It’s My Tea Party
After weeks of laboring, I finally have an outline for Project Platelet. All that foundation and now I can commence construction. This first draft is twenty-five chapters and the big thing is: I want to make the reader cry at the end. I can see it, hear the music, see the colors of the words lined up like a rainbow. It’s a very cinematic thing, and I got a bit teary just outlining it.
So today I am having a tea party to celebrate the birth of a new novel. I’m also submitting two queries today, but mostly I am drinking more and more tea. Even out of a teapot and a small teacup! This draft features a prologue, which I will pair with Hearthside Toddy. I’m snipping and replacing names, changing the trajectory of the series. And through it all, I can see that ending and hope that I can write it on the page as it exists in my head.
Sometimes, or maybe all the time, we writers have the vision and then getting the expectations and the realities lined up. We know what we want, but our fingers loop around the core of the thing and we get very little of what we originally intended, particularly in the first draft. Expectations: Tears. Reality: Flat. Expectations: Heartbreaking themes and grotesque motifs (this is a horror). Reality: This tastes like dirt. I don’t fear these discrepancies at this stage in the drafting process, but I do hope that they appear as the revisions begin. My goal is to have a simple draft by the middle of September.
When I hit print on the outline last night, I planned to read some more of my linguistics textbooks, but I was so exhausted that I ended up watching Gilmore Girls instead. I made myself a green tea. I wrote in my journal. I picked up the index cards that were scattered around my bed and floor. Sometimes I overwhelm myself with my own work, but this is a sweet feeling to have, as I am so excited that this book is going to be better than anything I have written so far, or at least that is the dream. I view writing as sort of an act of crossing a river by jumping on one exposed rock at a time, each time reaching closer to the bank on the other side. But what is great about literature is that you will never reach that bank, you will always be in the mode of improvement and exploration because the human is so deep that it can never be excavated. We are eternal. Our minds will always be the final frontier.
Then there are the things that are scary with this outline. What if I don’t want this character to end up this way? What if this plot is stupid? I have to remind myself that nothing is permanent: If I don’t like it, I can change it. Characters have a mind of their own with this draft, particularly two of the women, and I always fret that perhaps they will elude me and traipse across the page with nothing but smirks for me. I have another metaphor for this, because I am full of metaphors: Never forget that you are in charge of flying the plane. Even the most unruly of characters are fundamentally mine, and that is almost…a bitter pill to swallow because I alone write this story. Though we are surrounded by characters, we writers can be a bit lonely, I think. That is what is scary about going forward with any story.
Finally, I need to consider whether I am a planner or a pantser. I’m really neither. Sometimes I plan, sometimes I see where the currents drift and lay back, calm, as I disappear down the river with them. However, because this is what can loosely be termed as a series, I have to consider what needs to appear in which books. Project Platelet is vivacious, but it has to have some sort of foundation for itself or all that fiery energy will dim and I’ll be left with something that never got to grow (I know, this entire document has been a mixing of metaphors). It needs something that can withstand the heat, and that is where the outline comes in.
Here is what I do. I go to the gym. I come home. I write the book. I do the best I can. I finish up drafting Project Guernica (hopefully this week). I step forward onto a new stone. I look around and feel the summer air. I drink some tea, as that is what I do. And I try to cry at the ending.
