The thesaurus is my best friend.

The thesaurus is my acquaintance, pal, ally, associate, colleague.

Nah… the thesaurus is my best friend.

I use the electronic tool from my word processing software constantly (continually, always, repetitively) when I write. I have a phrase in mind; I type what I think, but it’s not always what I imagined, so I go to (click on, look up, check) the thesaurus tool. A list of synonyms pop up; I try different ones to see what fits. Sometimes I stay with my original word choice; other times I find a better word.

In this excerpt, Lyra learns a little of David’s background. The words in capitals are words I looked up in my handy-dandy thesaurus.

“I am the reason Thaddeus [David’s older brother who was killed in a terrorist attack] was in Rahma. I am the reason he met Moto.”

“I don’t understand.” Lyra wants to draw nearer, to comfort him, but she holds herself back. She thought she knew David, even if they’d only met a few days ago. There was a connection between them, instantaneous and real and it has only been STRENGTHENED by their INTENSE experiences together since. Lyra doesn’t want to lose that connection and it hurts to hear that David is willing to sacrifice it.

“Strengthened”: Originally I had “intensified”, as in “…it has only been intensified by their experiences together.” But you see I added “intense” before “experiences” and the repetition no longer worked. “… it has only been intensified by their intense experiences…”

I searched first for “intense”, because I’d added the adjective after my choice of verb. Penetrating, strong, powerful, forceful. Then I tried them in my phrase. “…intensified by their strong experiences…” “intensified by their powerful experiences…”

I didn’t like it. I liked “intense experiences”, so I stepped back and looked up “intensified”.  Deepened, exaggerated, increased, strengthened. I plugged those words in: “…it has only been deepened by their intense experience…” “…it has only been exaggerated by their intense experience…” Nope. Not working. I keep going. “… it has only been strengthened by their intense experience.” Yes. Much better image of what I want to get across.

There are times, too, when I have a word in mind but I doubt whether I’m using the word in the right context so I use the thesaurus as my dictionary.

“David will take you across,” Annie speaks to Lyra. “And,” her tone turns SARDONIC, “since David now knows about your… talents, we can talk freely.”

It’s an unnecessary JIBE that Lyra ignores.

The word sardonic popped into my head, but was I using it in the right way? Up comes the thesaurus: mocking, scornful, sarcastic. Yep. That’s what I meant.

“Jibe”: taunt, dig, insult. Yes, “jibe” works.

So I carry on (recommence, restart, continue) with my new best friend, thesaurus (lexicon, glossary, vocabulary, wordlist) and marvel at how many ways in the English language we can say the same (similar, identical, equal, equivalent) thing.

No wonder good writing takes so long 🙂

Q: What is a writer?

A: Someone who writes.

Q: Who is a writer?

A: A quagmire of perception and interpretation so complex that there is no definitive, conclusive answer.

When people ask me what I do, I assume, naturally, that the question they’re actually asking is what job do I have? I always answer with the most straightforward response because it has the most external, verifiable evidence: I am a teacher. To prove it: I have a teaching degree and certification from the Ontario College of Teachers. According to the experts, I am qualified to teach. A second piece of evidence: I have a teaching job. Someone believed I was well qualified and trained enough to teach. A third piece of evidence: 13+ years of experience. I have done the job for a lot of years; I know what I’m doing.

Am I a writer? Who is to say? There is no professional qualification for a writer (although my Master’s thesis was on the concept of licensing journalists to give exactly that credibility, but that’s another story… 🙂 ) There is no professional, external body to evaluate my training, expertise or experience to officially designate me as a writer.

Therefore, anyone who writes is a writer.

Does that mean I count myself in company with William Shakespeare? He wrote.

Or do I share the same profession with J.K. Rowling? She writes. How about Margaret Atwood, the preeminent Canadian author? Or Stephen King, the prolific American horror fiction writer? In their respective genres, they are gods. Can I claim to be in the same heavens as them?

Of course not.

So I ask again, who is a writer?

