Copyright © 2005 by Blake Charlton. All rights reserved. No part of this text may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, reposting, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission of the author.
Some things are both difficult and painful. Oral surgery is an example, so is golf. But love is a better example; it lends itself to analogy more vividly.
I write this because when you first conceive of a story, you fall in love and fall hard. Your every thought is dedicated to the beauty of your Pygmalion. As you set into the book, characters wake in your imagination and grow; themes spawn among the sentences; hidden truths momentarily emerge before sinking back into daily life. And most wonderful of all is the infinite number of plotlines that spawn in your head: they begin to connect, to weave together until they are not so much lines as a continuous plan-a 'plotspace' really.
Remember that rainbow-colored parachute your second grade PE teacher would bring out on sunny days? Your class would surround the thing and shake it with the collective might of fifty eight-year-old arms. Some of your classmates ran under the parachute as it rolled and roiled, or perhaps teacher dropped a clutch of foam balls onto the popping multi-colored cloth. When I'm first working through a plotspace, I feel as if that childhood parachute is unfurling in my imagination.
Happily, my first infatuation with SPELLWRIGHT was a long one. The idea came to me autumn 2000, but for nearly a year I did no more than scribble abortive first chapters. The only person to whom I showed the early work was to a saint of a girl who put up with me and gave me the confidence to show my pages to a select few. That summer I worked at the Yale Summer Programs and made my first serious effort at novel writing.
I failed miserably - perhaps because I fell out with said supportive girl, perhaps because my imaginary world was still in its infancy, or perhaps because I was still discovering what I could and could not achieve with my prose. And so, the next autumn, I began senior year believing that I lacked the talent, or vision, or some other je ne sais quoi required to become an author. So I again delved into my science classes and the rat-race of rabid premeds.
Fortunately a new dean had come to Trumbull College--Trumbull was my residential college within Yale University - think Gryffindor then take away the magic and add 1) ~500 semi-manic co-eds, 2) beer, and 3) a waffle bar in the dining hall. Dean Laura King was a Godsend. As her head freshman counselor, I quickly came to know and admire her. It was during a freshman trip to "The Fellowship of the Rings" that we began to discuss writing. Within an hour it was clear that we had both been bitten by the novelist bug. She asked to see the first few pages of SPELLWRIGHT; I obliged, and in the spring we set up an 'independent study' seminar. In a stroke of bureaucratic genius, Laura convinced the university to give me two academic credits to make a second go at novel writing. Suddenly with time and a mentor, I found myself again inflamed with SPELLWRIGHT.
With infinite patience, Laura perused my drafts, critiqued my sentence structure, and laughed at my stranger word choices. Whatever style I might be said to possess is surely the result of her guidance.
By graduation I had 150 pages and enough chutzpa to forsake the beaten pre-med path. I put in another summer at the Yale Summer Program and then worked for a few months as a medical writer at UCSF. When I had enough money saved, I convinced my mother to let me live in the back house for as long as it would take to finish a first novel.
I set up camp, and from late autumn to the following spring I did little but write and play basketball at the YMCA. As I think back on that slice of my life, it becomes something of a black box; which is perhaps unfortunate because this is part about which some of you will want to know the most. How many words did I write a day? What was my routine? What other books did I read? How did I go about 'world building'? Truth is I don't truly know. Writing, in the end, is mysterious process. It is almost more physical than mental. And during that year, I didn't let myself think of such things. I forgot about money; I forgot about medical school; I forgot about everything but the keyboard.
Hammering out words was what I did.
It is a bitter-sweet thing to get what you want. I finally had the time that SPELLWRIGHT deserved, and I gave myself completely. But in doing so, I opened my eyes to what the book truly was. The honeymoon was over. There were problems with my prose, legions of them: the characters had rough spots, the beginning was too slow, and many of my 'literary' experimentations had failed.
My summer of discontent was filled with revising, thinning out the prolix passages, deleting characters, and eating improbable things while fretting about my life going nowhere while my friends were in grad school or making a mint on Wall Street.
I came to hate my manuscript as I had hated nothing before. It had been a false hope, a glimmering light that had lured me off the true path of life. I began to worry that the book would consume my early and mid twenties. Turns out that it did, but I'm grateful for the fact now.
