Jeannine Atkins

Since I put my manuscript into big envelopes for my writing group yesterday, I’ve made some notes about changes I need to make. But I’m calling this the end of a pretty polished draft. It enjoyed working with those last fifty pages, having a nice pile beside me that I poked and prodded now and then, taking out or adding sentences. I feel ready to do more shuffling after my writing group meets, but I’m also making notes about my next project.

And I get to give the novel to my husband, who’s heard about it for so long, who’s watched me at the computer, doing what? He said, “I know it will be good. The only question is will it be good enough for you?”

Last night I happened to be reading Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, which includes a wonderful talk she gave at Columbia about writing. She writes: “Who can find anything bad to say about the last day of a novel? It’s a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.” (p.107)

Yes, that was fun: and just in time to hit the grocery stores for a turkey and start thinking about pie.I can knit, and repot the African violets, and stick the paperwhite bulbs into gravel. I can read, get past the first three chapters of A.S. Byatt's scarily thick but intriguing The Children's Book; maybe this will be the winter I read the final (okay, for me that means four) volumes of Harry Potter. And planning out a new project is kind of delicious, too.

I keep a folder un-creatively labeled Notes for my work in progress. In here I tuck away descriptions of places, animals, people that don’t fit where I am at the moment. I also put scraps of dialog that don’t belong, some plot ideas, moments that come to me when trying to sleep, character descriptions, edges of scenes, bent-out-of-shape metaphors: like an attic filled with boxes, there are some things in excellent repair, others that could be fiddled with and saved, and some things that will get tossed when I’m in the deleting mood.

The folder doesn’t seem appealing on a glance, but while there is junk to be waded through, I know it holds something that might feel like a gift to myself. When I’m stuck with my writing, sometimes starting out on a writing day, or feeling discouraged or bogged down, I may begin looking through here then finding a place to insert the sentence, phrase, of paragraph. I get to think: it fits! It looks good! And I’m no longer in a mire, sometimes working out from the place where I put this gift or ready to go back to the boggy place I left.

I’m at a point where this folder is down to a scant nine pages, while I’m working on the final chapters. Will someone ever get to eat that noted feast of roast lamb with thyme, fragrant grains, olives, figs, pears, and fresh hot bread? Hear round pigeons croon? I don’t yet know. But I'm glad to have that thin folder of notes that might prod or lift me through the end.

The hydrangeas I planted a few years ago because they’re one of my daughter’s favorite flowers first turn cream-colored, then rosy, and finally a golden-brown. If the deer don’t eat off their tips, they’ll bloom again next year. This I can count on. Though we notice that “if.” So often it follows “always.”



I’ve been writing and complaining all summer and fall about my pace, the small steps forward, the awkward ones back. I’m still doing that shuffling. But the gaps between good sentences are smaller. The characters are showing rather intriguing faces, and speaking up. Even the arc is starting to look sturdy.

I hope I’m finding a place here between self-frustration and bragging. I’m trying to stay true to how I feel as I creep a little farther forward. Sometimes, like hiking through the woods today with Mary and the dogs, I whine about my pace. But the good news is that I like what’s behind me and the small surprises that keep coming. I’ve got to accept my pace because, well, as with most acceptance issues, I don’t have a choice. And besides, without too many side looks at calendars and clocks, it’s getting me to a place where I’m starting to feel proud.

Thank you for keeping me company along the way!

Lovely Melodye newport2newport pulled up soft chairs, put on tea, and invited us to join her while revising this weekend. And when Lorraine lorrainemt and I showed up in hip boots and hauling axes this remarkable hostess let us in. Though gently suggesting the axes might go in the closet, lest the gunk on them scare away fledgling ideas.

She’s right: there’s a time for axes and a time to stash them. I had to wait very quietly and patiently for all the ideas on my pages: now many need to be cut, but some I’m very happy to have. And the sight of that axe indeed would have meant some would never have seen the light of day.

