NaNo 2009 is over, and I have 80k words of novel to revise.
First off, I want to thank my family, my fingers, Holly, and Steve Jobs for making this possible.
On to new business.
The first worksheet for How To Revise Your Novel asks the question:
What was the idea that made you want to write your story in the first place?
There are four blank lines to be filled with handwriting. Okay. Um. Handwriting.
Aside from that, there is the whole problem that this story has its own backstory, which I don’t think will fit into four lines.
Let me try:
I wanted to tell the story of a woman who, rather than reinventing herself–for she was a businesswoman at the start and at the end–discovers and integrates a new part of herself.
Okay, that would fit into the space provided, and maybe that’s all that Holly had in mind.
It was more than that, of course.
In the beginning it was a tight little story about a woman coming out of an unhappy, broke-down marriage and how she went looking for the father she had never known. She had grown up the only child of an unhappy mother. Her father had been a sailor who had broken her mother’s heart, finances, and health by abandoning her and their small child to return to the sea. So my MC grew up on stories about how awful her father was. She put herself through college with lots of hard work, then fell for some guy, married him, found out he was Not For Her (possibly because he cheated on her, but I don’t remember very well), and became unmarried. I think the marriage never had financial security, not because of a lack of earnings, but because of a lack of direction and discipline. In other words, they, or maybe just he, blew money like soap bubbles.
She has troubles, too. For instance, she’s a chain smoker. There’s something about being disappointed in love that creates the need to smoke, drink, or eat too much, IMO. She lives on cigarettes, vending machine snacks, resentment, and fear. After growing up fatherless and then leaving a ruined marriage, she has definite fears, resentments, and longings toward the male species in general, and toward her father in particular. She believes she is incomplete because these longings are unfulfilled.
With nothing left to lose, because she has nothing left, she tracks his movements till she hits a dead end in a small town on the central California coast. She goes there, discovers that her father is dead, but there are a few people who knew him. She interviews them, and comes to know a man who certainly wasn’t Ward Cleaver, but who wasn’t Satan, either. Mainly, he just wasn’t cut out to be a husband and father.
Seemingly, this story doesn’t have a good ending. Her father is dead, so there’s no big, “I didn’t come back because I wasn’t good enough for your mother but I’d love to be in both your lives now” scene. He’s dead. I have a feeling that if he had been alive, he would have been a bigger disappointment to her than he was dead. Maybe the point of it all is that producing children is easy, being a parent is hard. And it may not be possible to say which is harder, mothering or fathering. Maybe it’s harder to be a mother, simply because it’s a trap–women have very few options, fewer yet if they have kids. Maybe it’s harder to be a father because men do have lots of options, and the presence or absence of kids means nothing, either to a man’s job opportunities or to his job responsibilities. This is why the children of a man’s second marriage are spoiled where the children of his first marriage were ignored.
So, in this story, what the MC got was a mental photo of her father, which also gave her a new appreciation of her mother, because all her life she had figured that her mother had simply driven her father away with her whiny anger. In her imagination, her father was a good man, a hero of sorts, who just had to get out there and deal with the world for the good of all mankind, and for the good her her, specifically. That crashed.
What rises from that crash is her realization that no one can ruin your life but yourself. Just as her father abandoned her and her mother, her husband also abandoned her. She could let herself slide into the Whiny Anger Camp, or she could see her divorce as a lucky escape from unhappiness, a new chance at life. She could also acknowledge her mother’s heroism in keeping her, supporting her, and doing the best she could, even if she whined about it.
Note: I don’t think the mother was whining so much as trying her best to warn her daughter about sailors.
Now, the original story is short–would have been maybe 9 or 10k words. It would have made a terrible movie. Black and white talking heads.
Well, folks, is that Deep Enough for you?
So, when I first thought of this story, I was in a screenwriting class at the UCLA extension. I got as far as saying that a divorced woman goes to this town and talks to this guy who owns a boatyard. My instructor, a minor movie producer and banal to the bone, immediately said, “Oh, a romantic comedy! Great!” Because, you know, any story that features characters from both sexes must automatically be a romance, AKA Date Movie. And, if it features characters of the same sex, it’s a gay romance. Thus spake Hollowood.
Gobsmacked, insulted, and needing brownie points, I reached into my I Am A Professional bag (sturdy canvas, $19.99 at the Bookstore at the Center of the University of Life) and pulled out a romantic comedy with much the same underpinnings, and surprisingly, much the same theme.
So, for some reason, I decided to do NaNo in 2009–well, to jazz up my writing, which had bogged down in self-doubt and Martha-ism. And, for some reason, I pulled out this 1994 story to write. No longer had any written files, but the idea was still there, which is a pretty good indication that if I didn’t write it then it would clutter up my head forever.
Dusted off, it looked pretty good to me. A novel is much freer medium than a screenplay. More personal, more flexible, much less remunerative and not at all collaborative. For the writer, a novel is more responsibility, too. No house, car, dress, town, or sunset exists unless the writer builds it. The screenwriter can say:
Imperial Bay, a small, dried-up nowheresville.
The location scout will take the director’s ideas and go off with a chunk of budget and a Cool Pix and find a place to shoot the story.
The novelist must pave and pot-hole each street, build and weather each dock, bench, diner, and seedy motel.
So, more work for less pay. Hey! My productivity is up!
But also more fun.
So, that’s what I was hoping for when I wrote the book:
I wanted to tell the story of a woman who, rather than reinventing herself–for she was a businesswoman at the start and at the end–discovers and integrates a new part of herself.
Only now it’s funny, knock wood, and I designed every stick of furniture myself. Mahogany.
Oh, why I didn’t write the movie:
While I was in Los Angeles writing the movie about a woman who searches for her father, only to find that he has already died–my own father passed away down in Oklahoma.
I dropped out of class to go home and help my family–I would have dropped out anyway, because my dad really was a hero, the everyday kind, the kind I needed and still love best. And, you know, Dad, I put a big damn sailboat in this story because, remember how you and I used to dream of sailing the South Pacific? Bon Voyage, Daddio, catch you on the flip-flop!