Selene Castrovilla, author of Saved by the Music and The Girl Next Door, will participate in Pages & Places free outdoor Book Expo, reading from her work and signing copies of her books.
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You can probably guess the question I’m asked most: “Where do you get your ideas?”
My ideas get me.
My characters stow away and ambush me.
Willow, who would become the voice of my novel Saved By the Music, literally launched into a soliloquy in my mind while I was driving home one night. Her first words were, “Sometimes I feel translucent.”
I didn’t know what to make of this strange internal voice, but I did know that what she was saying was important. I pulled over, yanked out my notebook and took her dictation.
She complained about her name. “How could anyone named Willow be substantial? I bend, I fold with the weight of the rain bearing down on me. What kind of a whooshy, wishy-washy, spill-your-guts-and-weep kind of a name is ‘Willow,’ anyway?”
I didn’t like the name either, but I didn’t say so. She wasn’t looking for a conversation–she was just venting.
She didn’t like her mom either: “I bet my mom did that to me on purpose. She wanted to saddle me with a wimp name so she could bask in the sunlight. Isadora, that’s her name. Why would an Isadora make a Willow? To stomp all over her, that’s why.”
She went on for some time. I wrote it all down dutifully, and when she finished–as abruptly as she’d started–I continued down the block and around the corner to my house, went inside and typed it all into my computer. I knew I had something, but no idea what.
Willow would remain in that file for quite some time.
Meanwhile, I’d written a picture book manuscript about my aunt’s floating concert hall and how I’d helped build it from a coffee barge. I cannot possibly convey the thought and sweat I put into trying to make that sucker work. Many people, editors included, told me they thought it was a novel.
No way. I couldn’t write a novel. Not me.
A couple of years and about thirty barge revisions later, I had to write my MFA thesis. Well, might as well start that novel everyone insisted the barge picture book was, since I had to produce something.
My advisor told me I had to change the name of my character, which had been Selene in the nonfiction picture book.
Hmmm. A name. I needed a name. What’s in a name…
Then I remembered her.
I remembered that girl who’d ranted in my brain over two years back. I remembered her words, safely stowed in my computer.
“Willow,” I told my teacher. “Her name is Willow.”
“Uck. That’s a terrible name,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “She hates it.”
But still I teetered at the edge of writing my novel, hesitant and afraid. I bought a huge notebook and made tabs: plot, setting, characters, timeline, weather–yes, I made a tab for the weather in my manuscript, and even more nit-picky tabs that I can’t recall.
Now this may work well for some very meticulous writers, and I applaud you if it does–but as I’m not an organizer in my life, trying to force myself to be one in my writing was akin to banging my head against the proverbial wall.
So there I was with my big fat binder and nothing written down except vague notes about plot and some deep thoughts on the weather (it would be hot, definitely, I decided–not a tough call, since the novel takes place in the summer.) I was stalling.
This went on for some time, until I had a dream.
I dreamed a whole other novel.
“Jesse’s dying,” I thought, as soon as I’d opened my eyes.
Then I wondered, “Who’s Jesse? I’m writing about Willow and Axel!”
But this other novel – The Girl Next Door – had made its entrance, and it would not be ignored. I started to type it, and an even stranger thing happened. I was able to start the barge novel without any difficulty at all.
I just plunged right in.
Finally.
It was like my subconscious put the second novel in my mind to prove to me that I wasn’t a planner, and that I needed to just get on with it.
I wrote the two novels in three months.
Then, just when I thought it was time to rest, another character named Darwin spoke to me. But that’s a whole other story you’ll have to be patient for.
Ideas are literally everywhere. The real question is: How – and when – will I use them?