A friend recently confided that she doesn’t read fiction because she can’t see the story in her head, not the actions, not the people, not the places. She always wondered what people meant when they talked about getting lost in the world of the book, and when she finally understood she felt so sad that she lacked that gift.

Another friend, one of my first readers, describes her reading experience as “movies in my head,” which makes her an immensely helpful editor, because she gets a hit as if the film’s been poorly spliced when something’s amiss in a scene, someone shows up in a room without having entered, a character jumps locations or changes outfits in mid-scene.

I love learning how differently we think. When you close your eyes, can you see a pine tree?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2011/dec/20/robin-robertson-at-roane-head-video

Take, for example, Queen Philippa, wife of King Edward III. I’ve written about her–well, technically Candace has written about her– in the Owen Archer crime novels as Archbishop Thoresby’s beloved friend, the woman he held in highest esteem. I wrote about her as the ambivalent third party in the Alice Perrers/King Edward/Queen Philippa triangle in The King’s Mistress. And now in my books about Joan of Kent, wife of Philippa’s eldest son, the queen has become, in the second draft of the first book, a much more complex character than I’d allowed her to be before–let me correct that, than she’d revealed to me before. It was as I drew to the end of the first draft that she grew edgier, more demanding, more controlling. And as I wrote the long outline restructuring the first draft in prep for the second, she took over the beginning of the book. This is what I mean by character-driven from the writer’s point of view–every time I tried to write the prologue from either Joan’s or a fictional character’s point of view, Philippa took over. She’s angry, worried, frustrated, and she wants to make that clear from the start.

Much the same thing happened with Alice Perrers when I began The King’s Mistress. I intended to write in third person, from multiple points of view, but she insisted on turning every scene I wrote into first person. All the she’s referring to Alice became I’s. I couldn’t escape it, so I gave in. Fortunately Queen Philippa has not gone so far as to insist on first person. But she has a lock on the prologue.

If I seem to be complaining, I’m not, not really. It’s when my characters begin to wake me in the night with corrections to a scene or react to something that’s going on as I write, refusing to move in the direction I’d intended, that I know I’ve brought them to life. Frankly, for me, that’s what it’s all about, this writing life.

http://www.luttrellpsalter.org.uk/

May you be blessed with happy hearts, vibrant health, loving friends, and many, many more happy moments absorbed in wonderful books. Thank you!

Friends laugh when I tell them that this is my favorite Rumi verse. Aren’t words the tools of my trade? Yes and no. I use words to express what I’ve discovered in stillness. “Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.” (Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,  Act I) The words are my medium of exchange, my tools. As an artist uses a camera, a brush, a charcoal, so I use words.

The words are the final step. First comes inspiration, and that comes from stillness. To receive inspiration, I stop the words and allow quiet to settle on me, in me, allow the cacophony of thoughts—or words—to subside. I wait for the voices in my head to bore themselves into silence, to exhaust the cliché, the too-easy response. Only then, in that peace, do I hear my heartbeat. And my heart leads me to new questions. I open to curiosity. “We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the words for it, before we know that there are words.” (Stoppard, RGAD, Act II)  In silence I discover my own wisdom. Only then do I begin to play with words.

How satisfying the rehearsals have been. Now for the performance.

I’ve launched into a serious restructuring of the book previously known as The Hero’s Wife. I’ve found some underused characters, some intriguing subplots. I love close third person from multiple points of view–I enjoy exploring the contrasts among perspectives–each person sees her or his own reality. And I’m privy to all of them. This extensive revision does mean the book won’t appear next summer. Sorry! But I want Joan of Kent to have the book(s) she deserves.

Colm Toibin: “It seems that the essential impulse in working at all is to rehaunt your own house, or to allow what haunts you to have a voice, to chart what is deeply private and etched on the soul, and find form and structure for it.
“Thus the idea of making experience seem urgent, vital and alive remains at the core of our enterprise. We can bathe this in irony; we can find metaphors for it; we can even invent it and disguise it. But it is there in the room when there is nothing else in the room.”

Jeffrey Eugenides: “If I’m really honest about it (another fine word), it is indeed that simple: you’re alone in a room with the stuff that won’t go away. I won’t say “haunts,” because memory doesn’t feel ghostly to me, or unwanted. It’s more like a lost Eden: Detroit in the ’70s, college in the ’80s, all those vivid sensations and terrible mistakes still there for me to revisit and reuse in order to make up stories that never happened. “Making experience seem urgent, vital and alive” is exactly what we do. We don’t have to justify it or philosophize about it, or to bring in “progress,” necessarily, because such ideas happen after the fact and are extraneous to the main enterprise.”

There is no substitute for reaching within and bringing forth that haunting urgency, moment to moment asking the question, what compels me about this scene, this character, this event? The point is not breathless action, over the top emotion, but a subtle urgency that draws me (and future readers) deeper and deeper into the story. It keeps me excited about the book, even in a rewrite.

That this query has to do with a sense of urgency came to me as I watched waves rise, curl, crash at Cannon Beach last weekend. I felt the suspense, I couldn’t look away–the stormy ocean mesmerized me. I forgot everything else. I was just there with the waves, caught up in their continual reforming, anticipating the next one, and the next one. That’s the effect of great storytelling, isn’t it? Anticipating the next thrill, chill, tear, aha!, sigh…. What serendipity to read the above “conversation” this morning.