I ask because of an experience I had earlier this week when I was fortunate enough to meet the award-winning, internationally best-selling author Kenneth Oppel. My friend Jim Sherman, a retired colleague who now owns Perfect Books, an independent bookstore in downtown Ottawa (check out his website at www.perfectbooks.ca, or better yet, drop by his store and check it out in person!), was part of the Ottawa International Writer’s Festival hosting Kenneth Oppel at a reading presented to intermediate students. It happened to be held in the auditorium of my high school.

While Jim was busy selling Kenneth’s books, I stole a moment to ask Kenneth to sign his latest novel Every Hidden Thing. We chatted for a few minutes before Jim joined us.

“Were you too modest, or have you mentioned to him that you’re a writer, too?” Jim asked me, smiling.

A writer, too.

My friend and mentor introduced me to an internationally-acclaimed author as a writer, too.

How cool is that?

Of course, I felt modest enough to point out I’m yet unpublished, but Kenneth was kind, considerate and generous enough to engage with me as if I were one of his profession.

Am I?

Of course I’m not in his league.

(Yet!)

But am I a writer? Do I deserve the title Jim bestowed on me?

I write.

I have written.

I made my living by my (non-fiction) writing for eight years as a freelance journalist before I turned to teaching.

I write this blog.

Is that enough?

When do I call myself a writer? Now? Without the adjectives like “unpublished” or “amateur” or “part-time”?

Later, when I get that first, elusive publishing contract?

And who determines that I am a writer? Me? Because I think I am? Because I think I have some talent above and beyond the average joe? (Perhaps even arrogant enough to believe I have talent above and beyond the average joe who already has been published?)

Or a literary agent? (In which case, since I had a contract with one, does that get me in the club?)

Or an audience? Only if people read my work am I a writer?

If I am a writer, how do I differentiate myself from Uncle Bob who posts his rants on Facebook about the length of time it takes to receive his tax return?

Or maybe I don’t? Is Uncle Bob as much as a writer as I am? Are you as much as a writer as I am? More? Who decides?

For a long time I thought the answer was the publishers. They are the gatekeepers, the arbiters of what’s good and what isn’t, but we’ve all heard the stories about dozens of publishing houses who have turned down authors whose works later became sensations (ahem, Harry Potter, anyone?)

Yet self-publishing today no longer has the stigma of a vanity press that it once did. So is that enough to grant you membership?

I’d like to say I’ve internalized the philosophy that anyone who writes is a writer, but still I hesitate to use that label for myself. I do not yet make money from my writing and I do not yet have a large, adoring fan base. (Maybe someday!)

Until then, I think I’ll do my best to forego labels and perceptions and expectations.

I think I’ll just write.

I have to get out of my own head.

There are two of us in here: Lyra and me.

When I write I have to remind myself I’m writing Lyra’s story, not my own. It’s not me who experienced a devastating terrorist attack, who lost her whole family, who discovered she has super cells. It’s Lyra, so I have to move aside and give her room because she needs her own voice.

It’s hard, though, because I’m still in here. And sometimes I want Lyra to think like me. And I want her to do what I’d do and say what I’d say. I want her to be my mouthpiece.

But alas, Lyra often resists. She’s her own person.

Here’s an except of where I think I did well to capture Lyra’s voice. (Lyra and David have just been rescued from their kidnappers. David seemed to be on the verge of death, but is recovering.)

 And you?” David asks. He coughs again and Lyra grabs the cup of water, lifts it to his mouth and helps him drink. When he rests his head, he continues. “You are on life number 10? 12? 100? There is no end for you.”

Lyra knows he teases but still she imagines herself as an old, tottering spinster still hanging on even as the world she recognizes disintegrates. No longer is there anyone alive who knew her as a young girl; no longer is there anyone alive who knows her now. In her old age, old beyond all expectation, she is alone.

 “There is no end,” she agrees softly.

David senses the shift in mood. “Are you ok?” He turns serious, the intensity of his one good, open eye burning into her.

