Creativity is Not a Linear Process, Part 2

Especially for Scott, here's the continuation of my "Creativity is Not a Linear Process" post from last Thursday... We left the dramatic story at the moment when I had sold my novel, The Threadbare Heart, and been told by my editor to throw out the entire 50 pages I'd submitted, except for one sentence.



* You're probably thinking that it must have been a pretty great sentence, right? It wasn't. It was a garden-variety sentence that contained a powerful idea about a mother being jealous of her daughter over the concept of love. "That's what your story's about," my editor told me. And she would know. She knows everthing. (You know how when you were a kid and you thought that your mom must have eyes in the back of her head in order to know everything that she knows about you? That's how it is with me and my editor. She knows things about me she has no right to know. It's creepy...and really, really cool.)



* So I knew I'd have a mother and a daughter and I knew that one of them had a good, long marriage -- and the other didn't. I chose to give the daughter the good marriage. And so then I had an older woman who perhaps hadn't had the best luck in marriage, and I was instantly inspired by a friend of a friend of mine who is this sassy, vibrant, spectaculsar 90-year old who lives in a killer house in Santa Barbara filled with fine art. This woman has been married a bunch of times, and all to very prominent men (Supreme Court justices and such.) What a great character, right? I was off and running.

* Somewhere along the line, I was also inspired by a story that happened to my mom. A real life love story, where she married the man who had been the best man at my parent's wedding, some 47 years earlier. I asked if I could borrow this story. She and the man -- who is the best sport, ever -- said yes. As long as I made them look good. (I think I succeeded with HIM, to be sure. But there are no characters in this story who resemble my mom in any way. She may be happy about that, or not. We'll have to wait and see.) Suddenly, I had this rich stew of long love and new love and mothers and daughters, and it was great! All this overlapping emotion, and jealousies and regret. Things changed daily as this stew boiled away. There was this one character, a surfer/lideguard love interest, who had about nine different lives -- as the object of desire for a girl in high school, as the love of the girl in high school, as a stranger on the beach, as the savior of a dog. That guy popped up everywhere, and finally stuck in a way that was just right. He's awful, in a wonderful kind of way.

* There was always a dog. Always named Luna. Everyone else's name changed a hundred times and back again as I struggled to know who they were, but the dog was always Luna. She was named after a dog I met in Colorado who was crazy. (She'd run after a thrown stick with this manic passion for HOURS on end -- into a rushing river, up a bank choked with brush. She was a little scary.) Her name was Luna like the moon, but also luna like crazy. Lunatic. The dog, however, was at one point going to live, and then she was going to die, and then, because my niece Hannah begged for her to live, she lived. And became a really important part of the story.

* Then I got stuck on this thing about whales. Deciding to set part of my story in Santa Barbara opened up all kinds of imagery and ideas for me, because I grew up in that town. I suddenly pictured someone living on an avocado ranch, and going to the Tuesday morning farmer's markets, and standing outside on the night of a wildfire watching the sky. The thing about the whale was that the body of a grey whale washed up on a Santa Barbara beach last year. The images of this beast on the sand were so arresting. So I wrote this opening scene where a woman is weeping over this whale, only she's weeping over her life. Everyone who read it kept saying, "What's with the whale?" I ignored them -- for about six months. I clung stubbornly to the whale-at-the-start-of-the-book-scene. Then I finally axed it-- only to give the scene BACK to a DIFFERENT character, in the middle of the story. Everyone who read it said, "The whale scene is so moving." Ha!

* When the real fired ravaged Santa Barbara, I sat at my computer, paralyzed, thinking that someone my imagination of a wildfire had contributed to the real-life fires. I watched avocado orchards burn. And houses just like the one I was describing burn. I felt guilty. It was strange.

* I finished the book and sent it to my editor. She sent it back and asked for changes. I made them and sent it again. She asked me to write 100 pages -- in 3 weeks. She just wanted MORE, she said. More of everything. And she was right, of course. So I did nothing but write for 3 weeks. It was August and my kids watched a lot of TV. A lot. I'm talking 4 hours of Hannah Montana per day, 3 hours of SNL (I know -- a strange mix. Who can figure out what teenage girls want to watch?) I didn't care. I sat here and spun my tale, making it bigger, and better.

* My sister, who is the most logical thinker on the planet, read the story for flaws in time and other logical things. She never comments on emotion or story, just on things like dates and time and whether or not the Harvard baseball team actually had a winning season in 1952. But she said the ending was wrong. She told me how to fix it. I thought she was right, even though I didn't realize the ending was wrong, and even though she'd never said anything like that about my writing before. It was a small thing, but it turned out to be a really big thing.

* When I was done, I got a gushing email from my editor. It was a very good day -- the end of a long, winding path. Some people say they couldn't stand writing a novel because there is no right answer to any particular problem. You just have to write, and trust the process, and trust the nagging things in your brain that say, "Gatsby/no Gatsby, whale/no whale, dog lives/dog dies, wedding's off/wedding happens." It's a crazy process. But I love it.