But now it’s time for lumberjack work. I make it gentler by saving a draft. Telling myself these sentences, paragraphs, chapters are not totally gone. Just stored. Like clothes I know will never fit again, but maybe…

Last Thursday my writing group told me what I kind of knew: I’ve got characters, details, history, even some plot, but not the overriding arc. So I’m cutting much of what’s there, trying to clear a path for something that rises and falls and ends in a satisfying way. I’m working today, and those with or without axes are welcome. Just expect to smell some rough fresh-cut thatch along with the pot of Irish Breakfast. You can wear a dress or plaid flannel, a fancy hat or something with a net to protect you from storms of insects we might disturb with our hacking. Hey storming insects: could they be what I need? What’s that sting on my neck? Let’s begin.

Hear that? Sounding sort of like puzzle pieces falling into a pattern, or dominoes dropping into line, some sentences are landing in proper paragraphs and scenes finding their places into chapters. I’ve still got a long way to go, but the pesky first half now looks like more than a mass of pieces with edges that fit nowhere. And as they fall, I’m thinking of new conversations and scenes they can stir up.

I’m happy, though I’ve been blog-neglecting. I’ve got a day of writing scheduled where I hope to touch Chapter 13. Tomorrow Jo Knowles and some friends will meet again for good coffee and inspiration at Esselon Café. Join us in person or spirit at noon! The tables are big. Other than that, I’m not venturing far and meaning to get my pleasure from seeing words fall into place – click, clack, click – and a page, then another, and another, start to look like a pile.

My walking buddy Mary is away on vacation, but I’m still getting out with a dog or two. The big dog likes going to the woods with me, but he doesn’t stick to the paths as I do. Parker zips and jogs to check out swamps and squirrels. At almost nine years old, he’s happy with a loop, or maybe two; while enthusiastic and fit, he doesn’t have the impulse and propulsion of Mary’s two year old dog. And unlike Mary, I don’t keep a pedometer in my pocket, (along with dog biscuits),. I’m content with one loop, but because I know when Mary comes home she’ll be listening to how heavy I breathe on the hill, and because she’ll ask, and because it’s already embarrassing enough that this is my exercise while Mary considers it just a prelude to the gym, I make myself walk two loops. But seldom the three we do together. When she’s along, I can get around the bend because I don’t want to be the laggard – or interrupt the conversation. I can get around on the force of hearing the latest re Mary’s job, health, marriage, garden, thoughts on Teddy Kennedy and health care reform, etc.

At my summer writing place on the porch, it’s a different story. Nobody’s watching or counting, nobody cares too much. I’ve got to make those corners on my own. Today I’m telling myself to write until my pen, swiped from Crowne Plaza at the last NESCBWI conference, runs out. (you’d think they’d make hotel pent to last a short time, but somehow they don’t). I give myself mini-deadlines – finish revising these three pages – and when I’m done that, say, yay me, or something like that, check email, LJ, and now Facebook as reward (so thanks to all you writers!) and begin again. I keep the book I started reading at my elbow for promised company later.

Of course it’s not all about my challenging myself re how much ink a purloined pen holds and getting the breath of someone else’s words. I’ll find some small rewards in writing. Often I plod, and then, words topple into place. Or a new scene starts to come up out from under my fingers. I like things to be tight, but sometimes time must pass, and I get a little thrill whenever I find a new way to skip ahead in a few words, even if they’re as simple as changing paragraphs and saying, “Next week…” This always makes me feel like I’m getting away with something. I savor the look of a slight pile of pages as if I’ve never before seen such a sight. Or a glimpse on the horizon of Chapter 11. As if I’d never seen it before, loved it, got trapped, and let it send me back to Chapter One. No, no, it’s all new now.

Soon I get to go over everything one last-ish (ha!) time for my writing group, make an attachment, and hit: send! That little button-hitting moment is a thrill every time.

Anyone with good tricks about keeping yourself stuck to your chair? Or just pass me something caffiennated: thanks!

Wasn’t it last week that I was all braggy and ecstatic about naming chapters in the double digits? Well, I’m still at Chapter 11. And not really. I made a plot change which sent a lot of scenes rolling and unraveling. Some were chopped. I salvaged a sentence or two in others.

I was feeling kind of bummed when Lorriane lorrainemt, who’d been hard at work on Chapter 11 of her novel, wrote in a comment: “Yay for decisions that make us go backward to go forward.”

Could I have a better Chapter 11 buddy? Thank you, Lorraine, for the reminder that what matters is whether the change is for the good. Who’s counting? Well, we do. But I love the idea that counting backwards also works.

