These Five Years: Part One

How fiction found me.

Picture it with me:

Dawn is still hours away on the first morning in November. Outside, the sky is inky and overcast, the temperature unseasonably warm. I wake excited, though startled, by the delicate chimes of the first alarm I’ve set in a very long time. It’s not just the long-overdue date night to see The Phantom of the Opera I look forward to later, but the writing appointment I’ve had marked on the calendar for all of three weeks.

Blessedly, the children are still asleep, even the toddler, and I remembered to grind the coffee last night. It drips hot and bold while I walk briskly around the block to wake up my body and shake off my nerves.

I have no idea what I’m doing.

I pour coffee, stir in sugar first, then cream.

I light a candle that whispers of rain, paper, and orchids.

I sit down.

I open a word processing software with no spell check, no buttons, no toolbars. 

All that waits for me on that vast sea of white is a blinking, blue cursor and the weight of more than a dozen years of wanting this.

I remember everything about how this felt.

I was 20 years-old when, while reading Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz, I first realized that my kind of writing, at the time, could be found in books. The world of narrative nonfiction was cracked open for me. It became a (rarely) spoken dream to put essays down on paper that might one day become a book or two.

For the next decade and some change, I housed my writing in personal and photography blogs and Instagram captions, with a smattering of brilliantly organized but emaciated .doc files on my computer.

I was a long way from the dream, which felt more impossible by the year.

Favorite view from a hotel room, possibly ever.

The summer of 2018, Cliff and I took an anniversary trip to Manhattan. I’d grown up visiting family often in nearby Queens and Brooklyn, but had only one December evening in my adolescence filled with memories of red lights on yellow taxis, hot pizza, and a sky-scraping Christmas tree.

I’d always wanted more.

That gorgeous July week together redeemed all those years of staring across Jamaica Bay imagining what treasures the city held just for me. As a child, I remember lying upstairs in the creaky bed in the front bedroom at my great grandmother’s home in Belle Harbor with the windows open, thinking I could hear the low hum of the city over the water.

And then I finally got that hum, way down deep, in my bones.

The first of many photos I’ve now taken of this painting.

On the evening of our eleventh anniversary, I stood transfixed by the painting that would go on to become the very crux of my first novel. Had you told me such, that evening, I’d have laughed uproariously. A novel? Fiction? You’re joking!

Not even three months later, though, in the alchemy of transformative personal therapy, reading copious amounts of fiction, and a scene in my head I could not shake, I had a crazy idea.

One of few people who knew, before November 1, what I was daring to do.

The seed of that story had begun to grow roots in a way I could no longer deny. I mean I could, but it was probably going to be more difficult not to do it than to simply try. I could see a woman, wild auburn curls and a soft yellow dress, a hand reaching out, and a heart full of pain. I wanted, no, needed to know why.

I felt the compulsion to pull the threads and find out more.

So that’s where I began.

No outline, no notes; just a scene, a little research, and a whole lot of questions.

I’d wake at 5AM, fix coffee, take a quick walk around the block, and then open Byword in line-focus mode and write until the first child awoke. If I was lucky, that was 6:45 or 7AM; if I wasn’t, it was closer to 6AM. It was a crapshoot, and so at my rustic wooden dining room table in this black Windsor armchair, I’d write before the sun and my children were up, like my life depended on it.

It was one of the most magical, unbelievable experiences of my life to let these words come out. I didn’t worry about mistakes because I could only see the line I was presently writing. This was flow, and I’d never known anything like it.

I live for a spreadsheet.

Watching those words accrue and still living my normal, day-to-day life with all its varied demands, was empowering. I figured out how to work when 5AM quit on me. One day, I wrote 171 words on my phone, sick in bed and covered in crumpled tissues. The next, I wrote nearly 3,000 in the glow of the Christmas tree after bedtime. I wrote in every coffeeshop within a 20 minute radius of our home, the library, and the floor of my in-laws’ bedroom.

I bought flowers for myself when I hit 10,000 words. 

I cried when I hit 50,000.

I finished at 54,000+ knowing I needed another 30-40,000 words to finish.

But even then, I didn’t know if I could.

I’m so grateful for documentation of this season.

The plan was to take a week off and then resume drafting. By the turn of the new year, I’d only picked the manuscript up once or twice more, adding perhaps another 1-2,000 words. I’d lost steam, the holidays had wrung me out, and the hardest part of the story was waiting to be told.

A few weeks into January, one of my best friends called to invite me to surprise our husbands with a trip to NYC. We had three weeks to make it happen. In a moment of insanity, or perhaps divine inspiration, I had the motivation I needed to finish the draft. I wanted to stand in front of that painting again having answered all the questions I knew, then, to ask.

Over the next three weeks I wrote more than 30,000 words, so that on February 14, I had completed the first draft. I’d told the story as best I understood it with all 88,900 words, and I’d never been more proud of or entirely humbled by anything, besides bringing our children into the world.

My “work window,” long before it finally became truly that.

The next morning, we got on a plane; the surprise had been a resounding success.

By that night I was studying Vincent’s Starry Night, which I hadn’t yet seen in person. I had no idea just how desperately I’d cling to the imagery and significance of this other painting of his, in the season to come.

If you ever go to see art with me, be prepared for a lot of this.

More on that in These Five Years: Part Two.

Until then,

Read more from These Five Years series:

These Five Years: Introduction

These Five Years: Part Two

These Five Years: Part Three