Off with my imaginary friends again

Today I was finally able to go back to the story I started last year. It's been a couple of months since I wrote (fiction) at all... first there were hours of post-caucus volunteer work for the DFL, and then hours spent working on the 23 Things lessons. Both of those were worth the time invested, but I get itchy and fretful whenever I spend too much time away from writing fiction. Other creative pursuits -- knitting, beading, gardening, cooking, even writing the blog -- can dull the need, postponing that day when I get up and nothing else matters but spending time at the computer, letting the story fill me up and spill out onto the screen. But I always have to come back to it.

And today the story -- place, characters, plot, atmosphere -- was waiting for me like an old friend, ready to pick right up where we'd left off. Nothing had withered while I was away, and that was so inspiring. Sometimes the words have a life, and a lifespan, all their own. I write them one day and later, when I come back back to them, they've turned dull and hollow. They lay on the page just filling up white space instead of opening up into a new and vibrant world. So it's always a brilliant event, a little startling even, when they are as fresh and alive to me "later" as they were during that first initial rush of inspiration.

The act of writing itself has a lifespan. That first draft is pure blissful energy, inspiration and discovery (sometimes, when it's good, the rush lasts into the second and third drafts). This is puppy love in letters. This is adrenaline. This is believing in the unity and beauty of the world, interconnectedness of thoughts, inspirations and beliefs. This is pure, simple, ecstatic, exhausted joy.

Then there's the editing. Drafts three through ten still have some of that bliss. There are moments of peaceful certainty and soulful thrill, moments when plot and character suddenly gain a clarity that was missing. You see the story in a slightly different light. It's the difference between looking at a landscape at high noon, with the sun bleeding all the nuance out of grass and sky, and at that rosy period just before dusk when the colors warm and glow and every rock looks alive. Suddenly, aha, you get it. This is what the characters have been trying to tell you. This is where the story wants to go.

Unfortunately, if my last novel was any indication, that is not necessarily where the story is finished. These glimpses of clarity occur scene by scene or, perhaps, if you're good and lucky, chapter by chapter. But that doesn't mean that the whole thing is finished. It's not enough to have many fabulous scenes and one or two mesmerizing characters. The whole story has to fit together, as seamlessly as possible, and you, the writer, need to disappear into the atmosphere. You need to become like the atmosphere -- always there, doing your job, but invisible.

And thus goes the slogging labor of drafts ten through ... the end.

And even then, you might spend a year or more looking for an agent, perhaps even get some nibbles, but no one willing to introduce you to a friendly publisher.

But I don't want to think of those end drafts now. I'm still in blissful puppy love land with this new story. I'm fascinated and moved by the characters as they grow and become so much more than I ever expected them to be. They're alive, and so I feel that way too.