Drafting

Saturday afternoon, as the Pacific Northwest bid an unusually warm and clear adieu to spring, I completed the first draft of my third novel, Tui. No drum roll accompanied my typing of The End. No one witnessed the tears. I hadn’t made any particular plan to finish on that day, but by Friday I knew I was close. Saturday I knew I was done.

 

It’s a hollow release, this finishing of a novel. It comes with a particular wistfulness and melancholy for which there is no word. No matter how many months of revisions lay ahead, you will never experience these characters and their journeys in quite the same way again. If you’re a pantser, like me, most of what happened on the page happened as you were writing. Experiencing the story’s events and your characters’ reactions and growth in real time is magical.

 

I’m not sure if I’ve told the story I set out to tell. I wrote the first half in fits and starts—six weeks in November and December, two weeks in February. Finally, by early April, after I’d submitted the final copy-edits of In Another Life to my publisher and the last revision of The Crows of Beara to my agent, I cleared out the worst of my to-do list to focus on Tui. As soon as I returned, new characters entered the scene and a certain light filtered into a dark narrative. I felt freer to play with styles and structure.

 

Tui is the most personal of my novels, inspired not only by my deep feelings for a place (in this case, New Zealand), but for a little girl I once knew, with whom I’d shared peanut butter and jam sandwiches, jam I’d made from the peaches that fell from her tree into my yard. I have no idea what happened to that child. She disappeared one day. I disappeared too, not long after. Hers was a physical disappearance, mine a descent into a dark abyss. This novel became a way to tell a little girl’s story. And maybe bits and pieces of my own.

 

My second novel, The Crows of Beara, is on submission, a process that takes months, perhaps years. Yesterday, in my angst and restlessness, I rewrote the beginning of that novel. I revised the first forty pages and fired them off to my agent. If we need to go into a next round of submissions to publishers, this is the version I’d like to use. Because I think I learned something about my central protagonist, Annie, that I didn’t know until I’d stepped into the heads and hearts of characters from a completely different story.

 

Or perhaps I rewrote those opening pages because finishing a novel is so bewildering.

 

What happens to Tui now? Nothing in the short-term. The novel will sit for weeks or months, resting, settling down. Sorting itself out. Revisions can be done only with a mind that sees the story from a fresh, well-rested perspective. I need to forget what my intention was when I started writing and work with what actually happened over those weeks and months as the story unfolded. Sometime in the fall, I’ll open the manuscript again and see where it leads me.

 

Besides, I have this idea for a new novel and I’m itching to get started on it . . .

Pacific Coast, Canterbury, New Zealand