Evolution

The first novel I ever attempted was an historical. I quit by about page 80. I just didn't "feel" the storyline from another century, and I felt romance seemed, as a genre 20+ years ago, to have a lot of pre-conceived notions about sex scenes and characters. My second attempt, a fairly serviceable psychological mystery novel, was told in linear fashion over the course of a month of storyline, with flashbacks. I sent a single query to St. Martin's and got a request for the full--I'm talking when I was 24 or 25. In the end, the editor was impressed, she said, but the book was a little too psychological and not enough of the mystery part for her imprint. I didn't even TRY to write or submit a novel again for years. And years. I wasn't devastated by the rejection . . . I knew I had a million to one shot. I just didn't feel capable enough as a writer to write 300 pages. I didn't have enough story. So I worked on short stories and poems, which I got published with regularity.

Then I decided to try my hand at a novel again. I attempted a complicated contemporary women's fiction piece about 10 years ago, but a key component involved a man from the I.R.A. and the history of Ireland, and he had built bombs in his lifetime and had been part of a subway attack in London. And he was my hero. And then 9/11 happened and I knew what was already a story about redemption would become a thousand times more difficult to sell. So I abandoned it around page 200 for Spanish Disco. I wrote Spanish Disco in four months, edited it, stuck it in a drawer, went to the Book Expo as a consultant to a publishing house, met an agent, shared the novel, and it was sold less than 3 months later to Red Dress Ink. That book is completely linear and takes place over the course of 14 days. No flashbacks in time. First-person narrative. Seven characters--five of them with significant "face time" in the book. Writing it wasn't painful. It flew out of me, a total "zone" book with almost no rewrites requested by my publisher.

That was the last "easy" book I ever wrote.

Since then, not that I haven't written whole books in 3 months' time . . . or had a book just fairly effortlessly spill out of me . . . but I have EVOLVED. There was a time in my writing career when I never would have attempted a book in which God is a woman--and a character. In which Albert Einstein had a role. Or one that was a triology spanning 250 years and a hundred characters. Or one that wove the story of an African-American drag queen's love story with the heroine's search for love while living in a haunted house. Or one that wove a conspiracy from the Vietnam war with a present-day Vietnamese-American's search for understanding of her mother's suicide. Even if I had thought of the storyline, I wasn't far enough along on my journey as a writer to even try writing something so complicated. Linear and first-person was about a complicated as I could get.

I look at Spanish Disco and think, as much as I adore it and it remains one of my three or four favorites of my books. that it's very much like an adolescent. As Cassie narrates, it's all about HER. How SHE is impacted by the inconveniences of dealing with the secondary characters, how SHE hates having to work with Roland in a small beach town, how SHE hates her mother. How SHE feels about everything. If you've ever parented a teen, this is how they tend to view the world. It revolves around them. As a writer, I hadn't, I don't think, evolved enough to understand how the secondary characters could have their own full lives and yet not--importantly--hone in too much on the main plot. When I look at The Roofer now, I see, for example, how Tom is just as important as Ava, how the father's story, Uncle Two's, and Ava's mother's storylines are complex in their own right and intersect with the heroine's. I see how, just off of Uncle Two's story, there is his son's death from a drug overdose--years ago and off-stage--and yet it colors how he deals with Tom's drug abuse. I see how Hell's Kitchen itself is a character. How the Westies' history and the RICO Acts affect the storyline. If I wrote that book 20 years ago, it would have been about how Ava felt about her father's death. One long, linear story of her life. I would never have thought to tell the story over the three nights and a day of an Irish funeral. I would never have given in an actual narrative structure that way.

So we evolve as writers. Each book I write, I become more ambitious. It never occurs to me, now that I've written about 20 of them, to just follow a pattern, stick to something I've tried and done before. It's a process of growing with each book. Sometimes that makes readers angry . . . they like knowing, sometimes, that an author will write the same sort of book. But it's my journey as a writer to want to do different things, to keep evolving.

How about you? Can you now see the evolution of your work?