My Book's Skeleton and the Imaginary Interview

What was your writing process like?

My writing process was very chaotic and out of order.* Words or images would come to me at random, so I'd write them down and then build scenes around them. It felt a bit like having pieces from several puzzles on the table but not knowing how or which ones fit together.

Where did you get the idea for the book?

This story started with a phrase that popped into my brain as I came out of the shower one day in Ecuador: "I was born with grey eyes." I unpacked all the isolation and rejection that Tea feels and her quest to accept herself from that one phrase.

How long did it take?

I wrote countless drafts over my three years of Nanowrimo (2015 to 2017), although I started collecting ideas for a novel in a notebook in 2007. I can pretty much say that only a few great-grandchildren of those ideas ever made it into the final book, thankfully! The second half came together quickly and has pretty much stayed the same through all my drafts, but it was only in 2017 that I was able to write a coherent first half, mostly thanks to another inspirational phrase that popped into my brain, "You have been chosen." That solved how Tea ends up at Riderhill despite her eyes and why they don't quite know what to do with her. They can't send her away but they don't let her in either, so she ends up in the middle, still searching to belong.

* Like now, I'm writing the answer to an imagined interview question about the published - and hopefully wildly successful - book when I've just finished the skeleton and it still needs fattening up.

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Ah, back to my current life. :)

I felt hope in my spirit that I would have a working draft by this December, consisting of the final list of scenes that made the cut. The good news is that today I finished sorting everything into 5 sections with 6 chapters each. I was tired of writing thousands of words over the years that were not contributing to the story as a whole. I would write and delete and write and delete. It was a desire of my heart to finally just work out which scenes would actually be in my novel and focus on developing those. It was hard for me to know what to include because in a creative sense, anything was possible. What made one choice better than another? Even in real life I struggle to choose, and writing was no different, but it is finally done.

I expected more of a sense of accomplishment, which is probably why I writing on my blog, looking for my lost sense of success. Yay! I made it this far! I have decided which bones to keep and which do not belong to my novel's skeleton - 29,545 words - and now I just need to flesh them out. Bibisco has been a great tool that God put into my hands through a Google search for "free writing software."

A month or so before this year's Nanowrimo, I asked God if we could make a deal. I would keep showing up to write if He would help me with everything else. I have kept up my end poorly, but He has been more than faithful to help me see this through.

I am going to celebrate by cutting my hair in time for our family Christmas Eve party. My mother-in-law wants me to dye it too, but I am fond of my white and brown stripey hair. We'll see.