“Of course,” she says brightly. “Not even a scar.”

“Scars do not have to be physical,” David reminds her gently.

How does he do that? How does he know her?

Lyra shrugs, but says nothing. She’s good at that, saying nothing about how she feels.

David, however, is not Jonah. He won’t accept her silence. “Tell me,” he urges.

Lyra perches on the edge of the bed, David’s warm hand brushing up against hers. She searches for a way to explain how she feels it and David waits quietly, patiently.

Finally, she speaks. “You know how a snake sheds its skin? Well, I am the opposite. I’ve kept my skin but shed myself. I may look the same, but inside I am now a different person.”

Here’s where I got in the way (Lyra and her new Muslim friend Ayaan are discussing the modest dress of women in the Second World):

Lyra digests this reason, and on the surface she can appreciate what Ayaan says, but she is nagged by a whiff of sexism in it. Why must women cover up to stop men from behaving boorishly? Why is it not the men’s responsibility to keep their thoughts pure—or at least to themselves? It reminds her of a battle her school had last year over dress codes. The principal insisted that girls could not wear tops that showed their bra straps nor bottoms that were shorter than the tips of your fingertips if your arms were straight by your side. It is inappropriate, he claimed, but a girl, Caitlin Xu, a senior, challenged him. Why, she demanded, was it inappropriate? He asserted that boys would be too easily distracted by the sight of so much female skin, a response that was—rightfully, in Lyra’s opinion—roundly criticized for its stuffy, outdated morals. When Caitlin shot back that she was not responsible for sexualizing her body, that if boys were distracted then it was their problem, the principal had no retort and the dress code was amended.

“There is an assumption that all men are lewd?” Lyra asks.

This is me preaching. Maybe Lyra shares my views, but she wouldn’t dwell on it here, not even during a conversation about modest dress. She has bigger problems. Like trying to kill the bad guy who is responsible for killing her family so she can save the First World from more religious attacks. Can’t say that’s on my to-do list today.

Which means I need to defer to Lyra. She knows best.

So I’m going to just shut up now.

Well, I’ll try to shut up now.

That’s why I have this blog, for my own voice, so I can have my say, so Lyra and I don’t have to constantly compete for space on the page.

Ok, shutting up now…

(Really).

What I like about math–scratch that; there’s nothing I like about math (when I was in Teacher’s College and learning about learning disabilities, I decided I could diagnosed myself with a learning disability about numbers 🙂 I swear! It’s why my pulse races and my mouth goes dry when I’m asked to look at, think about, concentrate on, manipulate or work with numbers.)

What got me through math class in school were formulas. I had no understanding of what they meant or why we were supposed to use them, but I could plug the numbers into them and work through the equations. (That is, until the senior math classes in high school… then you were actually supposed to know what you were doing. Much, much too unrealistic.)

Turns out what got me through my first novel, the YA murder mystery, was a formula, too. Never thought about it at the time, but since I wanted to write a contemporary version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, all I had to do was follow his plot. Of course I made some brilliant changes, that if the book ever gets published will live on for 400+ years, but still, I owe credit to William himself. (Who, by the way, often “stole” his material from other sources. He may be credited with inventing over 1,700 new words in English (“manager,” “uncomfortable”, “eyeball”), but he often lifted his ideas from others.) To quote Mark Twain,

“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”

See what I did there, eh? Eh? Used someone else’s idea to explain my own thoughts?

Well anyway, that’s what I did, and while that first novel is not yet published, it was successful enough to get picked up by a literary agent, which means someone other than my family liked it, which means my use of a formula worked.

Then I started my Lyra novel. I found I was working without a net. I had no plot to follow. Gosh darn, it was all up to me. But all was not lost. I’ve been teaching story analysis for more than a decade. I know the structure of a story: inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement…  When I ran into trouble with plot–the sequence of events–I turned to my trusty plot graph.

Of course, if you read my last post, “Stalled (or Not)?” you know I was (ok, ok, still am) struggling with the ending. The plot. Making the sequence of events all make sense.

