Hold on Loosely

by Sara Zarr

            Like many before me, I made the mistake of thinking that once my first book was published, the writing and editing of subsequent books would only get easier. The logic that the rest of the world runs on promises that the more you do something, the better you get. Now I understand what other writers have said: writing a book only teaches you to write that book. The next has lessons all its own. The lesson I learned while writing my third novel, Once Was Lost, is best summed up by .38 Special: “Hold on loosely, but don’t let go. If you cling too tightly, you’re gonna lose control.”

            It’s a book I knew would be challenging from the outset. I’d been working with it in various forms since 2002, when a teen named Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped from her home, right in my neighborhood, and like many others I became emotionally absorbed by the case. That summer, I worked at a nearby church. I’d walk there in the blazing heat, passing trees and fences decorated with the blue ribbons neighbors had put up in symbolic hope for Elizabeth’s safe return. As the summer dragged on, I’d think to myself that there was no way she was alive; when were we all going to admit it, and take the ribbons down? At the church, my job involved typing up Bible verses and prayers and song lyrics for the Sunday service and generally being paid to implicitly endorse a God who’d let this girl get snatched. Every day, hope diminished, leaving me angry and depressed and confused.

            The story idea started there. What if I were someone Elizabeth’s age, trying to understand how this could happen? My previous books featured small stories about everyday life. This one had a certain feeling of largeness and importance that scared me. I felt the heaviness of it every time I sat down and tried to work. I wasn’t sure I was even equipped to tell this story, and spent three years figuring out how.

            At first, I wrote it as an adult novel from multiple third-person points of view, one of them a pastor’s daughter who becomes fixated on the case of a missing girl in her community. Then it was a young adult novel with multiple third-person points of view. Then it was a third-person novel from the point of view of the pastor’s daughter, Samara. I settled on that.

            I wanted to communicate the bigness of the story through the prose. I started with a zoomed-out—way out—camera. A God’s-eye view. The original beginning, which I was in love with for far too long, went like this:

The summer Jody Shaw disappeared was the hottest in the history of Three Pines. There were twelve straight days of record temperatures; days that felt like they’d never end and left the town crackling-dry and brittle. Fires caused by discarded cigarette butts ate up the brush along the highway, and the new tar in the Wal-Mart parking lot up in Dillon’s Bluff melted, sticking to shoes and tires.

            When I say that I was in love with it too long, I don’t mean it’s bad. It’s a perfectly fine opening of a novel (though, reading it now, I don’t like that I used the word “up” twice in the last sentence—who says writers are obsessive?). The problem was that this opening became cemented in my psyche, a completely immovable part of my conception of the book. And once you become so married to a particular aspect of a work that you’re unable to see other choices, you’re in dangerous territory. Until the final, final draft, when others around you—an editor, a writing group, trusted readers—have affirmed that yes, you are near the end, you should be working with clay, not casting in bronze.

            I use the opening only as an example; my dogged determination to hold on to the distant narration ran throughout the book, and set up a rather large problem for me. With that remote view of the world, how would I ensure that the reader could personally connect with the main character? This is so important in young adult fiction. I knew this. Yet I clung stubbornly to my wide-angle lens, thinking that at some point I’d zoom in and it would all work beautifully.

            Around year four of drafting, I finally admitted my approach was not working, and hammered out a dozen new partial drafts. One version of the opening read thusly:

It was hot that summer. Hot like the end of the world, hot like an apocalypse. Some people thought that’s what it was, that Jesus was coming back, that the skies would open but instead of the rain they really needed there’d be angels with trumpets followed by Christ himself. It wouldn’t have surprised anyone in Dillon’s Bluff. Not that summer, anyway, when it seemed like anything could happen.

            Funny how I convinced myself that this was so different. Again, it’s a fine opening; if I came across it in a writing workshop I’d give it a gold star. But it’s essentially the same as the older version. The real problem was this: every story should ask questions, and these openings implied I knew the answers before I’d even gotten around to asking the questions. And what were the questions? While brainstorming, I found myself writing on a Post-It: “How can a loving God allow suffering? Why do bad things happen to good people?”

            That’s when I put my head on my desk and groaned.

            No wonder I was having such trouble with this story. And with such epic questions, no wonder I was attached to my epic opening. Why I’d chosen to deal with questions that no one in the history of humankind has been able to satisfactorily answer yet, I’m not sure. But, the contract was signed, the book paid for and scheduled, and it was too late to quit and try something less ambitious. 

            Ironically, I’d created for my story the very same problem my character Samara had—the God she believed in had become remote, unreachable. If novelists are the gods of the worlds they create, by clinging to a large-scope, impersonal style of narration I was being exactly the kind of god that frustrated Samara. I needed to humble myself, set aside any notion that I had answers, and get into the head and heart of this fifteen year old girl and her personal and specific interactions with the questions.

            The first version of the book I turned in was still in third person. My editor’s notes started, “As expected I think this first round will be a rough one.” Talk about your gripping openers! She then proceeded to build a case for why this novel needed to be in first person, something I knew at gut level but had resisted because I’d somehow believed third would be more “literary.” Finally, I submitted, loosening my fist to let the third-person narration fall away. In the second round of revisions, I relaxed my grip a bit more: I said goodbye to a subplot I’d once believed vital, also a thread involving the details of the investigation—what I now think of as my Law & Order moments—and, maybe biggest of all, I dropped epistolary sections in which Samara wrote letters to the missing girl.

            The final draft opener of the book is this:

            The whole world is wilting.

            Shriveling. Giving up. Dying.

            Maybe not the whole world. Somewhere, I guess, it’s not ninety-one degrees at four in the morning. I would like to be in that place. I would like to be somewhere, anywhere, that life feels possible and not smothered under a layer of heat and hopelessness.

            I still managed to work in a grand pronouncement, but it’s brief, and there’s a question implied. And, right away we get into Samara’s heart. As soon as I had this beginning, the rest of the book opened up to me.  (Well, okay, let’s be honest, it was still hard, but this was the key that got me in.)

            Every time I loosened my grip, something fell away that had at one point seemed permanent. There are things I miss, but it’s easier to take those losses when I know that the core of the story I wanted to tell remains and can now shine in unfiltered light. That’s where the “don’t let go” part of the process comes in. Hold on to the heart of what first makes you want to tell a story—that seed of inspiration, that character that haunts you, the moments you long to crystallize and bring to life. My goal is to couple that holding on with a practice of staying loose and softened and humble—remembering that the task is about questions, not answers. And maybe next time I won’t exhaust myself wrestling for control for quite so long. Then again, I probably will. I’m a slow learner.

 

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