Here at The Writing Barn we love Uma Krishnaswami. We devoured her last novel, The Grand Plan to Fix Everything and eagerly await The Problem with Being Slightly Heroic, its sequel, which releases on August 13th. Today she joins us for Craft Talk Tuesday.
Ten-Power: A Disorganized Novelist’s Approach
I had such a good time writing The Grand Plan to Fix Everything that I figured I’d be able to dive into the sequel with ease. I was eager to start work, my vision of it crisp and clean in my mind. It would be a lark. A frolic. Dini and Maddie and their madcap friends would reunite in Washington, DC. There would be a parade. Roses. Milk shakes. Gourmet confections. Dancing. Music. A movie. An animal character, or a few–why not? I knew the setting well, so that part would be easy. I knew the characters already from the first book. I’d conquered my terror of the timeline. Piece of cake.
At the time I was contemplating this book, The Grand Plan to Fix Everything was getting reviewed and people were saying nice things about it. This was a pleasant surprise, as it is to any sensitive writer who cringes at the thought of reviewers’ sharp pencils and keen wit.
[Here is a PW starred review of Grand Plan.]
Soothed in starlight, I settled into a happy haze. I wrote in my notebook. I wrote questions in multi-colored ink, hoping the answers would begin to break out. I downloaded my Scrivener update. The Bollywood jingles on my iPod became my go-to playlist. When I was in Washington, DC, I made a point of spending a morning in the Smithsonian’s Enid Haupt Garden, writing a scene with the girls and Dolly and the moon gates.
I should mention that I’m a slow writer. I’d had all of five leisurely years to figure out the first book. I had eighteen months to get this one done. By the time I got back from DC, I knew it was time to panic. This can sometimes be a good thing. My panic helped me churn out 1500 words a day. I usually erased half of them the following day but managed to get another 1500 down so I could more or less keep going forward.
In between panicking, writing, and eating a surfeit of chocolate, I asked writer friends for advice on writing a sequel. Here’s what they said:
1. Keep the characters true to themselves
2. Keep the story moving forward, but remember…
3. The new book is a new book, and you could even…
4. Create a new arc that sets the character on a different (even opposite) trajectory from the old one.
5. In other words, know the world you’ve created but change it if you have to (believably).
It was all good advice. I took it to heart as I wrote my draft. By the time I’d revised and re-revised, shunted events around and added 
and deleted scenes, it was easy to see that what I’d written was a big mess. Why had I expected anything else? I told myself that drafts are supposed to be a big mess. I put it all away, took long walks, and thought morose thoughts. Then I went back and reread the first book. Slowly. Carefully. Paying attention to its rhythm. Considering the pace at which things happened.
While I was doing that, I got my editorial letter back. It contained a solid block of praise, one whole paragraph of it. I memorized the paragraph before turning with a sigh to the rest. In short, my editor warned me that revising this would be harder work than revising the first book. I needed to find a balance between remarkable coincidence, benevolent circumstance, and believability. I needed to throw out several scenes that seemed to go nowhere, and while I was at it, I might consider whether all my characters, animal and human, really belonged.
It happened that a packet of student work arrived before my next round of revision. This was an entirely fortunate occurrence, for one reason. The things I tell my students with the greatest conviction are always–always!–the things that trip me up in my own work. “Don’t think your story through quite so much,” I said to my students that week. “Too cerebral. Feel it instead.”
When I got back to the work after a couple of days away from it, I found I could examine it as if through one of those 10-power lenses that turn flowers into miniature alien universes. I could see the landscape of it as if under magnification, and the characters at work against its field. I could see that some of the events in my draft drove the story forward. Others diluted it, or strayed too far from the main character, or spun away into inconsequence. I considered each of the secondary characters in this light–who advanced Dini’s story? Who provided needed conflict? Who simply got in the way? And somehow in this viewing of it, I knew where to cut. I knew which subplots derailed the main storyline. I will only say there were feral cats whom I’d grown quite fond of, and a wacky lady who in turn loved those cats. There were beavers in the Tidal Basin. A mail carrier. They all had to go. Why put everything and the kitchen sink into this single story? Why clutter the story with details that might really belong in some other story?
Annie Dillard writes that the work is not the vision itself. “Its relationship to the vision that impelled it is the relationship between any energy and any work, anything unchanging to anything temporal.”
I will confess that when the mental 10-power works, when you can see the alien landscape of your story as if for the first time, it’s purely intoxicating. Fleeting, naturally, because publication will freeze it all on the page, and then of course, there will be those reviews. But still, a moment of bliss. Which is why next time, next story, it’s probably really important for my fickle memory to erase all this. That way, I get to discover it all over again.
Uma Krishnaswami was born in India and now lives in northwest New Mexico. She is the author of many books for children including The Grand Plan to Fix Everything and Out of the Way! Out of the Way!. She is on the faculty of the MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She believes in embracing contradictions and ambiguity.