Starting Over and Over and Over

Perhaps it's a curse, this business of putting your thoughts out there for other folks to see. When you do your mulling silently inside your own head you can allow yourself to forget what you said to yourself. When you publish your thoughts, even on so ethereal medium as the Internet, they have a way of hanging around.

On New Year's Day I talked about starting over. I talked, in fact, about how life seems to be made up of starting over. I even pointed out what a good thing it was to find everything fresh. And it is. I know it is. But isn't there an old phrase, "too much of a good thing"?

So, guess what. For the past year I've been working on a young-adult novel, Blue-Eyed Wolf. I have 180 pages down and was, I figured, about halfway through. A couple of months ago, however, at page 180 I found myself with my nose pressed very firmly against a brick wall. A character who was important to the story but who wasn't quite working had stopped me cold. Suddenly, the story seemed to have no further use for her, and I was stuck.

When I get stuck I spend time reading, thinking, asking of every novel I examine why I'm interested, whether I care about and believe in the characters, how much is being carried by action, by my wanting to know what will happen next, how much through character exploration and how much simply by the power of the writing.

If that process doesn't carry me back to my own manuscript with solutions and new energy, I ask a couple of readers for their response. Perhaps I tell them what the problem is that I'm having and perhaps I just wait to see what makes them stumble. This time I did all that, and I got responses that only affirmed my stuckness.  And so, defeated, I sat down with a friend who is a fine writer and outlined my characters and plot.  She, not knowing the details that cemented everything into place, made an inconceivable suggestion, one that gave the character I was struggling with a whole new role in the story. I was astonished and grateful and still stuck. The character we were discussing is an adult. If I went in the direction my friend suggested, giving this character a central role, I would end up with an adult novel, not young adult.

I am a working writer. I earn my living with my stories. At this point in a long career as a juvenile writer my chances of selling even a finely written adult novel are limited at best. (Something about a snowball in hell might be appropriate here.) Could I afford to spend what could easily be another year on a project that had so little likelihood of being published? Was the fact that I was in love with this character – or rather in love with the idea of exploring her – enough to justify such an impractical leap?

It was a business question as much as an artistic one, and so I took it to my agent, Rubin Pfeffer. He gave the matter careful thought, then came back with another suggestion that would push my story more in the direction of another character, a teenager, whom I had yet to explore. My first response was resistance. I longed to climb inside the adult character. But then I took everything I had been given, everything I had already invested in the story, and stirred it together in another conversation with another friend and writer. (What a blessing free long distance is these days.) And I came up with a whole new way of telling my story through four different characters, one of them 12 years old, one of them 18 – which will give my novel its YA credentials, and two of them, used more circumspectly but satisfyingly, adults.

Suddenly the energy I had lost last October was back, and I am ready to start over… with a bit of a sigh, I'll admit. My usual way of working is to revise as I go, looping back and back to polish and correct earlier missteps. I don't remember in forty years of writing ever going back to the beginning after I had so much down and starting in again nearly from scratch.

How ironically appropriate that I began the year talking about starting over.  

And how do I feel about this new start? A bit weary, thoroughly resigned, and very, very excited.

Blue-Eyed Wolf, page one.