Bits and Pieces

At Ms. Lamott's suggestion, I kept a tiny empty picture frame on my desk. “It reminds me that all I have to do is write down as much as I can see through a 1-inch picture frame,” she says. It helped me remember not to rush, no matter how anxious I was to get to the next place. It helped me remember that, even though I didn't know where I was going – something that was very hard for a control freak like me - I certainly knew where I was at. If I was diligent and looked in every nook and cranny of the moment I could see, when I was done with the complete picture, I would get the gift of knowing what I was supposed to write about next.

My journal entry 4/25/08 - “You know what is so cool about this whole process? The fact that more keeps being revealed. One second, I don't know what is going to happen to them, and the next second it appears in my mind.”

It's good to remember that sometimes I thought it was cool.

Because, for the most part, it was extremely hard for me to let go of my linear thinking and my yearning to write chronologically. I had to surrender this over and over again. Now, it's easy. I have the luxury of knowing it'll all work out in the end. Then, I had no idea. Then, it seemed entirely possible that I would never find out where these scenes took place in the big picture or how it was all going to fit together. I forged ahead anyway. Thank God.

I had three snapshots in my head when I first started writing; one when my characters were in college, one when they were adults, 23, 24 or so, and one when they were six.
I started at college. Even though I had only a peripheral idea of who they were, and no idea how they'd gotten to 18 or why they were acting the way they were acting, I still had a really clear picture of the context of the scene. As with most of this particular book, it took place by soundtrack. Music is a huge part of the book and inspired most circumstances, so I would listened to whatever song or album or musician it was over and over again while I worked.

By this time, our basement had flooded and was in the process of being remodeled. I had moved out of the laundry room and my “office” was now in the kitchen nook, pending the move downstairs to a big girl office. I wrote with pillowcases up on the nook windows in order to keep the blinding sun out of my eyes and dog dishes at my feet. Most of the time I wrote in the early morning and late at night, when I could put my headphones on and disappear. But sometimes in the beginning the insanity of my obsession was matched with writing in the midst of the insanity of my family.

I soon “finished” the college scene. My first complete picture. It was exciting, but I didn't know what happened next. I sat, perplexed in my nook, while Dan cooked dinner a few feet away from me. I asked him what he thought, should I look really, really hard and try to figure out their next move, or should I start working on these other two little scenes I had in my mind, even though I felt strongly that would probably add to my confusion.

“Oh, no,” he said, with the inherent knowledge he possesses where any kind of creativity is concerned, “you have to write whatever you have.”

So, with that, I set out on a journey of snippets, bits and pieces, vignettes. As the besties will tell you, it got frustrating at times, for all of us. One of them would say, “Well, does this happen before or after that?” And I would be forced to shrug my shoulder, curl my lip unfortunately and say, “I don't know.”

But there were also days when I would call one of them and say, “YOU WILL NEVER GUESS WHAT HAPPENED TODAY!”

It was a messy, exciting, terrifying whirlwind of a roller coaster - all in all, only seven months until the first draft was done. For a long time in the beginning it was a crazy pile of scenes, untidy really, much like her. I would try to force my will, make things neat. I would write down elaborate time lines in the back of my notebook to keep the thread or find the thread or conjure the thread out of thin air. And then I would try to surrender to only knowing the next thing.

“How is this going to work itself out?” I would cry to Bestie B. “How will I ever get them where they need to go?”
“I don't know,” Bestie B would say, ever my moral compass, reminding me to get quiet and listen, “it'll get figured out. It always does.”