Solving the Puzzle of my Novel

I spent a good part of the last half of December working on a 2,000-piece jigsaw puzzle called Packets of Promise. At 3′ x 4′, the puzzle took up all of my dining room table and the bowls of pieces—sorted by color—took up the buffet. A few hours each night I’d choose a side of the table, grab a bowl of color and hunch over the chaos I was trying to tame. Some pieces I could identify and place in seconds; others I must have touched 10, 20, even 30 or more times before realizing where they fit.

When I was working on my first novel, Adrift on the Dark Sea of Memory, I’d often describe the writing process as putting together a jigsaw puzzle where every piece could fit everywhere. (That’s what I get for writing a book with five POV characters, three of whom are ghosts who are not tethered to a linear timeline.) There was no “right” way to finish the puzzle of Adrift; instead I needed to focus on whether I had fit everything together in the most beautiful way possible. As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, making it even trickier.

As 2012 launches me into yet another year of work on Seeking Troy Donahue, I’m determined to hunch myself over this project like I did Packets of Promise. Yes, the pieces that are left to fit in are the trickiest, but those give the most satisfaction when they finally find their correct orientation and lock into place.

The next puzzle I plan to tackle is The Color of Money. But I think I’m going to hold off until the book is finished. It’s the perfect puzzle to be working on as I’m selling the book to the highest bidder!

This post was originally written January 2, 2012 for the private blog of my writing group, Novel-ties.

On Seeing Marc Chagall’s “The Green Violinist”

I’m in the Guggenheim, staring like twenty other souls at the Chagall of the Green Violinist, and what calls me isn’t the angular tones of purple that make up his coat, or the angry green of his face or his unflinching red eyes but the gray angel nearly hidden in the similiarly gray background that hovers over the violinist’s head.

This angel is a Chagall regular—perhaps the artist himself, his arms outstretched not so much to bless as to paint—and the only beneficience in a painting that seems otherwise faintly evil. As he flies above the foreboding clouds and the baying dog, the angel rains forgiveness on the cop with his billy club poised to strike and on the poor Jews hidden behind the dark windows of the violinist’s ghetto legs.

Perhaps it is the angel who turns the violinist’s feet—one east and the other west—and thus transforms him to a jester, a pied piper parading the Jews from their ghetto to the freedom of the kibbutz or America’s shores. Because of the angel, the violinist becomes laughter and celebration, a wise rabbi of peace who, by the grace of the angel, may vanquish all that is gray in their world.

Oh, how I wish Chagall had given this angel the sovereignty of purple.

This post was originally written November 14, 2011 for the private blog of my writing group, Novel-ties.

Growing Pains

SPOILER ALERT

The holiday and its visitors are past. It was wonderful to have my brother’s four very energetic children romping through our lives these past days but the quiet that closed in after they left is pleasant, too, if not a little sad. The next holiday looms with no children;  I feel the slowing pace that has become December for me.

It makes me think of Aggie. She had faced the end of 1959 not knowing where Stella was, faced having to make some sort of holiday for Willie and Horace. Faced her own part in what occurred. Faced how unstoppable the freight train of our fears can be.

I’m a little afraid to put my hands back on the keyboard and say to Aggie, “Speak.” I never have thought of her as me until now. Being Mrs G, who lost her child by accident, was so much easier.

The truth is that I am all three women in this book.

I am Stella—scared and alone and separated from the ones I really want to be with.

And I’m Mrs. G—well-meaning and desperate, seeking comfort (or redemption) in a well-baked chocolate cake.

And now I know I am most certainly also Aggie—broken, rageful, so very scared that the stones I’ve kicked off the cliff in a huff will have a murderous velocity by the time they find a target.

This post was originally written November 29, 2009 for the private blog of my writing group, Novel-ties.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch…

It’s hard (I mean EXCITING) to be rewriting the first half of the book I’ve slaved over for intense periods during the last five years. Not that I’m bitter, exactly, it’s just that I thought I knew how the story was supposed to go four years ago. (Hey, I think Adrift… turned five this week!)

Okay, that rant’s behind me. On to the new thing I’ve learned in the last few weeks.

The ghosts knew a lot and were telling it as flashbacks. Now I’m dramatizing those scenes and the story is changing. I’m seeing options.

Look back at your first love affair. You think “He and I were in love from the first moment.” But were you? What about the first time he farted…were you so in love with him then?

And don’t you remember all the miscommunications that happened? The arm stretch that you thought was going to be the first hug but it really was just an arm stretch? Or when he turned to you and said, “I’d really like to…(long, loving gaze)…watch the football game tonight.”

So I have an opportunity to be evil. To not make the path of romance so true. (Okay, so maybe it never was that true in this circuitous book.) I can throw a monkey wrench into the works on its first rotation, so that although Sylvia may remember she was in love with Cort from the first time she saw him and that love never waivered, we know that he passed a little gas along the way.

This post was originally written February 7, 2008 for the private blog of my writing group, Novel-ties.

The Writer Dreams

I’ve been hacking a big swath through my book. Even the title changed from a lush Adrift on the Dark Sea of Memory to the economical but evocative Twilight. The number of ghosts is still hovering at three but their musings are much more focused. This is now firmly Cort’s story, not Gillian’s. I wonder what my characters think of all these changes. Well, I don’t have long to wait.

Last night in my dreams I found myself visiting my grandparents (Thelma and Bart Bishop, who in the book I’ve broadly fictionalized as Sylvia and Cort Dillard).

There was their little house on the corner of 12th and Wayland in Sioux Falls and me turning into the long gravel drive on a motorcycle(!), and both of them there, blessedly, as they haven’t been since I was eight.

They are older now than they ever became—at least in their 80s—and Grandma, who was always petite, fits into my anxious arms like my seven-year-old niece. I cradle her head against my chest and inhale the smell of her that has been gone from my life for nearly 30 years. She leads me through her tiny kitchen into the room that used to be the dining and living rooms combined. The table is gone and the furnishings are modern.

And there is Grandpa! No bald head or dimness in the eyes from the brain cancer (how strongly those changes in him impressed themselves on me, even though I was only eight when he died). He is a little wobbly on his feet, grasping a cane to rise and greet me. He is not as hale as Cort, but he loves me as much and his eyes are as blue and twinkle as lively.

I comment on how the room seems smaller, and Grandma shows me the porch they made from half of the living room. A part of my dreaming brain marvels that their life has gone on without me while another part wonders: Why didn’t they ask me to add a porch to their house?

I ask Grandpa about his garden, and he admits his kneeling days are over. They’ve just sold the strip on the other side of the driveway to a young man a few blocks away who wanted a flower garden. Grandpa is free to wander through the young man’s paradise but can leave the weeding to the stronger back. It’s a match made in heaven, he says, and I wonder: Why didn’t I buy the land or just give them some money? I leave the connection with them for a minute to berate myself for how long I’ve been gone from them and how poor of care I’ve taken of them.

Then Grandma’s hand comes over mine, as real and warm as the sun, and I remember this is a dream and to give myself a break. Grandma says, “We love what you’re writing.” And I wake up.

Today, I can hardly breathe I am so happy.

This post was originally written January 15, 2008 for the private blog of my writing group, Novel-ties.