I’m getting there–because of a formula.

The Hero’s Journey.

I was teaching it to my students when we were discussing mythology, but this formula of the hero’s journey applies equally to many contemporary stories such as Harry Potter and the Star Wars movies.

Adapted from the work of Joseph Campbell, a scholar and writer of comparative mythology, the Hero’s Journey is a 12-stage formula (open to multitudinous–another Shakespeare-invented word that means “a lot”–of interpretations):

1. Ordinary World: The world the protagonist lives in as the story starts
2. Call to Adventure: A call to action
3. Refusal of the Call: Reluctance on the hero’s part
4. Meeting the Mentor: A person who guides the desperate hero
5. Crossing the Threshold into the Special World: Beginning the quest by going somewhere different
6. Tests, Allies, Enemies: The struggles the hero faces on his or her journey
7. Approach: Making the final preparations for the final leap into the unknown (right before the final battle with the bad guy, which could be an inner conflict instead of an actual person)
8. Ordeal: The final battle (can be inner conflict, too)
9. Reward: Defeating the enemy and coming out with a prize, either literal or spiritual (such as new insight)
10. The Road Back: One last push to return to the Ordinary World
11. Resurrection: The climax where the hero faces the most dangerous encounter with death and the consequences are far-reaching
12. Return with the Elixir: The hero returns home a changed person.

This formula led me to those questions I needed to ask to help me figure out my ending. Once I get this finished, get this published and you get to read it, then you can see for yourself how Lyra goes on a Hero’s Journey.

Who knew that a concept I associate with math, that dreaded subject, would help me write?

Guess that means I need to keep an open mind.

I’ll look for a formula to help me with that.

I’ve stopped writing.

The clack of the keyboard has fallen silent.

It’s the damn ending.

I’m about three-quarters of the way through this draft and I’m at the point where I’ve introduced a new character. In my first iterations (my fictional African country), Lyra meets Ayaan, a Muslim teen about her own age, who helps Lyra when she needs it most and Ayaan accompanies her on the rest of her journey.

In my First-World/Second World version I still had Ayaan help Lyra when she most needed it, but I’d painted myself into a corner with her location (too far from the setting of the climax), her family (a caring, yet traditional father who refused to allow Ayaan to travel in dangerous territory) and her culture (women rarely ventured out on their own). I could find no logical way for Ayaan to go with Lyra the rest of the way, so I left her at home.

Now that I’m revising the section where Ayaan and Lyra first meet, I’m rethinking Ayaan’s role. She’s still a Muslim girl in a traditional culture, but she is as independent as Lyra–more so, perhaps. I like her as a character; I think she’d add value to the ending.

Which means I need to rethink the plot of the climax. If Ayaan is there, what can she do to help Lyra? She has to have a specific role, something that only she can do, otherwise she’s mere window-dressing and that would be doing Ayaan a disservice.

To answer that, I have to skip ahead even farther. What is my climax? I already explained in my last post (“I Shot Lyra”) how I have to consider the consequences for Lyra confronting the bad guy since she can’t seem to die.

That’s where I’m at. I haven’t even gotten back to Ayaan. I’m using a process that, in teaching, is called “backward design”. Start with what you want the students to know (curriculum), figure out how you expect them to show you that they know it (tests, assignments), figure out the skills they need to know to successfully complete the assignments (unit plans), then figure out how you’re going to teach those skills (daily lesson plans).

So here I am, thinking (again) about the ending. I have to figure out what I want the readers/Lyra to know (what insight, message, theme), then figure out how I expect Lyra to get there (plot points), then what she needs to get there (tools, allies, etc.) then write it (pacing, characterization).

It’s frustrating as hell. I’m brainstorming, thinking, sitting, thinking, but my mind is a whirling kaleidoscope of ideas, a tornado of thoughts, a murky fog of reasoning. (Enough metaphors for you?) I know that the right ending is somewhere in the mess that is my imagination, but I have not yet been able to get it to settle. It’s like building a puzzle with blurred, indistinct pieces without knowing what the picture looks like.

