I live in the Northern Hemisphere. Not on an ice flow but fairly far north, well beyond what you’d call tropical.
So imagine my shock when I looked out my office window in the dead of winter and saw a koala perched on a branch of my gnarled apple tree.
Yes, I’d had my morning coffee and, no, it didn’t contain brandy. I saw a koala. At least until my brain slapped my imagination upside the head and reminded me it wasn’t possible; I was seeing things. Seeing things differently.
At least outside my window. Inside was a different story.
Some months prior to the marsupial sighting, I’d been working on a novel, one of the most challenging books I’ve written. This story required the weaving of two worlds. I had everything in place, or so I thought, but readers weren’t getting it. The protagonist was compelling; the writing and dialogue flowed; the goals, motivations and conflict were all spelled out. Editors and agents had said so. Yet they weren’t buying. Readers seemed fuzzy on the secondary world I’d so carefully woven through the pages. Maybe, someone suggested, you could take a specific pivotal event that happens later in the manuscript and use it as your opening. That, they said, would clear things up.
No. Not possible. While I wasn’t married to the opening I had, I did favor a certain order in the unfolding of events. There was a logic to it. Putting that pivotal event at the front of the book would seriously mess up the pacing and ruin the escalating tension.
When the Martian-I-married pointed out that I was, in fact, the author of this particular novel which meant I had complete control over the unfolding of events, the rising of said tension, etc. etc., I told him to (please) go into the basement and work on his car. Then I stuck the manuscript away for more aging while I finished something else.
As these things work – literally minutes before I saw the koala – I had pulled the manuscript and placed it on my desk. But while I had new perspective on the wildlife in my backyard, I was still seeing what I wanted to see in the WIP.
I spent the next few days revising around that troubling opening and maintaining my unarguable logic of why events needed to unfold the way they did. Curiously, the opening did not rewrite itself; the problem still remained. Funny how that works.
On Thursday I decided what the hell. I copied and pasted the pivotal event from the middle of the manuscript to the beginning. I wrote, and rewrote. I fiddled with the middle, writing and rewriting that too.
It did not work. It wrecked the flow in the middle; it raised too many questions at the beginning.
Feeling both smug and discouraged, I went to sign off for the day. And that’s when I saw it. Another koala. Only this one wasn’t in the apple tree, it was on the screen in front of me. I saw, quite suddenly and from a completely different perspective, what that reader had been going on about. I saw beyond the specific event of the pivotal scene to the elements she was after – the danger, the conflict, the setting. And – praise the writing Gods – I saw how to incorporate those elements into a new opening scene.
I saw differently. Obviously seeing things differently is a skill I need to feed. I just hope that koala sticks around.
