Against a backdrop of difficult news coming from Washington, I write and revise my novel. Four hours a day, every day, I block out phone calls and emails and texts (mostly) and try not to think about the latest disturbing executive orders. I start by reading through and finessing the beginning of my book, my prologue. Editing this prologue every day helps me get going on the book, reminds me what the book is all about. And I just like being there.
The first chapter usually introduces the main character and informs about the situation she is in, and that was how I started my previous draft, putting my protagonist at her father’s grave. She is a complicated woman, and she is so entrenched in her life, so saturated in her history that it was hard to see through her eyes how things really are. So when I shared the novel with my agent, Bill, he suggested the book needed a prologue.
Well, Hallelujah and Praise the Holy Ghost! At first I thought it would be to hard, but it turned out to be very possible and, though not easy, the most natural thing in the world. My main character does not appear in the prologue, but everybody else does, and we get a view of all these folks as they really are, before we see them through the eyes of my protagonist. No surprise that Bill was right!
So every morning I start with the prologue and then move on to other parts of the book. After a day of writing or revising various parts of the book, I look forward to going back to the beginning the next day. After spending time in chapters 15 and 16, I feel I know a little more and have a better sense of what will make the beginning just right when I have it in my fingers again.
The natural thing to do here would be to share the beginning of the first chapter with you, but I am very uncertain about that first line, and I change it every day. I will probably tinker with it every day until somebody makes me stop.
Actually, I do something before I start working on my prologue; I warm myself up by working on a poem. Just to remind myself that language is the big deal here, that writing is all about language. And my poems give me huge pleasure—often they make me laugh. Here is the first line of my latest poem
A naked man stumbles out of the foam
And of course I can’t spend all day with naked men or even with my novel. I must feed the donkeys and the cats and give the husband some love. This 28-second video is the donkeys munching hay on a very cold night. After I kiss them goodnight, I try to sleep well, despite the day’s portion of dispiriting news, and then I wake up and I write a world where difficult problems get worked out, the kind of world I want to live in.
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