Alegra Clarke on Writing (and Rewriting) a Novel

Following is a guest post from Eros-Alegra Clarke. Alegra won the 2007 Writer’s Digest annual writing competition for her story Salamander Prayer. I accompanied her to New York last year (find pics of our trip here) to pitch literary agents, and I’ve been following her journey to write her novel and get it published ever since.

Here Alegra writes about participating in NanoWriMo to get her rough draft finished.

The sharp-edged heat of the Southern Hemisphere summer is creeping over New Zealand and I find myself haunted by déjà vu. At this time last year I was preparing for the Writers Digest NYC trip, diving into the process of creating a novel with blind faith that in the end it would all work out—and it did. Here I am a year later, preparing to write a second evolution of the novel, a story that is now radically different from the original but somehow still connected.

The last time I wrote one of these blogs I had roughly settled upon a genre for the book. Now I have a title. My agent, Joel Gotler’s wisdom about the need for a title to guide the story’s theme was, as expected, full of truth. After receiving the thumbs-up on the title (it took quite a few attempts to get it right), the challenge of NaNoWriMo arrived on my doorstep with perfect timing. My M.A. thesis—the novel— was to be kicked off on Dec.1. November, I figured, would be the perfect month to close my eyes and jump, or rather, belly flop into the frigid waters of an unwritten story.

First, I set off to rectify my mistake of last year’s novel attempt; a lack of structuring my novel before writing. Using a novel planning book I created a formula for plotting the novel that would make a person with obsessive compulsive disorder feel as though he were slacking off. I posted a picture of my endeavors on my blog and horrified a few people. I was told I had turned novel plotting into a geek’s higher art form. I responded by informing my friends that I planned to top off my method by color coding character sections and scenes and then I cackled wildly.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to research and sketch out scenes before beginning NaNoWriMo so I decided to view the competition as a warm-up. I began Nov.1 with a fierce momentum gathering words to the page like a kid burying herself at the beach, fist after fist of sand pouring through my fingers. I wrote as I watched the presidential election. I wrote as my husband, Dan, and I prepared to haul our two children, both under the age of five, across the planet from New Zealand to California. People questioned the timing.

“It’ll be fine,” I declared to the naysayers, sweeping my arms through the air, “The great thing about writing is that you can do it anywhere!” I have learned that the only way to convince a doubting audience is a lot of wild gesticulation. At the very least it distracts them from listening too intently to your argument.

And it was fine. I continued to write wherever and whenever I could. I even have several photographs of me caught in mid-stride with my head down, notebook in hand, scribbling away. I cherish these ‘walking while writing’ pictures because it makes me appreciate how easily my family could have led me to the edge of a cliff but didn’t. It is always nice to know you’re loved.

It has been roughly two weeks since I hit ‘save’ on that draft and closed the document, turning my attention to research (something I have no real idea of how to do—anyone have any suggestions?) for the next month. On my kitchen table a stack of books ranging from the history of childbirth to sociopaths to Genesis to Stephen King sits waiting for me, some of the books already flowering with post-it notes.

My friend Greg recently challenged me to another writing deadline and I picked up the gauntlet with gratitude; a crazy challenge, a deadline, a reason to gesticulate grandly, are always things to embrace. As it has been pointed out before, writing is an action, and to be a writer is to write. When I go back to those 50,000 words from NaNoWriMo I’m looking forward to that experience particular to having written a rough draft straight through —returning to my work to discover that it has been playing in the dark while I wasn’t looking.

Tagged as: fiction writing