Creativity Is Not Linear Process

Last week, I finished revisions on my newest novel, The Threadbare Heart, which is due out from Berkley Books in May 2010. It took me almost exactly a year to write this novel, but what's interesting is that there were many weeks, and even one whole month, where I didn't touch it. There is a minor character in the novel -- a ceramic artist -- who says, at one point in the story, "Creativity is not a linear process." She's speaking to a mathemetician who is struggling with a textbook revision and her comment falls on completely deaf ears, but that comment absolutely speaks to my process in writing this book. I thought it would be interesting to show, now that it's OVER, exactly how NON-linear my process was:

• I started The Threadbare Heart during in August 2008 in Crested Butte, Colorado. My 12-year-old daughter wanted to visit her grandparents and her cousin and she DIDN'T want me to go with her, but I was too paranoid to let her fly by herself, so I accompanied her....and spent the week in a small apartment by myself. I decided I would see what it was like to write with 100% focus, and so every day, I told myself that I couldn't leave to get any food until I'd written 10 pages. I had granola and tea, but that only gets you so far. Or at least it only gets ME so far. I had this idea in my head about an older woman who has lost a beloved husband, and who stalks a movie star who is the spitting image of this husband as a young man. (Why this idea? There was an older widow in my novel, The Last Beach Bungalow, whom I loved, and whose story I didn't get to tell completely. I wanted to return to her. And people kept telling me that my husband looked like Matt Damon. I mean, three people in one week, including my mother, who hadn't known who Matt Damon was until she saw The Bourne Identity on a flight home from somehwere....and so I thought the universe was speaking to me. And so I thought about this widow, who was 80 years old, and what it would be like if SHE saw a movie with a man who looked like HER husband when he was very young.)
  
• For reasons I can't explain (because I can't understand them myself) I was fixated on the fact that the movie this widow was going to see was going to be a remake of The Great Gatsby. I made my widow a specialist in hats. At the end of the story, she was going to save the day -- and meet this man and exorcise her demons-- by making him a hat. I did all this research on Gatsby and costume designing and hats. I mean hours and hours and hours of research. I re-read the Fitzgerald novel, emailed my niece in Paris and asked her about a certain fabric store, uncovered some experts on Jazz-age clothing and made lists of the books I was going to have to read. I wrote some scenes I thought were pretty fantastic -- a woman who leaves a camera in a taxi, a Shakespeare festival in Stratford-on-Avon (where the actor was doing stage work). They added up to 50 pages (5 days, 10 pages a day...pretty easy math!) At the end of the week, I sent these pages to my agent and she sent them, in turn, to the editor who had an option on my next novel, and within weeks, I had a book deal. But...

• My editor said I should throw out the 50 pages and keep JUST ONE SENTENCE. It was a sentence about a mother being jealous of her daughter's long marriage. THAT was the story she thought I should tell. And this editor knows me better than I know myself; I trust her. So I threw out the 50 pages and looked at the one sentence, took a deep breath and thought, "Okay."

To be continued on Thursday.....