Killing Your Babies

I have a draft of what I have been calling The Big Damn Epic on this blog and another that is dated from 1998. I have proto-versions of it that date to 1995, and characters/concepts that go back to 1992, and probably earlier. This particular novel has been with me for so long, it's hard to remember a time without it. It has never worked. The seeds of a good story were planted before the ground was fertile enough for them, and I have spent over a decade waiting for the soil to mature. I can't say it has now, but fruit hanging too long on the vine goes rotten. Last year I started a last ditch effort to rescue the novel before it went bad; that attempt, like every annual one going back a decade, ultimately failed.

I work all day long in front of a computer, writing, and so when I get home my energy and fire is usually tapped. I had reached a very long dry spot before Elizabeth, and was afraid I had run completely dry. That kind of fear will keep you up at night, and it did. Elizabeth proved to me that I had still had the fire, still had something left in the well, but it didn't give me the direction I needed. Did I go forward with the idea for the sequel? Another novel? Or do I go back to the Big Damn Epic, and try and raise this thing from the dead one last time?

The last failed draft came out of that confusion. Before I even finished it, I knew it was wrong. "Wandering Star" - I can say the title now, because it is no longer the title - seemed to be an endless struggle for me. I wanted to finish it, to move on with my creative life and so I started fantasizing - as one might with a spouse one can no longer stand - about murdering my heroine. Sojourner occupies a place in my heart about as large as a first-love does. I have been with her longer than I have any one in a real relationship; but she had become stifiling. Suffocating.

(What follows I guess must be SPOILERS for future readers - yes, all two of you:)

I started to dream about killing her at the end of the novel - instantly disintegrating my grandiose plans for an epic trilogy, the second part already in the can - but divorcing myself from the long term committment of those books wasn't enough. I had to be rid of this novel, the unfinishable book. One day, it just occured to me: just kill her. Right in the middle of the book, right in the midst of the quest, right as she started to cement.

And it freed the novel. It freed me. It unlocked all the threads I could never weave - suddenly agendas and actions and themes came into relief. The entire architecture of the novel coalesced. Since then, that well has found new depth and I have a queue of novels waiting to be written. The reason for this long post is I've just finished the chapter in which she dies, and I am 212 pages into a novel I am finally excited to write for the first time in a decade. The thread of the book hasn't changed - it's remarkably similar to what it was in 1998 - but the details have evolved considerably, and in ways I never could have imagined.