wade in the water

A friend of mine wants to start a writing group to discuss “craft.” I balked immediately—can’t we just get together, talk shop, and eat cake? I’m the only person in this group, I think, who doesn’t have an MFA. I took (and failed) a creative writing class in high school; I tried again in college during my study abroad semester in England, and wound up winning the writing prize that year. But I’ve never been a formalist and another professor friend once accused me of teaching African American literature as a history course. Guilty as charged—I’m not that interested in the placement of a comma in the middle of a line of verse. I prefer to talk about themes and originality and dramatic tension, and whether or not a storyteller grabbed my attention. Talking about a story’s structure makes literature start to feel more like math; even if there is a formula for writing a good book, I don’t want to know what it is. I’d rather jump into the ocean and flounder until I make my way back to shore. I can swim; I learned a number of different strokes when I was a kid, but I’m not graceful or fast in the water. And I don’t need to be. I just need to stay afloat and get where I’m trying to go.

The hardest part about writing a sequel is making sure you don’t drop the ball when it comes to continuity. I threw out a bunch of southern states when I was writing A Wish After Midnight—Genna learns near the end of the novel that Judah’s journey led him from NYC into the deep South. But I didn’t really think about HOW I would get Judah there and back, and doing research in South Carolina a couple of years ago didn’t really help. I stayed in a lovely hotel in Charleston, visited the old slave market, and took a bus tour of the sea island plantations. But none of that taught me what it would be like to run for miles on foot with slave catchers on your trail in the middle of the Civil War. So now I’m trying to find facts that support my fiction. Would it have been easier if I had plotted both novels before starting to write? Probably. I do use a fairly detailed outline, but sometimes I just throw a ball into the air and assume I’ll be able to catch it later on. So I took Judah from New York to Virginia to South Carolina to Georgia, and now I need to place him along the banks of the Combahee River back in South Carolina so that he can be saved by Harriet Tubman during her rescue of over 700 enslaved people during an 1863 Union raid. No problem, right? I have to have this scene in the book because I’ve seen—and cherished—the word Combahee for decades, ever since reading the 1977 statement by the Black feminist Combahee River Collective. Judah is anything BUT a feminist, but this connection matters to me so I’m exercising my author’s prerogative. I’ve finished 4 chapters so far this month but that leaves 8 that still need work. I’m kicking and splashing and choking sometimes, but I’m still keeping my head above water…