The Elk and I Begin Again
The Elk and I met long ago in Durango. It was October 2006. The leaves were thinning gracefully into their autumn colors. I was knee-deep in writing my novel, based on a childhood game of mine. At the time, I was thirteen years old, and, yes that novel read very much like what you’d expect a teenager to write: Adult characters behaved childishly. There was no balancing humor and heart.
October 1st remains an important day for me, not only because it was when I met the Elk, when I first bought my journal and began addressing letters to him, but also because later it would become known as my Recovery Day. I know that’s vague, but it is what I am willing to toss about on this page. Anyway, that book became the basis of my first-ever novel, which I am now querying. Project Platelet takes place in the same world, and I have officially broken ground in that story. This is what the Elk and I have discussed after drafting the first and last chapters of this manuscript.
After I printed out the outline to Project Platelet, I sat down at my writing desk with the Elk propped up against my copies of The Call of the Wild, which I keep near me at all times. The Elk is far more patient than I am; he listens with solemn dignity to all my chatter. His name, the Latin word for “friend,” always feels simple and smooth in my hands when I write him a letter, like his very being is a well-worn glove. He puts up with my rambling on about the stories that matter to me. So of course I came to him first when I had that precious outline.
“This will be easier than drafting Project Guernica,” said the Elk. I knew that he was right, as he is always right. “You have the momentum, the songs, the colors, the elements of horror.”
I couldn’t help but agree, especially because I wrote the prologue and it was terrible (the shit draft always is), but it came out fairly fluidly. I twirled my stick pen in my hands. “It’s good to be back in the world of [Character name redacted].” And it is good. Like the Elk said, writing Project Guernica has been a challenge — to borrow a cliche, it has been pulling teeth. When my pen hit the paper on the prologue, it sort of danced there for a moment, a single, solitary sway.
The first and last chapters of Project Platelet form a Mobius strip. They feed into each other, and the entire structure of the book is a whirlpool, a swirling around these two characters. As I wrote in my last blog, I want the reader to feel anguish and grief. I don’t really cry much in books myself (though I did get teary in Everything is Tuberculosis), but I felt some emotions stirring below the surface. I have to balance the new characters without letting the plot get too big and bloated.
The Elk has something to say in that regard: “Things will pare down eventually. You’ll take sandpaper to the rough edges and whittle away those parts that aren’t necessary."Thoughtful for a moment, he said next, “You already know [Character] is going to be much more important and complex than you realized going into this.”
This is quite true. [Character] is more morally gray than I had pictured her in writing the book that I am now querying. She was supposed to be quite evil, and yet she really is neither good nor cruel, only a heavy footprint in the snow of ever-searching humanity. With some violin music playing, I am enjoying drafting her final scene in the chronological order of the book.
The commitment to turn a character from Good Person or Bad Person to Mixed Person is a highly intuitive one for me. There are times when you smooth them with that aforementioned sandpaper that you rub away all their nuances. But I think improving as a writer — I’ve already written one book before — leaves one with greater dexterity in the fine-tuning process. With this entire world that I have built steadily for years and years (since before I could even write, in fact), I know the ins and outs and the nooks and crannies and the small places where characters hide from the light or the dark. As the first book was a love letter to a genre — fantasy — Project Platelet is a love letter to nature and horror and film and all these things that go into a colorful story. To serve that, I have to make judgment calls about [Character] and see that she has some good to her and that [Other Character] must come to terms with this.
When I run into wee plot knots, I talk to the Elk. I have a fountain pen and a good friend, ever ready to hear. Other times, I talk to Vicki or Kateland, as they both have a beautiful eye for storytelling. In solving so many problems with Project Platelet, I may have generated more problems for a different book, but short-term-thinking Savannah has not gotten to addressing that yet. Honestly, though the plot is busier than my first story in this world, I think that it is a more emotionally equipped novel. We writers mature with each project. Once you know how to write a book, the path before you becomes not necessarily clearer, but inherently, you are less disturbed by the sounds and hoots and birds in the pitch black, or else you learn how to discern the sun through the filer of the canopy. You skin has thickened.
This sort of begs the question of why things haven’t been easier for Project Guernica, and the only thing I can think is that it is not that things get easier, but it is that you get more patient, like the Elk is with me when I bombard him with my insipid missives. Project Guernica is also an old story that got new life breathed into it at a museum exhibit that I attended with my family before my mother passed. I maintain hope that it will be finished. The Elk has had less to say about Guernica than he has about my fantasy series. Undoubtedly, he hears me talk of the series more often. He listens to me hum the music that I have playing in my head that I hope will inform the scene as I write it and later edit it.
Project Platelet was a go on July 23. The story is tugging me in so many directions, but I am beyond thrilled to follow them wherever they may take me. Atop mountains. In bogs. Through the lush landscape of my hopes and fears. I’ll let the Elk know when we get there.