I have the solution, though: Step out of the fray. I have to step back and ensure I’m asking myself the right questions.

Excellent. I have a plan, a way forward. I’m not stalled; I’m simply at another stage of the writing process. No problem. It’s ok. It’s the way it works. Lots of writers experience bumps in the road like this. I can handle it.

Thanks for listening. Now I’m going to go back and crack this nut.

Just one more thing… anyone know the right questions I should be asking?

It’s true.

I did.

I shot Lyra at point blank range.

In the chest.

The proof (she and David, her guide in the Second World, are trying to escape from their captors):

Lyra clasps her hands tighter around David’s arm; she’s not letting go, but she does speed up, dragging David with her. He wheezes, his breath ragged; she knows he’s struggling, but she won’t leave him. Suddenly David stumbles; he crashes hard to the ground. Lyra’s hands slip off his arm, her momentum propelling her forward. In the split second it takes for her to spin back, Pir catches up. In the split second it takes for Lyra to return to David, Pir raises his rifle. In the split second it takes for Lyra to realize that Pir, the good kid in a bad place, will actually shoot, Pir fires.

In the split second it takes the bullet to fly through the air, Lyra dives in front of David.

In the split second after that, Lyra crumples to the ground.

David, himself weak and injured, is distraught, as you can imagine, but he’s able to escape with the unconscious, dying Lyra.

Except you and I know something David doesn’t: Lyra will recover. Her super cells will heal her wounds and she’ll wake up fresh as a daisy.

That’s my cool premise, right? That Lyra can’t die. That she has these super cells that make her unique and indispensable.

Great idea, right? Only… now I’ve painted myself into a corner.

If you consider your favourite stories, books or movies, there’s always an element of suspense, often derived from the precarious life-and-death position the protagonist finds herself in. While we may know (or hope) that the main character will survive (she (or he) has to be around for the sequel, naturally), there’s always the possibility that she can die. More importantly, the character knows that’s a possibility, adding to the high stakes of her mission. We see the intensity of the character’s inner conflict when she must decide if she’ll sacrifice herself for the world.

So where’s the drama and suspense when Lyra already knows she’ll live? Where is the tension and excitement of the daring risks she must take?

Yeah… I don’t know either.

I’m working on it. Throughout the book, I’m careful to say that Lyra is not immortal, that she probably can die, but so far, the good doctor can’t figure out how that might happen. Old age, most likely, but what’s riveting about that?

All good heroic stories must end in the question of sacrifice.

If Lyra’s life, what we consider the most valuable of all sacrifices, is untouchable, what else will she be faced with giving up?

In the “Magic of Revision” post, I explain how I plan to change the ending to reflect a more believable confrontation between Lyra and the bad guy. What I didn’t realize in my musings about that possibility was how I might be draining the tension from the climax.

I have no answers for you yet.

Coming up with a satisfactory ending, full of emotional tension, suspense, conflict and surprise despite Lyra’s never-can-die super cells, may yet be the death of me.

A death as real as Lyra’s, of course.

There’s a game my kids liked the play when they were little. It’s a double-sided board that stands vertically; on each side are rows of individual characters, some of whom share similar traits, such as glasses or hats or blonde hair or brown eyes. Each player chooses one character that the other must  guess by asking questions about the characteristics. The answers will either help identify or eliminate the characters.

“Guess Who?”: many individual characters; shared characteristics.

My writing process: the exact opposite.

Looking over drafts, trying to determine how best to proceed, I realize I’ve flipped the game. I seem to have opposing characteristics for one individual. How, I ask myself now, is it possible for my protagonist to be such a vastly different character from draft 1 (whenever that was) to now?

My original (after may failed attempts) first lines:

Bastard. Arrogant, cowardly, cheating, fucking bastard.

 I slide down my locker to the cold hard floor, cellphone in hand, staring at the text. The words blur in front of my hot, stinging eyes, but they don’t disappear like I hope they will.

