From Seeds to Forest

In January, 2012, I embarked on the re-dreaming of a novel I started almost 12 years ago. With the guidance of a writing coach, Rosanne Bane, and the Robert Olen Butler's book, From Where You Dream, I began to envision my book using colored index cards, each one with a sensory description of a scene. After several weeks, the stack grew to 120 or so. Like a magnificent bud, it became an invitation to go further. 

My office was once my daughter's nursery. This is the room where small creatures became full-sized humans with lives of their own; a room for babies and dreams that grow up. I cleared off the desk where her little bed once was and spent several more weeks arranging the cards in the order they would appear in the novel.

I had avoided this little room for the past few years, stepping into it only to bring something that I need to file. I had all but abandoned my novel here. It sat in filing boxes and stacks, collecting dust. It would haunt me, sitting there in a box in the corner of my office. I became adept at ignoring its little persistent sounds. I tried to drown out its call with my excuse.

But its cry of abandonment soon reached me in other parts of the house, in other moments of my day, when I was teaching or reading. My avoidance of writing fiction began to appear in the form of jealousy and irritability. Restlessness took hold of me. Even with a full life, I found myself wondering what was missing and misplacing that at times on my marriage, or focused on how Metro magazine had dropped my popular Personal Gaines column. I secretly hoped that by just sitting there, someone would discover me. I would silently disparage other writers who’d apparently been doing the work and had a product to show for it.

But this January, the year I turned 50, a louder, deeper voice emerged: I am not done with that book. My life won’t be complete if I abandon it now. But how? I no longer knew what I had in that box. I read it and was pleased to find that some of it was good. But I had no idea really how to reenter the world of my novel. When Rosanne told me I could do it with a commitment of 15 minutes a day, my thoughts ran like this: “I can do that!” Then, “No way can I actually write a novel that way.” She assured me I could and I would.

I implemented Butler's idea of ‘dream storming’ on index cards, letting my mind fly from one character to the next, from one place to another, feeling, hearing, seeing through each character, paying no mind to chronology or even logic. Then I did it. I wasn’t always sure, but this was new territory.

Since I’d been working on this book in some form for many years, some of my scenes were already well imagined, deeply grooved in my mind. I put those on the cards, too, trying to give equal weight to well-travelled places and new ones that came up in my dreamstorming. I resisted the urge to place them in order. I simply wrote six to eight words on a card, put it under the deck and went to the next one. I stayed high above the details, swooping down for a quick, sensual peek, then back up to survey the lay of my novel land. It was pure freedom to fly anywhere I wanted, visiting this character, then that one. I stayed sometimes for a cup of tea with one, just long enough to see how the air felt in that hospital room or abandoned church or cool adobe hut.

When it came time to imagine one of the most difficult scenes – the protagonist hits a dog with his mistress’s car, then shoots it to relieve the animal’s suffering – I did not have to stay too long. I swooped down to the side of the road, then back up to fly. This was the scene that had always ended my writing sprees. But in this process of index cards, I was able to envision the next scene and the next. I was able to feel the character’s healing and relief as he buried the dog with the help of man just returning to his reservation.

I dreamed scenes until I thought there were no more. Then I began the process of laying them out in order – not necessarily chronologically, but with some emotional logic. I placed a few down then gathered them up. I added, subtracted, changed the order. I learned that structure is fluid, just like life. New scenes have appeared. Others have died. It is a living thing, this book.

 After several days, cards covered my table that stood exactly as my daughter’s little bed once had. There in that bed, she once told me that the sky people took her away at night. “But they always put me back,” she said when she saw my worried face. My daughter is grown now, living in Chicago. Here I am in her little dreaming room, a little afraid that I will fly away into my book and not return. But each time I do, more grounded than before, knowing that my book is taking real shape, something to hold and one day to open. For the first time since beginning my book so long ago, I am able to see the end of my book. Soon the soil will be ready. Each card will blossom into its own bloom to make a garden. 

I am now about half-way through my deck, more than 50,000 words have become a forest and I am the explorer. Each day, I drop down into the territory of my novel, following this character, then that one. There is no turning back.