Puzzles

Dear Karen,

I envy you being in the midst of writing a novel. I miss the puzzle of writing, the way my mind goes blank on everything else as I try to figure out the missing pieces. Maybe I need to find the bridge from one scene to another. Maybe I need to allow a minor character to become a major character. Maybe my task is naturalizing dialogue, or grounding the character in scene, or creating more emotion. Whatever it is, I love the problem solving that is part of writing a long piece of fiction.

The book launch of my new novel on Thursday night was amazing. It was the sort of thing for which the word ineffable was created. I taught the next day. The day after that I went to Winston Salem where I sold one book. Yesterday I had a radio interview. I am receiving the love. I am loving the love. But today I am grateful to have a day off, a day with nothing scheduled except taking a poster to a bookshop fifteen miles away, where I will be giving a reading on Saturday. I finally have time to consider the next book and to quiet my mind. I need the quiet. I need the next work too, but the next work is as elusive as the previous work was vocal and demanding. It is an odd, odd life, this intuitive creating of stories.

I have a philosophy about stories. I believe they are looking for their tellers. I believe a writer does not choose a story so much as a story chooses a writer. I believe that every story I write opens the way for the next story. I have tried to say no to stories. I have tried to say no to the ones that scare me, and the ones that I feel too inadequate to write, but of course these are the ones that I can’t say no to. It would be like walking past a starving, abandoned child. So what if I don’t have any food. I would have to pick that child up and find a way to get food. So it is with a story. If I turn my back on the one that has chosen me, it will only stay in my mind. It will bother me until I go back and pick it up and say okay. Okay, I don’t know how I will do it, but I will do it. I don’t know if I can do you justice, but I will try. I will spend time with you. I will search for the missing pieces of you. I will try, with my limited skill sets, to make you whole, and then I will let you go out into the world, and I will continue to wander along until the next story reaches out and grabs my ankles and says YOU.

It seems that the character who has chosen me now is mute. It seems that she needs me to be her voice. Karen, it just gets scarier and scarier, with each new work. Or so I sometimes think. So I think today, anyway.

Yesterday the interviewer asked me if I was scared while writing the book most recently published. I answered no. And I really wasn’t, or at least that’s not what I remember. What I remember is being immersed in the work, being interested in the puzzle of it, being so into it that nothing could have pulled me away. And being grateful that this story had reached out and grabbed my ankles and said YOU.

And now my ankles feel grabbed again, but this time by a character who it seems is not quite able to talk. And so I go in search of her. I am off to the library. Know that you and your writing and your characters, whom I have not even met yet, are in my heart.

Love,

Nancy