And thank you readers and supporters and company-keepers for taking deep breaths with me and hanging in. It’s going to be a slow slog back to Chapter 11, but you help remind me that I’ll make it. And somewhere along the way I’ll get a comment from you or one of my characters that shoves a sentence into exactly the right place. I’ll creep forward, tip backwards, shuttle sideways, and stay alert for the magic.

As we ate breakfast on the porch, my husband looked at my computer and asked, “So when can I read that book?”

“My goal is the end of August. It might still be a bit rough, but…”

He nodded. I’ve been working on this in various forms, stopping for various other projects, for years, but he knows I’m slow. Which is one reason why I like summer – almost everyone slows their pace, which matches my style of writing. Never fast. Leaving some spaces to dream.

I just finished a quite pretty draft of chapter ten, and like a kid with their first birthday in the double digits, I’m psyched. I expect what I’m now calling Conversations with the World to leave home around age, I mean chapter, eighteen, so I’m past the half way mark. The final chapters are all done in rough forms, so it’s rearranging and throwing out some wreckage and polishing what’s good that lies ahead. I’m fairly confident that this time through the foreword movement makes sense, though who can ever get those promises, on roads that have never yet been taken? So it’s all word by word, page and page, with lots of hope thrown in.

Working, taking breaks. I recently read Loree’s lgburns
blog with some great quotes from the book Creative Nonfiction, and in her reply to my comment she noted how it seemed helpful to read a good book on craft, but was it really procrastination? Oh that fuzzy line between inspiration and procrastination.

But when the clouds disappeared and I decided to swim, I was pretty sure that was not procrastination. After all, I want to write, but not with every joint making creaking sounds. Moving my whole arms, not just my fingers and elbows, felt good. Plus I got to see a toddler in a pink bathing suit running in circles on the sand, chattering and singing to herself. Which is kind of what it’s all about.

When I was driving back home down the rough road, a stranger flagged me down.

“I’m not from here,” he said. As in he-ah. “I’m from Texas, staying at the hotel ov-ah there. I took a walk and saw the sign.”

I nodded.

“So is that a joke? Is there really a beach?”



I laughed. “Yeah, it looks kind of unofficial, but there really is a lake, just a few minutes walk.” (You can’t really read the scrawl beneath the evergreen picture, about Xmas trees for sale.)

“I thought it might be a joke,” he repeated, then walked on while I drove out.

It really is a lovely lake that lets me float on my back, and reminds me that it’s good to spend a bit of time staring at the sky. It’s where, long ago, my daughter and her friends used to fling Barbies and plastic dinos and try to catch them as they drifted through the water.





When I told my husband I’d have a draft of my novel by the end of summer, I don’t want him saying, “Is this a joke?” Not that he would. But I mean I don’t want it to look too much like a hand-scrawled sign. I want him to be sure that there really is a lake.

A friend here on LJ recently wrote about a leery relationship with works in progress. I began to wonder if this may be because she has a small kindergarten, or at least triplets, of projects. When several noisy books-to-be are tugging on your trousers, how do you choose? Sometimes do you just shut the door on all to stop the noise?

I’m feeling the temptation now to shut the door as I pull together a few years of notes on my novel-with-poems. I'm raking pieces together, plugging in holes, trying to pull together a few finished chapters I can bring to my writing group. I want something pretty in my life, something that at least at first glance appears to be finished.

But I get distracted typing notes for another project that calls. I collect ideas and put them in very messy folders. Should I be giving these my focus instead? In some ways, the Voices of the New are always louder. There’s all that possibility, the salty taste of what’s unknown which, let’s face it, is attractive. We hear the promises, and don’t yet know the problems.

But with just a bit of pinching I can remind myself I love my older project, too. For better or for worse, in sickness or in health, to swipe a line. There are fewer surprises, but there are surprises. And while I like being dreamy, trying out this and that, spilling out uncommitted scenes riddled with gaps, if I ever want an adorable child – or even a loud rascal - to pick up a new book with my name on it, I’ll have to go through the big clean up at the end, wrestling fragments and run-ons into proper sentences.

So I’m keeping on with the old. Trying to celebrate the small beauty of a new sentence and have faith in time as something that will give me more chances once I finish what I started.


Azalea, blue-star flowers, and iris by my porch: