Writing a book can teach you about life, how to live your days, if you let it. Take this thing we call faith, this mystery that is as real in its presence as it is in its absence. You need it. The book cannot get written without it. But what is it? The kind of faith you need, the one you’re looking for, the kind you wait for open-eyed and thirsty is more than a belief. I believe in myself. I believe I can do it. My experience is that this kind of mental faith (for belief is a thing of the head) doesn’t get you too far. The faith that works is the kind that triggers surrender and that follows it. This vision of a book that I have, there’s no way that I can make it real. The work is beyond my powers and yet it must be done. I put my foot in the water, testing, and I wade in slowly. Or I dive in careless of depths or petrels. Faith is this two-chambered heart of giving up and going on. And as the book gets written sentence by sentence yet another kind of faith is needed. Let’s call it faith in the reality of your creation. The world that you are creating is made real and kept alive by your faith. You must not doubt your creation’s power or its purpose or its goodness. The world you have created has been made real by your faith and now you begin to love. You love your characters, the things that happen to them, the world they live in. Faith has become love. And that’s what it always wanted to be.
May 29, 2010
June 21, 2009
The First Novel
Periodically I get inquiries from young people (and older ones too) who want to write or publish their first novel. By way of response, I would like to share with you some thoughts about the writing of my first novel, The Way of the Jaguar.
I started writing Jaguar about seven years before it was published. Of course I was not writing continuously. In terms of time frames, the process of creation went like this. I wrote pretty much every day for about eight months and came out with what I thought was a best seller and which I proceeded to send out to agents and publishing houses and in the process picked up dozens of rejections. Besides sending it out to publishers and agents I gave the book to a few friends and one or two gave me helpful comments. I think that at this time I put the book away for about three years. When I picked the manuscript again, I started to re-write the whole book. I would begin each writing session by reading a scene of what I had written before and then I would start writing from scratch. Many of the same scenes were kept, but they were embodied in different language. But more significantly, many more scenes were added. This re-writing took about a year. Again I sent it out and again amidst the many rejections I received a letter from a publisher who told me that the book was an “unpolished gem” and she was specific about what did not work for her. This is when the third version of the book came into being. In this third version I did not re-write totally from scratch I re-structured. I connected. I changed where the story started, organized chapters into more logical common themes and time frames. By this time I knew that the book was not the type that would be picked up by a commercial publisher so I sent it to the type of small non-profit literary presses that specialized in Hispanic-American literature. That’s when Bilingual Review Press out of Arizona State University decided to publish it. A few months later, the book won one of the Chicano/Latino Literary Awards.
This is sort of the external history of the book. The internal history is more complicated. I have always wanted to be a writer. When I was nine years old my father bought me a typewriter, which I still have. But wanting to be a writer and writing are two different things. I majored in English in Philosophy in college. I studied Latin American literature at Harvard because I thought graduate school would help me write. I have kept a journal since I was in high school and I think that that’s how the book was born. The book is the daily journal of a person on death row. One day when I was writing in my journal I decided to imagine that I was a prisoner who was about to die. So then I just started inventing. The book is a grafting, a mixing of reality and fantasy. For example, the law firm that I used to work at had these yearly outings at a country club and I took that and created a scene where the main character was at a similar outing in the pool with the person he loved.
In thinking back, I see that I wrote this book at a particularly difficult period of my life. Writing is good therapy. But, of course, good therapy does not always result in good writing. The book was published because I was able to transform the writing that was helpful to me into good writing. The Way of the Jaguar was published in 2000. My attitudes toward writing have changed somewhat since then. Now I write books whose main characters are young people. But the experience of writing that first book showed me how to discover and accept the purpose of writing in my life.
February 28, 2009
Beginnings- Marcelo in the Real World
March 1, 2009 is the official release date for Marcelo in the Real World. I was looking in my journals the other day and ran into an entry written back in May of 2005 that talked about writing a story from the point of view of the son of Aurora, the protagonist of the novel I was then in the midst of writing. A few weeks later, I started experimenting with a story about Marcelo, the son of Aurora. What happened in the four years that followed can best be described as “false starts that got me closer to where the story wanted to go.” I would say that at least three versions of Marcelo were produced over a three year period before the right one chose to reveal itself. I wonder sometimes whether there was anyway to have gone straight to the final version and skip the pain of not getting it right. I’m inclined to think that with some books you can and with some you can’t. Marcelo was one of those books that required trial and error. I can see now that the character of Marcelo didn’t change that much all along and that is a good sign. It means that throughout, I somehow managed to remain true to the initial vision, the force that impelled me to create a character like Marcelo and to write about him.
You may be a young person who has a book you want to write. But you want it written and published like right now. You have the idea for the book in your head and maybe forty typed pages written already. You want to finish it and publish it before the school year is over if possible. You get the picture. In those forty pages of yours, there is a seed that may follow its course and grow into the book you are writing or maybe it will grow some place else. Please know that it will not be wasted. The probabilities that you have a “false start” in your hands are high. But it may also be a false start that gets you closer to where the story wants to go.
May Marcelo do well in the Real World. I send him out with all the blessings of a proud father. He persevered and kept insisting, even clamoring to be born, and so he did.
