Tosca Lee's Blog - Posts Tagged "on-writing"

On Writing: Essential Caca

My sister’s bulldog has a penchant for eating stuff he shouldn’t: bits of Frisbee, sponge animals from my niece’s bathtub, the eyeballs of stuffed bears. They all emerge like little treasures in the yard after a warm rain.

You get me.

Far be it from me to compare my beloved art form to a pile of dog business, but you know, there’s a reason Anne Lamott calls them Shitty First Drafts.

When I write I put down a lot of words—upwards of several thousand a day. I do time in my chair (the first part of which may consist of internal debate on the merits of Botox or mindless eyebrow pulling). But somewhere around the twenty-minute mark I get down to it. I write fast and ugly.

I do not look back.

Anyone who knows me knows this goes against all natural law. That I am, in fact, an obsessive nit who will pick at just about anything—sweater pills, labels, cuticles. Especially cuticles. That I can rearrange a sentence like a kitchen shelf for the better part of an hour. But I also know that without writing a bunch of essential caca, I cannot get to the good bits.

What are the good bits? I don’t know. Really—I never know. I never knew a jogger would get hit by a car in Demon. I did not know how a man’s head would shake on his neck in mortal fear... how Eve’s name would sound on the lips of Adam. Without letting it run out from the fingers, I still would be none the wiser.

And so I’ve just learned to trust that those bits are in there.

But let me say: writing crap is tough. We don’t want it to stink long on the page. We have high aspirations for these words; they should reflect on our insouciant brilliance, maybe be worth some kind of money. In the very least, they should not embarrass us, like sweet-faced children who parrot the best expletives of their parents.

And yet, there they are: parroting, stinking, and not worth… well, you know.

I prepare to go mucking on the second pass. I expect to shovel out a load. I expect to wade through manure.

And, against logic, I expect to find treasure.
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Published on September 29, 2015 14:25 Tags: first-drafts, on-writing, writing-process

Behind the Scenes: On Demon

I first got the idea for Demon in 1998 while driving home on a straight and hypnotizing stretch of Nebraska road. I was in the middle of another project, a fantasy novel about a woman warrior I had been working on for years and had affectionately named The Book That Will Kill Me, if only because I had spent years writing and rewriting the first 100 pages like some literary Sisyphus with his boulder. Had I known then what I know now, I would have pressed on to the end and fixed the rest later, but I was bent on getting it right (whatever that is) and pummeling that story into submission. (New writers: do not do not follow my example!)

I jotted down the idea of a demon telling his story, planning to revisit it some day after I had vanquished The Book That Will Kill Me.

“Some day” turned out to be only a few hours later when my motherboard short-circuited as I sat down to write. It fizzled and popped inside the case, a tiny wisp of smoke drifting out the vent. I freaked out, pulled the thing apart, beat my head against the desk, and finally sunk down in a concussive slump. It was early evening by then—help would have to wait til morning.

I sulked out to the sofa with notepad and paper, determined to march on.

Nothing came. Just the faint waft of burning circuitry from the direction of my office.

At last, I flipped the page and began to write this demon idea. The story that would become Demon: A Memoir, was finished six weeks later.

What you may not know about Demon:

-The manuscript took six years to sell.
-It was nearly published under the title The Appointment.
-Every detail of the setting is real, including Clay’s apartment house on Norfolk, 
the large house in Belmont and the artwork on display at the Boston Museum of 
Fine Arts.
-The dim sum restaurant, The China Pearl, is a regular stop for my sister (who 
lives in Boston) and me whenever I’m in town.

My father, my sister and I all have cameos in Demon. My sister immediately 
recognized the two of us standing in the Four Seasons’ Bristol Lounge scene. Dad, however, didn’t recognize himself (or his Gold Toe socks!).

For more Demon trivia, see the back of the book!
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Published on October 07, 2015 07:48 Tags: demon, demon-a-memoir, on-writing, tosca, tosca-lee

Behind the Scenes: On The Legend of Sheba

Why write about the famous Queen of Sheba?

My on-screen answers have to do with wanting to explore this rich, pagan queen who impressed the authors of Kings and Chronicles so much that they included what amounted to her endorsement of King Solomon in their narratives. But my first reason was that I wanted to be a girl again.

After writing the first-person characters of Clay in Demon and Judas in Iscariot, as well as numerous male characters in the Books of Mortals, I missed the female voice I had so enjoyed in Havah. And, being set nearly a thousand years before the time of Christ, the queen’s story would be much easier to research with more room for speculation than, say, Iscariot,

Wrong.

If Iscariot proved difficult for the sheer volume of material available on first century Israel, The Legend of Sheba proved difficult for the opposite reason. Scholars don’t even agree whether Almaqah, the primary god of Sheba (probably present-day Yemen) was a moon or sun deity. Never mind the involvement of the mysterious Ark of the Covenant and all the conspiracy theories surrounding its disappearance and hidden location. Once again, I consulted the experts: missionaries who had served in Yemen—a place too rife with conflict and kidnapping for me to travel for research—history professors, doctors of archaeology and the Hebrew Bible.

This time, I did not overwrite the story, but kept the heart of it forefront in my mind: the ideas of love, possession, and the desire to be truly known.

I had, by this time, begun to date a single father of four—a land developer and farmer who lived an hour away from me. (How we met is another story—one I will tell you if you ask me in person.) I set up shop on sunny days at his kitchen counter when my office became oppressive, a pillow wedged onto a wooden barstool, toes curled round the rungs. The banquet chapter and the bulk of Sheba and Solomon’s letters were written there in the country, out of reach of my cell phone service. I fell in love with a second man during that time—the queen’s loyal eunuch, Yafush, whom I shamelessly modeled after Karen Blixen’s butler Farah in Out of Africa, one of my favorite movies of all time.

The Legend of Sheba took several months longer than expected—about a year and a half—to write. It released September 9, 2014. Four days later, at my home Barnes & Noble book signing, my boyfriend proposed. (The story in photos is on my website.) By the time my next book releases, I will be getting married (you won’t mind if I forego book tour in lieu of a honeymoon, will you?)
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Published on November 10, 2015 21:01 Tags: behind-the-scenes, legend-of-sheba, on-writing, tosca, tosca-lee