Archive for September 2010
Mapping Unreal Places
Map of Wharfton and the Enclave
A summer ago, in Minnesota, I sat in my Aunt Rosemary’s lodge overlooking Island Lake and prepared to draw the map of Wharfton and the Enclave. My son Michael and niece Maura offered to help. I had the places all in my head, visually, but it was harder to set them down than I expected. Logistics intruded. It was important, for instance, that Gaia would be unlikely to stumble upon Mace’s bakery on her first trip to the prison, but the chimney of said bakery needed to be visible from a prison window.
We started with one piece of paper, and I sketched in Gaia’s home, the southern perimeter of the wall, and the Square of the Bastion. As I tried to estimate the size of the Enclave and include the complete circumference of the wall, we had to add another sheet of paper, taping it on to the north. As I expanded Wharfton, we added a third piece of paper on the south. We penciled in squares for key locations: Ernie’s Café (named for Hemingway in honor of “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”), the Quirk Home (named for a teacher friend), the Corpse Shed, the Nursery and the Honey Farm (originally a graveyard).
It started getting more complicated. Ernie’s Café needed to be on a convergence of corners far enough from the Square of the Bastion that walking there could take a while and stopping by Mace’s Bakery spontaneously would make sense. For safety reasons, certain people could not pass the Bastion on their way between the Nursery and the Quirk Home. I paced carefully through each walk in the story, including one in an underground tunnel, making sure I had a consistent layout of sites.
I also had class distinctions to think of, even within the wall. The city was built on a hill, and the wealthier people lived in the higher neighborhoods, so there I made the roads farther apart and added Summit Park, a place where Leon could have played soccer as a kid. I put more tightly spaced roads and long, narrow blocks in the steeper, lower parts of the city near the Corpse Shed, the Solar Grid Plant, and the Mycoprotein Plant.
Outside the wall, I needed the sectors laid out so that Gaia’s home in Western Sector Three would be at the edge of the unlake and far from the South Gate. I found a logical place for the Tvaltar on the Quad, and added Derek’s Bakery and Emily’s Home. I knew there wouldn’t be many roads outside the wall, so I indicated paths with dashed lines, starting with the ones going to the wall where water spigots would be located.
Certaldo, Italy
Finally, I reshaped the wall, drawing on my memories of walled cities in Italy like Certaldo and Ferrara, where the walls are far from perfectly circular. I added labels and the compass face, and darkened all the lines with black ink. In all, it took me several weeks of persistent tweaking, and I finished back home in Connecticut, August 18th, 2009.
I wasn’t certain the map would make it in the final book. It wasn’t in the ARC, and I knew we were so short on available blank pages (books are bound in multiples of sixteen pages, so we’d bumped a limit) that we had already decided to cut the Author’s Note page, instead putting a notice about Global Greengrants on the copyright page. Nan Mercado, my editor, suggested we could put the map behind the Contents page, facing page one of the text. I mailed the original copy of the map, all three sheets of it taped together, down to Ann Diebel, the art director, who cleaned up the labels and made it all legible.
That’s how the map appeared in Birthmarked.
Last week, I asked Nan when she needs the map for Prized, and the answer was “Soon.” I’d better get going.
Edited to Add:
(1/25/12) I’ve had several requests from people with e-readers for online versions of the maps in Birthmarked and Prized, and it seems the best I can manage is to scan the maps from the books to post here. If you click on the images, they enlarge, and I hope that helps.
Birthmarked Map: The Enclave and Wharfton
Prized Map: Sylum
Learning Revising from Picasso
Postcards of Guernica
In the Reina Sofia Museum of Madrid, in the white-walled gallery that showcases Picasso’s Guernica, across from the masterpiece is a series of six photos Dora Maar took of the painting while it was in progress. If you have the stubborn tenacity to thwart the crowd, you can stand in front of each photo and examine it closely, then go on to the next to see what Picasso changed and what he kept the same. The horse rises. The eyeball light emerges from a sun shape. Shadows and flames appear. The corpse-like figure at the bottom switches direction from head to toe. The horror and loss and anger intensify painfully with each draft.
