Paas

Growing up, all the major holidays were dominated by Slavic customs and food. I could tell you about gobs of honey being anointed on my forehead every Christmas Eve . . . and the back-breaking labor that goes into making 80 dozen pirogis from scratch. But instead . . . I'm going to talk about eggs.

I've known my mom my whole life, but still she surprises me once in a while. She is the least sentimental person I know and it's like pulling teeth to get her to reminisce. My father, on the other hand, will talk about the past for hours. But one day last Christmas she proceeded to tell Baby Girl about making Ukrainian eggs by hand. With beet juice. And needles. And hot wax. And it taking forever. DAYS. For each beautiful handmade egg. DAYS! I never knew my mom had this skillset. Probably because she has no intention of ever going through the process again. She knew if she told me, I would BEG her to teach my kids. I still may this Christmas.

Now, when my kids do Easter eggs, we're dropping them in Paas. We might slap some crayon on them before dropping them in. But it's Paas, folks. And they don't end up looking like THIS. (Wait for them to become illustrated! Cool site set-up.)

So it is with books. There are no shortcuts. I think one of the signs of a mature writer is an absolute gut-level understanding that there are zero shortcuts to writing a book. I can't tell you how many new writers I've encountered over the years who typed "THE END" to a first draft and sent queries to agents the next day. It doesn't work that way.

There are no shortcuts. No ways around the painstaking process. No class you take, no workshop, nothing but doing it, laboring over it, layering it with richness. There is no Paas for novels.

Thoughts?

Band-Aids

I am often accused of being many things: eccentric, weird, evil (that's my mother-in-law's impression of me), a terrible mother (mother-in-law again), funny, winsome (best friend gets to call me that--inside joke), frenetic, brainy, utterly lacking in fashion sense (Oldest Daughter chimes in there), and so on. But no one . . . and I mean not even my mother-in-law (and that's saying a lot) would ever call me lazy.

For me to produce consistently . . . I have to write volumes of pages. I don't ever take a few weeks off. If anything, this blog makes sure I wrap my head around writing each and every day.

But last night, I had a long conversation with my best friend, also a writer, about a problem I am having in a beta read of my work in progress. Everyone, so far, "really likes it." But they also really LOVE the male main lead . . . and the female . . . well, they like her, but they don't LOVE her. This is a thriller, not a romance, so you know . . . on the one hand that's okay. But it's not quite the feeling I am going for. My friend suggested a "simple" fix (relatively speaking). But it's a Page One fix. As in . . . I would have to go ALL the way back to page one and pretty much fix every scene AND add new ones.

Inside I cringed. But I know it's at least one plausible (and very smart) solution to my problem. I would gain a great deal with her solution, but I would LOSE one very important element (having to do with wealth and access). I am weighing it. I wrote two writers today to ask their advice (hello Lurker!).

But I will tell you something.

The solution will not be rejected because it's a Page One fix. It will not be avoided because it is again deconstructing the same damn novel for the third time. Laziness will not be part of it.

I have met a lot of writers over the years and have been asked a lot of opinions. And very often I suggest Page One fixes. Of any random ten writers, maybe a single one will be open to that. The other nine will think there must be some way to do it with a Band-Aid.

I firmly believe sometimes you can't. And if you SEARCH for the Band-Aid, you're shortchanging the novel that COULD be.

Thoughts?

Evolution

The first novel I ever attempted was an historical. I quit by about page 80. I just didn't "feel" the storyline from another century, and I felt romance seemed, as a genre 20+ years ago, to have a lot of pre-conceived notions about sex scenes and characters. My second attempt, a fairly serviceable psychological mystery novel, was told in linear fashion over the course of a month of storyline, with flashbacks. I sent a single query to St. Martin's and got a request for the full--I'm talking when I was 24 or 25. In the end, the editor was impressed, she said, but the book was a little too psychological and not enough of the mystery part for her imprint. I didn't even TRY to write or submit a novel again for years. And years. I wasn't devastated by the rejection . . . I knew I had a million to one shot. I just didn't feel capable enough as a writer to write 300 pages. I didn't have enough story. So I worked on short stories and poems, which I got published with regularity.

Then I decided to try my hand at a novel again. I attempted a complicated contemporary women's fiction piece about 10 years ago, but a key component involved a man from the I.R.A. and the history of Ireland, and he had built bombs in his lifetime and had been part of a subway attack in London. And he was my hero. And then 9/11 happened and I knew what was already a story about redemption would become a thousand times more difficult to sell. So I abandoned it around page 200 for Spanish Disco. I wrote Spanish Disco in four months, edited it, stuck it in a drawer, went to the Book Expo as a consultant to a publishing house, met an agent, shared the novel, and it was sold less than 3 months later to Red Dress Ink. That book is completely linear and takes place over the course of 14 days. No flashbacks in time. First-person narrative. Seven characters--five of them with significant "face time" in the book. Writing it wasn't painful. It flew out of me, a total "zone" book with almost no rewrites requested by my publisher.

That was the last "easy" book I ever wrote.

Since then, not that I haven't written whole books in 3 months' time . . . or had a book just fairly effortlessly spill out of me . . . but I have EVOLVED. There was a time in my writing career when I never would have attempted a book in which God is a woman--and a character. In which Albert Einstein had a role. Or one that was a triology spanning 250 years and a hundred characters. Or one that wove the story of an African-American drag queen's love story with the heroine's search for love while living in a haunted house. Or one that wove a conspiracy from the Vietnam war with a present-day Vietnamese-American's search for understanding of her mother's suicide. Even if I had thought of the storyline, I wasn't far enough along on my journey as a writer to even try writing something so complicated. Linear and first-person was about a complicated as I could get.

I look at Spanish Disco and think, as much as I adore it and it remains one of my three or four favorites of my books. that it's very much like an adolescent. As Cassie narrates, it's all about HER. How SHE is impacted by the inconveniences of dealing with the secondary characters, how SHE hates having to work with Roland in a small beach town, how SHE hates her mother. How SHE feels about everything. If you've ever parented a teen, this is how they tend to view the world. It revolves around them. As a writer, I hadn't, I don't think, evolved enough to understand how the secondary characters could have their own full lives and yet not--importantly--hone in too much on the main plot. When I look at The Roofer now, I see, for example, how Tom is just as important as Ava, how the father's story, Uncle Two's, and Ava's mother's storylines are complex in their own right and intersect with the heroine's. I see how, just off of Uncle Two's story, there is his son's death from a drug overdose--years ago and off-stage--and yet it colors how he deals with Tom's drug abuse. I see how Hell's Kitchen itself is a character. How the Westies' history and the RICO Acts affect the storyline. If I wrote that book 20 years ago, it would have been about how Ava felt about her father's death. One long, linear story of her life. I would never have thought to tell the story over the three nights and a day of an Irish funeral. I would never have given in an actual narrative structure that way.

So we evolve as writers. Each book I write, I become more ambitious. It never occurs to me, now that I've written about 20 of them, to just follow a pattern, stick to something I've tried and done before. It's a process of growing with each book. Sometimes that makes readers angry . . . they like knowing, sometimes, that an author will write the same sort of book. But it's my journey as a writer to want to do different things, to keep evolving.

How about you? Can you now see the evolution of your work?