Hello!
If you celebrated Mother's Day over the weekend, I hope it was a good one. We made a nice brunch at my house and, while I did not attempt to take a bath, I did get plenty of time to relax and read my book club's May pick, Feels Like Falling. While I was discussing last week's post (which was republished in MamaMia on Saturday - YAY!), I was reminded of one of my favorite stories from my own childhood. But more on that in a minute.
I talked in the blog yesterday about parallel processing - how my brain is always humming away even while I'm engaged in something else. Reading is no different for me, and I'm especially annoying about it as I become more engrossed in writing. With every book I read, I think about the parts of the story I'm enjoying, but I also can't help thinking about the craft of writing. Whether it's a sci-fi epic such as N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth trilogy or an quiet yet expansive chronicle of love and friendship like A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (both of which I highly recommend), or a thriller like last month's book club selection, The Perfect Marriage by Jeneva Rose, much thought and planning has to be done off the page (or on a page that then gets crumpled and tossed in the bin) to make it all come together. As a reader I love it when an author zooms out slowly through the course of a book, revealing the web she's created bit by bit, and as a writer it's really fun to marvel at the twists, turns, and connections as they reveal themselves. I know how much work it takes to make that happen.
Before I started writing The Other Women, I took an entire month to plan the book. Even with all the work I'd done, though, I realized after I began writing that most of what I'd conceived was backstory. After I reconciled the story I'd planned to tell with the story that was actually coming out, I rewrote the book, saving the deleted scenes for a possible prequel. And after that, I rewrote the whole damn thing again. This book has had three different beginnings and three or four different endings, and various scenes were either deleted or completely revamped. Two characters became one, another was cut entirely. A scene that happened in someone's living room was moved to the bar. And on and on.
One of my favorite quotes, by writer C. J. Cherryh, goes like this: “It is perfectly okay to write garbage--as long as you edit brilliantly.” I once thought I might be exempt from this rule. If I just wrote really carefully, massaging my words into something special as they went down onto the paper, I could escape the "sh*tty first draft" we're all told we must write before we can produce anything beautiful. Yet here we are. I probably wrote 200,000 words in order to get my 85,000-word book. And that's fine. Every single word I wrote was an essential piece of background that helped me learn who my characters were, how things got to be the way they are in their world, and how the tale had to end.
Sure, it all starts out as trash. But with hard work, lots of help, and a good eye, we turn it into treasure. Below, I've attached the first scene I ever wrote for The Other Women, the Prologue, which was also the first scene I ever cut. Trash or treasure? You tell me.
Until next week,
P.S. Sharing is caring. Forward this to anyone you know who would be interested in my former garbage.
P.P.S. Here's that scene I was talking about. What does it bring to mind? What does it make you think? Hit reply and let me know!
P.P.P.S. So, my dad is very handy. He used to hang drywall, and did most of the home improvement and repairs on our house growing up. One day, when I was about four, my mother walked into the bathroom and discovered a line of toothpaste all along the rim of the bathtub. When she confronted me about it, I panicked. "Jake did it!" I exclaimed, not wanting to get into trouble. (This was the first of many foibles I blamed on my dad's mean little black Pomeranian.)
Clearly the no-opposable-thumb-having dog didn't take down the toothpaste, remove the cap, and squeeze the contents onto the porcelain. In fact - and this may surprise you - it was me the whole time. But why? Tell me what you think, and I'll let you know next week if you were right.