When I saw the painting and the photographs this summer, I was inspired and troubled, but also enormously relieved. Here was proof that an artist did not know, at the beginning, how things would turn out at the end. Clearly, Picasso had powerful ideas right from the start, but he was willing to change them, and change them again, and let a change on one part of the canvas set off an effect elsewhere. He didn’t just polish in a delicate way. He massively reworked the canvas, and only near the end did he fine-tune the details, like the texture of the horse hair.
I don’t paint and I’m no genius, but I do write novels, and I swear the process is the same. My first draft of my latest novel contained a middle-aged woman who changed to an old man with a peg leg, and a horse rancher who became a mortician. Four other characters disappeared completely, taking their problems with them. In the third draft, a new ending replaced the pre-existing sixty pages. A birth scene was given to a different pregnant woman. A final chapter was added, and massive stream-lining happened everywhere. In the sixth draft, a key character who had consistently appeared on page 150 surfaced earlier on page 72, influencing everything in between.
When I discussed my latest draft of Prized, the sequel to Birthmarked, with my editor last week, I discovered that an issue which has hovered at the edge of the book for over a year could come forward and significantly alter the story. It has meant scrapping fifty pages yet again, writing several new scenes from scratch, and rippling the repercussions through the rest of the book. One character’s pivotal choice makes me re-see and grapple with the entire novel in a new way, as I never could have before I reached this point, and this is my eighth major draft.
A book isn’t as smart as a writer is at one moment. It isn’t the performance of a gymnast whose skill learned over years must be demonstrated perfectly in one 60-second routine. Not even Picasso could paint Guernica right the first time. A book is the work of a writer’s ideas in layers, over time, and so I take comfort in knowing I can revise.
Leon at Eleven, Continued
(This is the continuation of the story that began September 17th, one post below.)
The cook was frowning at him now. “How’d you get that?”
“It was an accident,” Leon said. “Come on, Fiona. We should go.”
“No, have a seat,” said the cook. “I could use some help, actually.”
“What with?” Fiona asked.
The cook held up a strange tool with a handle and a curved, dull blade that circled around on itself in a wheel. He passed it to Fiona. “See if you can figure that out.” Then he turned and strolled to the other end of the large kitchen.
Fiona fingered the wheel, and while Leon could see she was genuinely curious about it, the shame of his lip was coming back to him. He had a bad feeling his father wouldn’t like finding them in the kitchen, either. It was one thing if they could sneak in for a couple apples, or if the old cook was there to pour them some milk, but he didn’t know Mabrother Cho at all, and the longer they stayed, the riskier it was.
Fiona rolled the device over the table. “I see what it is,” she said, delighted. “It cuts circles. He’s making donuts. Please, Leon. Can we stay?”
Leon wavered, and looked up to see the cook returning. He wordlessly passed over a small green bowl with a chunk of ice inside, then took the tool back from Fiona and began chatting with her about donuts. Leon stared at the hard, frosty ice. He picked up a piece with his fingertips and tried it lightly against his lip. It made him thirsty.
“Like this,” Mabrother Cho said, guiding Fiona’s hand to firmly, slowly draw the tool over the flat dough. Perfect circles with perfect holes lined up in a neat pattern, and Fiona enthusiastically started in to cut the next row. The cook slid up the circles with a spatula and dropped four into the boiling oil. Immediately, the dough puffed up and began to brown. Fiona kept chattering, and Leon was happy for her. He settled back on his stool and closed his eyes, rubbing the ice slowly over his swollen lip and sucking the moisture in as it melted.
“How about you? What’s your favorite food, Leon?” Mabrother Cho said.
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll teach you how to make it. Anything,” the cook said, smiling. He scooped out the first donut, dabbed it against a paper, dipped it in sugar, and set it on a plate.
“Right now?” Leon asked.
“Sure.”
Nobody’d ever said “Sure” like that to him, not as long as he could remember. Fiona was already eating one of the donuts, getting sugar all over her little fingers and sleeves. She was such a kid, he thought.
“I guess I’d like to know how to make pumpkin bread,” Leon said slowly. “But not tonight. I need to take Fiona back up. Some other time?”
“I want to stay,” Fiona said.
“You heard your brother,” the cook said. “Finish up.”
“Leon didn’t have a donut yet,” Fiona argued.
“You can take a couple with you, then.”
Leon set the bit of ice back in the bowl, and glanced up to find Mabrother Cho regarding him thoughtfully.
