Fever Dream

“Do not worry. You have always written before and you
will write now.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

It’s been a long time since I shared another story here. Mostly, I’ve been preoccupied working on the second draft of the novel I finished writing in June. Yes! I finished it. I could hardly believe it myself when I wrote The End. In fact, I had to keep going back to check those two words to make sure I hadn’t imagined the entire process.

From the first chapter to the last, the writing of it poured out of me during the span of a little over a year. I can’t say why or how that happened because it seems like a fever dream, as I look back on it today. The words were flowing all of a sudden. The plot possessed me to the point I lost sleep and sometimes couldn’t tell if I was awake or dreaming the scenes. The characters became real people, their voices constantly interrupting my thoughts like toddlers demanding to know the why of everything.

I filled notebooks with scribbles of dialogue, plot points, and disjointed observations. I’ve gone back recently to try to decipher the notes I wrote. Often they were made at around four a.m., right after I jolted awake with a thought I needed to jot down before it escaped me forever. There were many times I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I finally gave in and got up, made coffee, and sat at the dining room table to quietly write until the time I usually got up. Then I would shower and start my day like any other day. Tired, but happy.

Somewhere in the middle of a messy, chicken-scratched page of plotting notes I wrote this: It’s not enough to be happy enough. I want more. At sunrise. On a boat. This time won’t last forever. Set the course. One of the characters in my novel is a musician and I think these might be his lyrics to a song. I didn’t use them in the story. I did, however, give him this bit of dialogue in the first chapter, “You know it’s okay to be grateful for what you have and still want more for yourself.” I suspect I was telling myself the same thing.

For the first time in years there’s been room in my life to explore the creative interests that used to give me so much happiness. Writing is the most important one, yet it’s an interest I’ve given the least amount of care and attention to. Why? Because I turned off that faucet a long time ago. The very nature of writing stirs memories and sometimes memories hurt. It became easier for me to move forward and not look back. Sometimes a drop would trickle out to remind me I used to be good at it. A poem. A paragraph. A witty observation. Then I’d get busy again and the words abruptly ended. Busy work, I call it. The things we preoccupy ourselves with to avoid looking inward.

This time was different. I gave myself permission to turn the tap on and leave it running. More importantly, every word I wrote was for myself. I didn’t think about who might read it. There was no imaginary audience in my mind. No sneaky editorial comments trying to derail me. No grammar police. No thoughts about publishing or rejection or doubting the process. No deadlines. Just me, moving forward page by page. Chapter by chapter. Moving forward, while also daring to glance over my shoulder from time to time.

Mostly it has been a joy to write again. Never hard, just all-consuming. Oh, how I’ve laughed at my own dialogue. I’ve gone back a number of times to read some conversations and cackled at them all over again. Slowly I fell in love with my characters, while at the same time not always understanding them. Near the end I wrote a scene that came out of nowhere and made me cry. I closed my laptop after writing it. I opened it again hours later and tried to take it back and turn it into something else. I really wanted to move the scene in a completely different direction because how could my characters hurt each other like that? Then I realized what I was doing was creating human beings. Humans make mistakes. So it remained the same, while I dug deep to find a believable way to help them grow together from the experience. Just like in real life.

A year is a long time. I expected to feel indecisive when I typed The End. Is it truly done? Don’t I have more to say about it? My husband once commented that I must be reaching the end of the book because I’d started to look sad while writing. Truthfully, I didn’t want the story to end. It had become comfortable. A refuge, of sorts. Yet there was no denying that what I was feeling was peace. It was done. I took a moment to enjoy the accomplishment, to be proud of myself. I printed it and held the stack of pages in my hands. Felt the weight. The work. I thought about my mom. How I wished she could read it. How I’d put a little of her personality into the grandfather character. How I’d put a lot of myself into all of it.

The End.

Only it really isn’t. I set the story aside to give it space and time before editing began. Let it percolate, a long ago creative writing teacher used to tell me. My characters had stopped speaking to me in the middle of the night. My dreams were my own again. I immediately started gathering notes for a plot idea that developed from the first book. I didn’t want to lose the momentum. I felt guilty about liking these new characters, as much or maybe even more than the first ones. They’re different, exciting. They have a lot to say, but in a gentler way. They’re not as rude as the others because they don’t interrupt my sleep to shout their ideas. It’s like they understand their story can’t be fully explored until I revisit the one that came before theirs.

So that’s what I’ve been doing, revisiting the place I started at. After weeks of letting it percolate, I fully expected not to like the story as much. I thought I’d be more critical, less enamoured. I have to say that I’m loving it just as much the second time around. It’s rough around the edges, often messy in spots. But it still feels like a gift from myself.