A little note before you read this. As silly as it sounds, this is how the process felt to me as I wrote.
Some of my family members & friends have asked me how I got started writing this novel. They wondered if I’d had some idea, or concept of what I would write before I got started. The answer to that, is no. Actually, what happened was, my husband and I were getting ready to do some running around, (pay some bills, stop by the junk yard to look for a grill for his truck, that sort of thing) and I felt the urge to bring along paper and a pen.
I don’t usually write long hand, typing is so much faster, but I felt like I needed to write something, and I wanted to spend the day with Lee, so I improvised. I had no idea what it would be, but as I sat in the parking lot of the junk yard, waiting for my husband, I started writing. It might sound like insanity to some, but it felt comfortable to me. As I wrote, it was like somebody was in my head telling me what to write, not whispering in my ear, but actually inside my head.
That was Jessie Stanton. As I wrote, she told me all about herself. Everything; from her first, middle, and last name, and date of birth, to her favorite foods, the things she liked to do, her unrequited love for Tyler, her love of watching scary movies only with Caleb (and why). Like I said, she told me everything. It got a little hard to hear her when my husband came out of the junk yard victorious, and tried to tell me the whole fascinating story of his great find, but I tried still to hear them both.
After Jessie stopped talking, and that took some time, I thought I was done with the voices in my head. Wrong. Caleb came out then, and spoke to me in his quiet way, introducing himself in much the same way that Jessie had. Though I did have to prompt him from time to time, he wasn’t as talkative as she had been.
So it wasn’t a surprise to me then, when Tyler interrupted Caleb to introduce himself, the person he considered the true star of the story that was coming together in my head. I couldn’t shut him up at first, he was a very big talker. Fortunately, I was home typing by now, and distracted by my three oldest children fighting and arguing, to the point that I had to abandon any thought of writing.
I had decided to sit down and write a short biography on each of my characters as soon as I realized what they were, so that night, after my family was in bed, I started a new routine. I sat up typing everything that I had hand written in the car that day into the computer. I took the time to ask Caleb to refresh my memory on the things that he had told me, and to finish what he had started to tell me before Tyler interrupted. After getting it all down, I thought that I was done. Wrong again.
As I started to close out my new document, Caleb spoke up and asked if I wanted to hear about Jessie’s first day in town. I shrugged to myself and thought, what the hell, it’s already four A.M., I don’t have time to sleep before the kids get up anyway. Taking that as acquiescence, Caleb suggested that I might like to add this story to what I’d already typed that night.
I got a kick out of the story, learning about how Jessie moved down the street from Caleb when she was five, and about how they first became friends. It was sweet, hearing Caleb talk about teaching Jessie to ride her bike, and showing her around the neighborhood, taking her to the park down the street. Then as they started kindergarten, and her parents asked him to make sure she didn’t get lost on the way those first days, was all very fascinating to me. As well as all the important things that had occurred between that first meeting, and their senior year of high school, it was very interesting.
It wasn’t a terribly long story, but it was the longest that I’d ever written. It was about ten pages long, single spaced, ten point type, so not short either. When I finished with it, I knew that it wasn’t the novel, but just an introduction to the characters and their relationships to each other. It dealt with the introduction of Katie, who had been too shy and selfless to introduce herself to me before, and explained how and when Tyler came in to the picture.
Part 2 of About writing Cross Roads will follow shortly, it is the other half of this post, and will complete this post.
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