Winston Churchill once said that "if you're going through hell, keep going." It's a good quotation, one that makes us chuckle at the different situations to which we might apply it. But outside the context of WWII Brittan, it's not quite correct. True, if the Nazis are trying to invade your only choices are to fight through hell or surrender to it. But love affairs, human or artistic, are different.
When the effulgence of infatuation fades and only passion's aftermath remains, we are in a kind of hell; we are removed from the beloved we once knew. But our choices are not to wallow or to preserver. It is perhaps unfortunate that in matters of love, human beings may suffer or escape. Leaving a lover, abandoning a novel, there is little difference between the two. To remain would be to surrender to a hell of realized imperfection, a hell of compromise and failure. When you come down to it, most people abandon their art for the same reason they might seek a divorce.
I am of course, entirely sympathetic. I have lost both stories and girlfriends to this escape impulse. And perhaps it is better this way that we might move on from what is not working to that which still could. Perhaps. But for whatever reason, I stayed with SPELLWRIGHT, again with the help of the saintly girl. And when the revision of the book was finally complete in the summer of 03, I moved to New England to be closer to the girl who helped me stay true to my art.
I sent out a salvo of cover letters to agents and took a job as a boarding school English teacher / football coach / dorm parent. After that there was nothing to do but wait and grow older. Half a year passed. It was a time full of anxiety and crumby Connecticut weather. I had a few timid bites from various agents, requests to see the first hundred pages and the like, but nothing substantial. Perhaps the one lesson I can pass on about finding an agent is this: send your cover not only to agents, but to anyone-absolutely anyone-associated with the publishing world. It was ultimately my sister's brilliant and beautiful former college roommate turned editorial assistant who, after reviewing my cover letter, recommended my manuscript to a few agents. And so on a cold January evening, after six months of waiting, I got a call from a young Manhattan-based agent who was passionate about SPELLWRIGHT. The next day I called round to the other agents who had the ms (ms = manuscript in publishing argot) to tell them I was going off the market. An older, more experienced agent asked for a little more time to consider. I obliged and a week later received another offer.
From zero agents to two in seven days, it nearly gave me whiplash. The next day I was on a train to New York to meet my rescuers and talk matters literary. It was a heartbreaking decision as both men offered different but equally exciting views of how the book might develop. The younger offered more of his time and a more 'mainstream' vision; the older more experience, connections, and a unrivaled knowledge of the 'sci-fi / fantasy' vision. Ultimately I chose the more established agent, and haven't had even a moment of doubt since.
Matt, for that was his name, helped me make a fresh start with SPELLWRIGHT. There were many things he wanted changed, but he always presented a ready ear and flexibility.
I waited until I finished my contract with the boarding school, and then returned to San Francisco, summer 04, to rewrite the book. And sure enough, my passion for the book returned; perhaps this time it was not so hot, nor so frantic, but--like me--a bit older, a bit wiser.
And so the cycle began again. Infatuation with new creation burned through the summer and autumn. But winter bristled with the realization of problems and compromise. Slowly I returned to the hell of revision and correction, first with the book and then with the girl for whom I had moved to New England. She could not follow me to California.
The love connecting boy and girl snapped, but that which connected creation to creator withstood the strain. And so as February came to a close, an entirely new version of SPELLWRIGHT came to completion.
Matt read the work carefully and was satisfied. I brushed up the text in a few places, put together a synopsis for the rest of the trilogy, and relinquished all control. We had reached the point where I had to let got, the point that is most difficult, the point at which the wisdom of Islam hinges: submission.
The manuscript was now in Matt's hands. The book--my only constant companion for past three years, my love, my sine qua non--was to be shipped off to sit patiently on editorial desks and kitchen tables, waiting for perusal and criticism.
Matt, being and excellent agent, had a battle plan. It was thought that perhaps SPELLWRIGHT could make its debut as 'mainstream' lit rather than SFF. I could care less about what it was published as so long as the people who wanted to read it could find it. But such considerations of what category a book might fit under are important to the industry. And being a greenhorn author, I'm hardly qualified to disagree. So, using all of his savvy, Matt discussed SPELLWRIGHT with Jason at Doubleday, an editor who had been making quite a name for himself. In subsequent entries, we will explore how SPELLWRIGHT bounced about different editors, but for now let's content ourselves on this tidbit: Jason, the Doubleday editor that was to have first crack at the book, had recently finished editing a little thriller about art and intrigue called THE DA'VINCI CODE.