I’m riding the third day of a cold, but I’m feeling pretty good, and not just because my last sinus rinse dislodged an impressive chunk of mucous. Over the last two days, while I’ve been lodged on the couch watching judge shows, I wrote an almost entirely new first chapter for Sliver of Light.
The meeting with the editor at Comic-Con inspired me, really, and reminded me of what it is editors do. (I am an editor, so presumably I should know this, but sometimes you go through familiar motions without giving it a lot of examination.) Editors push authors ask questions about their work and answer them in order to fix the problems in their stories. The problems in mine were a structure that wasn’t quite compelling enough and a protagonist who wasn’t quite active enough. “What is her motivation?” the editor asked, and that got everything moving.
With a clear motivation, Chi can be more active. When Chi is more active, the new structure for a the novel sort of builds itself. How the narrative is going to progress is clear in my mind, and the characters have taken on a new life for me, after years of living with them and writing about them.
It’s amusing to me to think how different the next draft of the novel will be from the thesis version I turned in for my MFA. This has been a huge learning experience.
Sad to note, too, the death of John Hughes has also got me wanting to write. I want to make my characters as real and feeling as his were — to emulate the example he set by making the problems of adolescence feel as real and important as they do when you’re living through them. There was texture to the worlds in his movies that made them real and imperfect and believable.