“Watch yourself, won’t you?” the new cook said.
Leon felt something go still inside him, but it wasn’t fear. It wasn’t quite loneliness, either. He reached for one of the donuts to take with him.
“Thanks, Mabrother,” Leon said.
As he guided his sister back up the stairs and along the dark hallway, the darkness felt different. He wasn’t sure when, but some night he’d go back, with or without his stepsister, and learn to make pumpkin bread.
Leon at Eleven
(Here’s a bit story about a character from Birthmarked when he was a kid.)
He felt the moment she crawled onto the end of his bed.
“Leon?” Fiona whispered. “Can I sleep with
you?”
Leon rubbed his face before he remembered his sore lip, and the pain brought him fully awake. He squinted through the darkness at his stepsister and pulled his feet up to make more room for her.
“Did you have a nightmare or something?” Leon asked.
She nodded. “Your real father came and took you away.”
“That sounds like a good dream to me.” Leon sat up, reached for the matchbox on his bedside table, and struck a light. The flame wavered as he lit the candle, and then he turned to the girl.
“Your lip’s all swollen,” Fiona said.
He touched it gingerly. “It’ll be okay.”
“I hate when he hits you,” she said, her voice rising.
“It was my own fault for lying to him.”
Fiona curled her arms around her knees, and in her white nightgown, she looked very small and half haunted still. Her hair was mussed, the fine strands wisping about her big eyes.
She rubbed her nose. “Did he take your last comic book?”
“He thinks so,” he said, and smiled, watching his sister to see when she’d get it.
Fiona laughed. “Where are the rest?”
“I’ll show you some time. Come on,” he said, throwing off the covers. “Let’s get something to eat.” He shoved his legs into his trousers, held out his hand to his little sister, and blew out the candle. Along the back hallways, the lights of the Bastion were dimmed for the night, but the blue, clear light of the moon dropped in the windows and Leon would know the way blind.
He could smell warm cinnamon and yeast before they arrived at the kitchen, and he paused in the doorway, wondering which cook was working. It was the new one, a young one, and Leon almost turned back, but Fiona pushed around him, the hem of her nightgown trailing over the brick floor.
“Hey,” Fiona said. “I haven’t seen you before.”
“I’m Mabrother Cho,” the cook said. “Which twin are you?”
“Fiona,” she answered. “This is Leon.”
The cook nodded in his direction. Then, with his rolling pin, he indicated a couple of stools on the other side of his big wooden table. Leon helped his sister up, and jockeyed her stool a little closer to the table. He was too fidgety himself to sit, and shifted to where he could keep an eye on the door. The kitchen was brightly lit, and a pan of oil was heating on the stove. There were bowls of eggs on the counter, two big hams, and a pumpkin, but it was early yet for the cook to be starting breakfast and the rolled dough on the table looked like piecrust, only square.
“Where’s the real cook?” Fiona asked.
Mabrother Cho laughed. “He’s sleeping.”
“How come you’re not?” Fiona said.
“Maybe it’s the full moon. I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “What’s your excuse?”
“Nightmares,” Fiona said. She reached out and took Leon’s hand. “Do you have anything for Leon’s lip? Ice or anything?”
Leon ducked his face away. “It’s okay. Forget it.”
The cook was frowning at him now. “How’d you get that?”
“It was an accident,” Leon said. “Come on, Fiona. We should go.”
“No, have a seat,” said the cook. “I could use some help, actually.”
“What with?” Fiona asked.
(To be continued.)
Where I’m Writing From
When asked to write a bio, I feel like I’m impersonating someone important and probably dead. The truth is, I’m a lucky girl who grew up in a loving home, made it through school, married someone great and started my own family. All the stuff about nuns, sandbox spiders, Alateen, my dog dying, volleyball and squash, the bakery, capsizing on Lake Nipigon, physics, singing in Ferrara, childbirth, teaching, my first kiss, and scuba diving slides into the deep background when I sit on my couch, imagining. These days, I’m nudging the first inchoate ideas of Book 3 in the Birthmarked trilogy, and just now I’m writing this bio. Poison ivy itches on my left arm, I’m wearing my dad’s soft blue sweater, it’s raining quietly outside my open window, and when I finish this, I’ll go eat some cereal.
