally revealed its importance only at
the end of my third working draft.
Writing a novel requires a whole lot
of patience, a whole lot of hope that things will turn out eventually. As Don DeLilo
put it ( or was it Walker Percy?) writing is like driving at night in the
woods. You can only see a few feet ahead
of you at any given time. It also requires
confidence in the intuitive part of one’s self, while the linear, logical part
of the brain recoils at the disorder and the unanswered questions.
It is so easy to give into despair,
but to paraphrase Sylvia Plath, “The greatest threat to creativity is crippling
self-doubt.”
And so it goes. Now I’m working on a book that’s taken me far
too long, with far too many characters, all of whom are surprising me daily,
but many of whom have begun to spill their secrets, uniting seemingly disparate
parts of the plot into a more cohesive whole.
This novel will be quite long, perhaps 800 pages. It will be quite complex.
Despite the recent success of long, complex
novels like THE GOLDFINCH and THE LUMINARIES, my process still requires
staggering leaps of faith in characters who – like children – insist on finding
their own path, ditching my map for the thrill of the chase and the scent of
treasures that they, not I, must find.
So the corn maze? Think of the zigs as the left brain and the
zags as the right. Both are necessary,
both take us in different directions. At
least, that’s the case for me. How about
you?
Sheila Curran wrote DIANA LIVELY IS
FALLING DOWN (Berkley, Penguin USA, 2005) and EVERYONE SHE LOVED (Atria, Simon
& Schuster, 2009) and is presently working on a book set in Atlanta.
Cindy Jones is the author of My Jane Austen Summer as well as work-in-progress about look-alike friends who trade places while under dangerous influence of Romantic Poets. Follow: 