My current draft:

God

God?

Lyra slides down her locker to the cold hard floor, cell phone in hand, staring at the text from her boyfriend Jonah. Staring at the text from, it seems, her now ex-boyfriend Jonah.

“Is she an angry bitter, resentful girl?” my opponent may have asked in our inverted game of “Guess Who?”

No, I respond, meaning only my latest version.

Old draft:

A group of seniors—friends, I guess, if I liked them—mill about the parking lot, but I don’t care. In fact, it’s good they’re here; I want witnesses to tell Jonah who vandalized his precious baby. I want him to appreciate the high cost of screwing me over.

I don’t hesitate when I reach the bumblebee Camero. I scrape my sharp key along the yellow driver’s door, savouring the satisfying screech. I slink, slowly, deliberately around the car, relishing the squeal of metal on metal.

New draft:

It’s Monday afternoon in mid-June, the last week of Lyra’s last year of high school. The day’s final shrill bell has rung and kids spill into the hall. It’s an unusually warm spring day in Thorin Hill, a normally temperate northeastern Atlantic coastal town, and the students are impatient to surge outside. They shout, and slam lockers and stampede toward the door.

Lyra, by contrast, does not move. She sits still, a rock around which the swell of students swirls.

God.

Lyra doesn’t understand. No one invokes God these days. Any mention of God or religion is an archaic throwback to the Conflicts, the period of time decades ago before their world evolved into a post-religious society. 

“Is she a hurt, confused, quiet girl who holds in her emotions?” my opponent may ask.

Yes, I say and when my opponent guesses correctly that my character was Lyra Harmon, she’ll ask, out of curiosity, to see the other incorrect characters on my side of the board.

I turn it around.

“How is that possible?” my dumbfounded opponent asks. “They’re all Lyra Harmon.”

I wish I knew.

I started out with the idea that Lyra was an angry, rebellious, grunge chick.

We’re grunge kids. We dress in ripped jeans, metal-head t-shirts and combat boots. We listen to real music—raw, throaty, unrefined sounds instead of the synthetic auto-tune pop that passes for songs today; we talk about real issues—the environment and homelessness and racial injustice, not celebrity worship and fashion tips. We believe in true, authentic, genuine expression and we don’t give a shit about other people’s opinions.

I thought an edgy heroine would work; that she could be out for revenge on her boyfriend could indicate she was willing to take revenge on the bad guy who nuked their city (first draft: a nuclear bomb by a rogue nation, not a lonely, confused kid bombing a high school). It spoke to motivation, I thought.

Result: I didn’t like her.

Correction: I didn’t like the way I portrayed her. I still like the idea of an angry, rebellious, grunge chick, but I was unsuccessful in creating an authentic one.

Once I dropped my fictional African setting of Taifa and created my First World/Second World setting, I dropped Lyra’s bitterness.

Lyra again thinks of Ivy, again feels the hot whips of panic, but she does not succumb. Instead, Lyra lies still. Stillness is her specialty, her dad teases. A calm soul, he calls her, serene and composed. Ivy often accuses her of being cold, unfeeling, unexpressive, but it’s the opposite. Lyra’s well of emotions runs so deep that it can never overflow.

I like her better. Little did I realize that Lyra would undergo a complete personality transplant.

One character; opposite character traits.

Angry, bitter, rebellious, vengeful.

Still, clam, serene, composed.

Guess who?

I am Dr. Frankenstein.

I am creating a monster (I assure you the novel, at the moment, is a beast).

I am breathing new life into the thing by cannibalizing parts of other corpses, or, what we commonly refer to as drafts.

At first I believed I’d only need four drafts to complete the creature. I’d start with its skeleton, the bones of the book that would hold it together. Then I’d add the muscle, which would strength the story and give it power. Thirdly, the skin, the covering that smoothed out the story and finally, the fashion, the style, such as figurative language and diction and imagery, which would make it its own being.

As you well know, I was wrong.

