June 2008“I finished a novel today,” I said to a friend a couple of weeks ago.And then again yesterday I found myself saying to the same friend, “I just finished my novel.”“Again?” she asked, surprised. “Another?”I had to laugh. I’ve been here before. I can’t help but brag when I “finish” a project I’ve been working on for months.But, of course, “finished” is rarely finished. The first “finished” means only that I got to the end of the last chapter...finally. And in this case, I got there only to be able to see clearly that my story’s premise had a serious problem. An important plot element that I had put in the first chapter was needed, fresh and new, in the last.The second “finished” means that I went back through, polishing and rethinking and reworking, and arrived at the end of the story again. The third and fourth and—who knows?—fifth announcements will mean the same thing.It isn’t that I start out not knowing where I am going. I always have the ending in mind—especially its emotional core—before I write the first line. In fact, I can’t write the first line without knowing the ending. I may not have sorted out the muddle of the middle, as one of my students referred to the long slog between beginning and end, but I always know my destination.What I don’t know, what I can’t know until I have written my way there, is exactly how the ending will feel. Or rather, I’ll know what feeling I’m aiming for, but I won’t know how that final feeling will click into place.

The story I have just finished is a small novel, what in the industry is referred to as a chapter book. I prefer the term novella. It’s for Stepping Stones, Random House. Not a ghost story this time, as my other Stepping Stones novellas have been, but a fantasy called The Very Little Princess. A small fantasy about a very small doll that comes to life.However small the story, though, the novella has taken a long time to write. But then this past year has taken a long time to live.It’s been a year of losses. My son, Peter, died a little more than a year ago, on February 9th. Ann, my partner of twenty years, moved out the day I left for Peter’s memorial service.In the family I grew up in, acknowledging losses of any kind was called “feeling sorry for yourself.” Even knowing better now, I have spent this past year mostly frozen...as the slow progress of the novella and the stoppage of this journal testify to rather eloquently.Even knowing better, even having enlisted help in facing these losses, during the first year I barely found room to grieve. (I almost wrote breathe, and I could add, “That, too.”)I’m a writer, though, and a writer writes, whatever else is happening, so through months of the frozen time I slogged through The Very Little Princess.It should have been an easy story, even a fun one to write. The idea rose out of two different experiences of my childhood, both of them rich.One was the unquestioning certainty I carried through my early days that my own dolls came to life. The only problem was that I could never catch them at it.The other was a story I built in my head when I was young in which I, myself, was a tiny, living doll. In my story I lived in my dollhouse in the midst of—but necessarily apart from—my family. I was with but apart from them all in other ways, too. When we traveled, for instance, the rest of the family rode in traditional style inside the car, but I always rode on top, “protected” by a small railing. (Clearly, however rich my fantasy life might have been, I understood nothing about the laws of aerodynamics.)Those two memories provided good energy for a story, enough good energy that I sold the idea—and a promise of a companion story—before either was written.Then, however, I sat down to write. I set one word down after another, and though my story had nothing to do with the loss of a son, the loss of a partner, the words came out dark, very dark.Ah, I said to myself, so this is the way you grieve.But I kept going until I came to the end of the story. And surprise! That ending was tears, unfrozen, at last. The girl cried, the doll cried...and the tearful ending is also a beginning.I looked at what I had written and knew that I had laid, not my life, but my emotions out for the world to see.When I write a journal piece such as this, I am in charge. I may seem to be baring my soul, but I reveal only what I choose. I decide with every word how much to say and how much to leave unspoken.When I write fiction, I have no such choice. The story reveals what is deep and true about me whether I ask it to or not. A Very Little Princess, quite apart from what it says about my childhood preoccupation with living dolls and with being a tiny living doll myself, is based, quite beyond my choosing, on the beginnings of my own thaw.The day Peter died I was so filled with relief that the long, brutal regime of his illness was over that I cannot remember crying.Almost a year later, a few days before the anniversary of his death, I received a card in the mail. A donation had been made by a dear friend in memory of Peter, “the little boy who was born talking, now silent a year.”I began to cry and barely stopped for several days.In the weeks and months that have followed, the tears have come again and again, sometimes at most inopportune moments.The relief is gone. There remains only loss. The loss of my son. The loss of the partnered life I had worked so hard to build.But with the unfreezing also comes a healing. I know that even as I wish the awkward, unlovely, totally undignified, “sorry-for-myself” tears would stop. I know what I’m living is both a necessary and a profound journey.So without any intention or plan of mine, the unfreezing—and the healing—make their way into my story.That is the way, I suppose, of all stories. Certainly it is the way of all of mine.It is a gift, I know, to be able to manufacture my living out of the deepest substance of my life.It is a gift, though, that sometimes leaves me feeling quite naked.P.S. The story of a story is never over in the first writing of it, or even the first and the second and the third and...whatever number of drafts it goes through before it goes out into the world.The first step “out into the world,” of course, is onto an editor’s desk. When I sent The Very Little Princess, I sent with it something that came close to being an apology. “I'm aware,” I said, “that the piece I'm presenting you with has a very different tone than my proposal gave you a right to expect. I have written what is possible for me to write in this season of loss....I hope you'll find that it is what you want even if it isn't what you expect.”Then I waited. When the phone call came, it began with a rather cautious question: “Marion, how are you?”“I’m okay,” I said, a bit tentatively, understanding the meaning behind the question, and waited through the brief silence that followed.“Because,” my editor said finally, “this is dark. It’s really, really dark.”Then we began our discussion...what she needed softened, what I needed to hang onto in order to be able to do the story at all.And now I am back at work, dressing my nakedness.Because a story is never solely about the person writing. It is about those who will read, too, perhaps especially when those who will read are children.And finally it must serve us all.It’s what editors are for, after all, to insist on clothes.If I do this well, the dressing will not alter the bones, the sinew and the tender skin spun out of my grief. If I do this well, The Very Little Princess will be richer and even more true for its new clothes.