It has been two summers since the publication of The Swallows, and I am finally back at the point where I can consistently write again. Working on The Swallows was pretty intense. I sold the book when I had only finished about half of it and had an outline for the rest. That (one-hundred percent) is an amazing thing to have happened, especially because without the looming deadline, I don't think I would have finished it. Too many overwhelming things were happening in life, and I could have easily checked out from the writing. For better or worse, I used the book as a way to work though all the negative life happenings. This was not easy. Especially with the outline.
The outline forced me to stay with the plan, to get there no matter what. It did not let me follow my feelings and recent tragedies, it didn't let me mope. It was a sharp-edged sword that forced me to keep my eyes straight ahead.
Lots of times at dinner lately, Evelyn says, "Mom, are you thinking again?" and it is true-- I am staring out the window over her shoulder, watching the fat tabby from next door navigate the logs over the bog, trying to trace an inner pattern that leads to the character I want to follow.
Tim always tells me I need to write about myself, but I always get hung up on thinking about Pearl. It isn't that I want to write about Pearl again, its just that she is the only hero I've ever written. She is who I wanted to be when I was fourteen.
And this brings me back to the question of who I want to be now. Who I am now. When I was fourteen, I realized I couldn't draw my own face, and if I closed my eyes, I couldn't picture myself. Even then, I knew it was a dangerous separation I needed to overcome. And I did. But how can I write a new novel about myself without unpacking everything? Sometimes I imagine myself in Florida, dumbstruck and aimless, wandering and cruel, and I wonder if I could ever write about her. Even she is someone I've hidden-- the true opposite to who I am now.
I guess that's probably something. Some understanding.
And this application of being confounded by the self is nothing new, not even close. It is the basic outline of the coming-of-age story.
Margaret Atwood's early novels and short stories walk the very personal line of who a woman is as an artist and an adventurer, how she navigates the space between desire and expectation, how she manages social pressures for better or worse, and how she can blow it all up and do what she wants. But there are consequences. Atwood employed this outline again and again (Surfacing, Cat's Eye, Lady Oracle) her characters aging between thirteen and thirty. And maybe she had to write through her own life before she could get closer to the imagined lives and histories she is so famous in foretelling.
Some writers never make that trip.
Even if Pearl is who I wanted to be when I was fourteen, in the story, I am not Pearl. I am the dead mothers. Every one of the them. On the whole, The Swallows is the confrontation and expulsion of my greatest fear, and it could be any old fairytale: like any wicked witch, the crone murders the mothers to get what she wants. Youth. Time. The fear is amplified by how the women are thought of afterwards. How their memories are even less acceptable than their lives were. I know that's pretty dark, but there is some light too (Benny is Langston, and Langston is all light). At least as much light as I've ever been able to write, which I suppose is far less than I thought it was.
At least that's how it was two years ago. Even with an outline to save me, feelings still have a way of breaking through.
Sofia Coppola recently said, "There's a depth of being really in touch with your feelings and noticing details that I think adults are too busy to notice. I feel this is a superpower that teenage girls have."
I've decided that novel no. 2 will be something different: a complete inversion. It will mostly be light, so distractingly light, so dreamy, with the horror on the edges, like a tide coming in. And the tide always comes in.
I still have the notebook of the first story I ever wrote.
It is black and spiral bound, covered in kitten stickers. Inside, the story is called "The Campout", and it definitely follows too closely to Jason at Camp Crystal Lake, but none of the other fourth graders knew that. They just liked to see their names in print; who would be offed next and how. The best friends and the cutest crush almost made it to the end. And that definitely meant something.
Everything in writing always means something.
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