I worked on the bones. I wrote a structure that wouldn’t stand on its own, so I had to saw and cut and refigure the story. So when I say that I was on my seventh or eighth first draft, this is what I mean. I was still at the fundamental, making-it-work shape.

Advice for a first draft that I’d been given, advice that I have given, is to simply write it, no matter how bad it is. Just get words on the page. Easier to work with something  than nothing. I agree. Except I didn’t realize how far off my final vision the “something” would be. In my very first first draft, finally completed after a dozen or more efforts to get started (so would that be my 11th first, first draft?) I discovered I’d created a skeleton of a creature vastly different from what I had meant to create. It resembled nothing like a story, one I could animate, one that could stand on its own.

It’s this realization that, yes, saved me from certain failure–had I put out that hideous creature, I’d surely lose all hope of success–but also frustrated me to no end. I thought I knew what I was doing!

This is when I learned to strip down my creation and use its many parts to start over.

Now I’m on the second of the four steps, the muscle. Around me, littered all over, are the remains of my earlier drafts and I now pick and choose elements from those to create a better version. I made the mistake early on in this stage to think I was already at the last step, the flourishes. To me, that’s the really fun part about writing–finding the right word, the strongest image–and I thought I’d be close to that.

Again, I was wrong. There’s a lot of work to strengthen the story, much of it new writing and new ideas. It’s taking longer than I thought.

Still ahead, smoothing it all out and finally the flourishes. By that time, I estimate a draft count–if you consider all my aborted attempts as individual drafts–of more than 20. If we follow conventional wisdom that each revision improves the book, then I should have a runaway bestseller 🙂

I thought writing was linear–write a story, revise a story, edit a story, publish a story. Only now do I realize how patchwork and circular and experimental the writing process is. I am trying to create something that has never existed before; I want to breathe new life into my story, one that can soar.

I hope, if I am Dr. Frankenstein, that the result will not be monstrous, as my creature feels now. I hope that, when I’m finished, when I succeed in presenting to you my final version, I will not have created a monster, but hatched a phoenix, one that rises from the ashes of all my old drafts.

Yes, yes, I like that metaphor much better.

Forget Frankenstein. I am Phoenix Rising.

I can turn back time.

I have the power to change the past.

It’s a heady feeling, to not only have lives under my control, but to make them go back and do what I want. 

When I started my first draft (I mean my seventh first draft) I had no real ending. I had ideas of endings from my earlier versions but I wasn’t sure if it would quite fit. I decided to just keep writing and see what Lyra did when she and I got to the end.

She made some surprising decisions (not telling! no spoilers!) but not all of those decisions matched up with what she said or did earlier in the book.

So I changed her. In my second draft (eighth draft, really), I could change Lyra to better fit how she acts at the end.

But it’s not just the characters’ personalities I could change. I could go back and add in clues that hint at the end. It’s like knowing the answer in advance and then coming up with the riddles to solve (so much more satisfying!)

I’m two-thirds of the way through this second draft, coming up to important plot points that will lead Lyra to her ultimate decisions. As I craft her reaction to those events, I’m realizing that I don’t like my first-draft ending. Again, the concept is good, but I think if I left the end the way it was, my readers would roll their eyes and never pick up another book of mine again. Without giving anything away, Lyra offers an ultimatum to the bad guy that she knows is risky, but hopes he’ll accept. Now that I’ve taken a step back, there’s no way anyone in his right mind would accept such an ultimatum, so it makes no sense why Lyra would expect it to work.

So I am changing the ultimatum. Lyra now has something more concrete to offer. That means I need to introduce the “something” earlier in the book so the offer doesn’t come out of the blue at the end.

This reflects a famous principle:

Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.

— Anton Chekhov

Except I always thought the rifle on the wall was there first. I didn’t realize that as the author, I had the power to fire the gun before the rifle was on the wall!

I have the magic to go back in time and place the rifle on the wall.

Take that, Harry Potter.

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne (author of The Scarlet Letter, 1850)