retreat or rethink?
Brooklyn’s under a tornado watch right now. It has stopped raining and there’s a little light in my apartment, but it’s otherwise kind of cave-like in here. A good day for writing, though I feel like I need to pause for a moment and get my bearings with this novel. I read Ninth Ward last week, and really admired the way Jewell Parker Rhodes told a beautiful, simple story about an incredibly traumatic moment in a girl’s life; as I think about the book now, I’m struck by the author’s ability to invoke the complexity of Hurricane Katrina without writing a long, dense narrative. I just passed 50K words with my novel, and wonder if I should stop adding new characters to the sequel. The challenge is to bring back some of the most memorable characters from Wish and have them interact with new characters in the same setting. One agent I met with suggested I cut Genna and Judah out of the sequel; I guess her rationale was that not enough people had read Wish and so a second book about their relationship wouldn’t interest new readers. Needless to say, we parted ways. I want people to understand Judah and that means providing more of his backstory, which necessarily means introducing more characters into the novel. Right now I’m working on a chapter about Judah and his deeply flawed role model, Clive (his aunt’s Kingman). For me, each chapter is like a scene in a movie—there are extras, and there are minor characters who steal the scene. But Genna and Judah are the stars—that doesn’t change. Today’s task is to go over the outline and figure out which scenes need to be crafted to draw the novel to a close. What’s the most direct way to reinsert Paul into the narrative? Which characters from the past are most likely to accept Genna’s offer to return with her to 2001? That’s my problem, I guess–getting to the end means writing more scenes! Back to work…
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