Walking the Song Lines
Picture Book Revision: Shaping the Text
by Sarah Sullivan
This is how it begins, with a voice whispering in my head or an image flickering in my brain, something visceral and compelling, a voice or image that suggests a character who will drive my story. The journey from first draft to final book is long and winding, with many detours and false turns.
I am reminded of the Aboriginal Walkabout, when a person makes a spiritual connection by following a song line across the land, a path formed at the beginning of time when the Ancestors sang the world into existence. In a similar, but far more humble fashion, a writer follows the path of her heart in search of story. She knows it’s there somewhere, buried beneath bush and weed, hidden amidst images and ideas. Her job is to uncover the path, to hack away the undergrowth, revealing one true line. This rarely happens without the help of a wise editor or trusted reader.
Writing each of my four picture books has been a journey through mucky ponds and murky woods. I begin by working alone in a quiet room. Then my editor enters the scene, bringing her independent vision, helping me discover the real story beneath all those words. Together, we shape a text. Once the text is polished, it is time to find an illustrator. Soon (or usually, not so soon—years may pass), we have an art director and an illustrator adding their vision to the story. The project continues to evolve. Meaning grows. Layers are added. Words fall away. Words are added. Words change.
In the case of my fourth picture book, Passing the Music Down (Candlewick 2011), it began with a photograph I couldn’t get out of my head, a picture of an old fiddle player named Melvin Wine who frequently performed with a young apprentice named Jake Krack. That image inspired this first sentence.
In his red plaid shirt, with his hands gnarled from working, Melvin Wine played his fiddle with a long bow arm.
Several years and countless revisions later, the same story begins like this, with a place, rather than a person. Like the opening frames of a movie, the lines set the stage for the action to follow. They establish the setting out of which my character will emerge:
Come August, with corn strutting high in the fields and tomatoes plumping out on the vine, folks get to talking about tuning up and heading over twisty mountain roads to hear fiddle players and banjo pickers make music under the stars.
The fiddle player does not appear until the third stanza now. Here are the lines:
Come to hear a man bent by stooping in the mines,
Come to hear him lift his bow and set his spirit free.
So, it goes with revision. I follow a path with no road map. I listen to my heart and my gut and pray for imagination to kick in. The process requires quiet and concentration . . . and a dash of luck.
I began writing Passing the Music Down shortly after 9/11, during a time when the idea of passing down tradition and preserving culture felt more important than ever, though I was unconscious of how deeply the undercurrent of danger and uncertainty was affecting me. In the early drafts I focused on the life of the old man. I thought it important to tell his story first and to end with the connection he makes with the young man, with the act of passing down wisdom and culture, preserving civilization, if you will, in the face of chaos. That’s what was really on my mind, in the deep dark recesses where fear resides.
Looking back, I can see now that I needed to tell that story first before I could find a way to build the foundation for what the book was really about. It was in the second draft that I started to discover the theme that would provide the framework for the book. In this version, the focus shifts to the act of passing on the music, though there is still much of the old man’s story. For some reason, I thought it necessary to “prove” how far back the tradition of passing down the music [read: civilization] stretched. This is where the manuscript was when I submitted it to my editor, Hilary Van Dusen.
In an early email, Hilary asked if I might consider “structuring the text loosely on the young fiddler’s life.” She went on to suggest how the story line might go. Smart editor. That was just the direction I needed. She believed in the story, as I did, and she helped me see how to tell it. So, I was off and running, revising with a clearer idea of how to make the story work.
The next version was very close to the final one. The changes from this point on were fine-tuning. I had needed to understand what story I was trying to tell before I could reach the point of line-editing. The text now begins with the young man traveling a great distance to meet the old fiddler, at the point of connection between the older generation and the younger one. That, after all, is what the book is about.
What remains of my original first sentence? The fifth stanza of my text now reads,
With his hands gnarled from work, the old man lifts his bow.
Gives a nod to the crowd and saws out a lick.
The image from that photograph is still in there, woven into the framework that my editor and I uncovered in the process of revision.
By contrast, the first sentence of Once Upon a Baby Brother (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2010), my third picture book, never changed. In fact, it’s the one thing that remained constant throughout the entire process of writing the book. The story began with a mental image of a spunky little girl who loved to tell stories. She was a second grader who adored reading and wanted to write her own books. She felt stymied at home by the lavish attention showered on her younger brother Marvin, who wreaked havoc on all of his sister’s things. At school, Lizzie was the star. Her fellow students loved her stories. Her second grade teacher, Miss Pennyroyal, encouraged her. The first line practically wrote itself:
From the day she could talk, Lizzie loved to tell stories. Tall ones. True ones. Funny ones. Sad ones. Lizzie loved them all.
In fact, the entire exposition of this story remained remarkably close to its original version. I knew Lizzie. I understood how she thought. I knew what she wanted. The difficulty was figuring out what the “turn” in the book would be, how Lizzie would resolve the difficulties she was experiencing at home with her younger brother and, how to balance the home story with the school story in the space of a picture book, (albeit a longer one for 4 to 8-year-olds). That’s where my brilliant editor, Melanie Kroupa, stepped in. In an email, she wrote:
Marvin – (despite or perhaps because of his being a thorn in Lizzie’s side!) is, in fact, her inspiration for all her writing . . . . He’s the little “itch” in her life that propels her to write. What if their mom takes him off someplace and suddenly Lizzie’s life is empty. So empty that suddenly she has nothing to write about (or so it seems). It’s not until he gets home that she can see him in a different light. . . .
There it was, the structure for the climax and denouement. The story was more autobiographical than I’d cared to acknowledge (a sibling who is both obstacle to and reason for writing). Now, all I had to do was write it!
Though the story line changed little over the course of the next two years, there was much tweaking of page turns and text to make the humor work. It was a matter of figuring out how much to convey through text without saying too much. Much of this work was up to the illustrator, Tricia Tusa. She’s a genius. Her illustrations brought Lizzie and Marvin to life, with humor, frustration and love shining through like bright, clear lines.
Each picture book has its own gestalt, the nut you have to crack, the part you must wrestle with to make it work, the underbrush you must hack away to uncover the song line of the tale you are meant to tell. With Passing the Music Down, it was understanding what the story was really about. With Once Upon a Baby Brother, it was figuring out the “turn” at the end, understanding how to make it organic to the whole while preserving comic timing and page turns.
Unfortunately, I know of no shortcuts to this discovery process. Susan Vreeland wrote that, “…it is the province and privilege of the writer to let concrete things that move us feed our imagination until we find meaning in them.” But, it isn’t always pretty getting there. As Shirley Jackson said of writing, “It’s nervous work. The state that you need to write is the state that others are paying large sums to get rid of.” It’s probably advisable to remember that. There will be days when words don’t come, when you can’t find any trace of a path.
The song lines of your stories are written on your heart. Only you can discover them (with the guidance of a smart editor).
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
This is very helpful and encouraging. Thank you for sharing your process!
I agree with Meredith. Thanks for sharing.