The Writing of From Scratch
I am beginning to be asked often, How did you write a book? My answers are not very glamorous or filled with writerly tricks. I am a first-time book writer. The words did not always pour out of me. I spent years thinking about the story and journaling about my life. When I sold From Scratch as a proposal, I spent weeks and months terrified that it wouldn’t all come together, that I had bitten off more than I could chew. However, I was committed to realizing this long-held dream. I had to do it, deep down to my bones or I knew some part of me would always regret never trying. And I had a deadline which, for me, is the sure fire way to get something done.
From Scratch: Beginnings
I had studied creative writing at UCLA Extension for years during my husband’s illness. Writing was the way I used my creativity to make sense of my experiences a young cancer caregiver, wife, mother, and artist. I wanted to stay close to my own inner life in the face of intense caregiving. It was vital to my own well being. Eventually, I completed their certificate program in Creative NonFiction the year after he passed.
UCLA is where I really learned about writing and where the first writings about this story emerged. I had wonderful instructors, engaged classmates and I learned much about craft, varieties of styles and structure. However, I did not yet know that I would write a book. It took six years of taking classes and workshops, before I began to feel like I had the core ingredients and story elements that might make for a book-length memoir. I had written hundreds of thousands of words. Still, I didn’t know where to begin.
Then, in the beginning of 2017, as I approached the fifth anniversary of my husband’s passing I felt ready to take a leap and write a book about what I had learned in our life together and in the wake of his death. I knew my summers in Sicily was a framework. So I started with writing an essay about my first trip to Sicily two years after we were married. It was a story I had been trying to write for years. Somehow I felt it was critical in telling a love story, a family story and a story about Sicily. Writing that essay “unlocked” the promise of the book for me.
From Scratch: The Proposal
When I completed the essay, I shared it with my sister. She in turn shared it with two influential people. I got a break. One of those people became my literary manager, Richard Abate. He told me he felt the essay was really a book. I told him I thought so too and he asked me to write a proposal. So I pulled out the book proposal that I had been tinkering with for years in workshop. Three intense weeks later, with much back and forth, we had a proposal he felt was ready to submit to editors.
It went out on Mother’s Day weekend which I felt was auspicious given the themes of the book. It was surreal when I found out an editor at Simon and Schuster wanted to buy the book on proposal. Even more surreal when I learned I had less than a year to deliver the entire manuscript. Oh my! I immediately cried, laughed, lept with joy and, let’s be honest, I went into sheer creative terror.
From Scratch: Staying on Track
Soon I devised a plan that I thought would work for writing From Scratch. I called on one of my workshop instructors and former UCLA teachers, Shawna Kenney. I asked her to be my writing coach. We agreed to meet weekly for the next year (through manuscript delivery and rewrites). She gave me everything from encouragement, a willing ear, writing prompts when I was stuck and, of course, she gave me discerning feedback along the way. She basically held my hand and said “You can do this. You know your story. …Now give me ten more pages.”
As a first time writer, I felt I needed someone else to “hold” the expanse and depth of the story with me as I puzzled out how the different events of my life all fit together. I needed to feel I wasn’t adrift at sea, lost in a complicated narrative that didn’t go anywhere. Other writers use writing groups or they can do this for themselves. But I knew I needed someone with whom I could hand over twenty pages of journal writing and have them highlight the parts that they felt connected up to the larger narrative. It was intimate and soul-bearing work.
From Scratch: Los Angeles to Sicily
I wrote From Scratch in two places – at home in LA, in my living room, in my bedroom, in my kitchen, in my office, in the backyard, even in the parking lot of Starbucks while my daughter did after-school activities. And I wrote a lot while I was in Sicily during the summer of 2017, especially the parts of the book that take place in Sicily. There was simply no substitute for the sights and sounds and food of Sicily to act as a muse. Sicily always opens my unconscious and my imagination. Once back in LA, I would sift through all the writing and many emails from previous summers in Sicily. Those journal entries, emails to the States and the Sicilian note-taking sessions became the heart of the Sicily passages in the book. And I did a fair amount of research using personal documents I had at home to verify what I remembered.
When I did turn in the manuscript to my editor, it was about 30,000 words over and almost 100 pages longer than what it was supposed to be. HA! But boy, did it feel good to have completed the many, many drafts that led to a complete manuscript. I celebrated with champagne. Every writer should, champagne or otherwise.
From Scratch: The Editing and Completion
Of course, that was just the beginning. When I got my editor’s notes back, they were extensive. The whole manuscript was marked up. And I basically had two months to cut almost 100 pages; restructure the whole book; and write new chapters that filled in unresolved parts of the story. That was a low day. I had spent almost a year writing something that was so far from being done, farther still from being published. I was a little panicked. I cried. A lot. And then, at the advice of many wise and experienced writer friends, I began to take each note one-by-one, each chapter page-by-page and I started over. I chose to not do acting work during that time so that I could stay on schedule. Basically, I just got my daughter to school, wrote, researched, picked her up, made dinner, cleaned and started over again the next day.
Two months later, I had a manuscript that was structurally sound. The story was written. And, serendipitously, I completed the final rewrite while in Sicily. I wanted to complete From Scratch on my birthday (which also happens to be my wedding anniversary with Saro). That was the summer of 2018, one year and two months from when I had sent out the proposal.
I still can’t believe it is written. And I’m still getting used to getting a full night’s sleep. 
