Holy sh*t, I'm writing a novel!

Maia shares the places that sparked her imagination, becoming the inception point for her work in progress. Plus the mantra that almost derailed her and a sneak peak from Chapter One.

Hi friends,

This is the week! We’re going to begin sharing our works in progress.

What, you might wonder, is “a work in progress?” A work in progress is an early draft of writing. We’ll be sharing ours messy. Nothing will be fixed or edited yet, and the pieces will still be rough around the edges. Picture visiting a friend’s new home when they still have multiple paint chips hanging on the wall and the furniture on sheets for easy sliding around the room.

So, should you give feedback?

Probably not at this point. Cheerleading is most appropriate.

In the interest of building a creative community, it feels necessary to share the fragments so you can see how small creative sparks might build into something larger.

Maia’s going first, sharing the inception point of her novel and an excerpt from Chapter One. Steph will be sharing next week. We invite you to begin thinking about your own creative endeavors. What are you working on? How did it begin?

Note that in the future, these “work in progress” posts will be for paid subscribers.

Enjoy the ride—

Inception

You might not notice the garden were you walking down Royal Hospital Road in London. The street view is almost bleak: a long wall, old brick, with few openings. Perhaps, if it were spring, a fringe of feathery growth might soften the stark facade. Here and there, a glazed roofline might emerge.

This is part of the appeal of The Chelsea Physic Gardens. Established in 1673 and home to over 4,500 medicinal and edible plants, these gardens are a verdant heart, a secret haven, and a treasure trove of stories. I was smitten when I first visited with my husband, Andrew. We stopped in London on our way home from a family trip to Portugal. I knew nothing of the garden’s history, yet as I walked through the tall iron gate, I felt my breath catch. I had stepped into a parallel and enchanted universe— a place where stories floated along beside me as I traversed the garden’s paths.

Upon returning home, I ordered as many books as I could find on the history of the gardens (there weren’t many). I began researching botanists, physicians, and plant hunters who might have been associated with the place. And I started writing the story of a young girl who attended a summer program at said gardens and the magic and mayhem that ensued.

The next year, I returned to London to take a writing workshop and revisit the Chelsea gardens. In the evenings, after a cozy cocktail to debrief the day with my traveling companion, I’d return to my room to work on the story.

Once home, I cracked open my laptop, only to find that the story I’d been working on had completely disappeared. I spent hours searching my computer and cloud storage. It was (and is) gone. I’m sure some computer genius out there is going to DM me and offer assistance. Keep reading. You’ll see I’m actually okay with this turn of events.

For months after, I tried to re-find the old story’s thread. But it seems the manuscript was not just gone from my computer, it was erased from my mind and absent from my energy field. I couldn’t feel it anymore.

Eventually, I realized that the story was a learning exercise. It wasn’t my first. Early in my non-fiction career, I’d written an entire book, under contract, that— despite hiring a private editor and rewriting three times— was never quite right. I pulled it, and wrote something new to satisfy my editor. I’ve long since accepted that writing is a craft and that becoming a skilled craftsperson takes practice. Not everything will be a work I want to put out into the world. Some of what I write will be for skill-building and experimenting.

But without the story I had begun, I was directionless. I wanted to work on a fiction piece but nothing was pulling me. I kept returning to my notes on the gardens, inventing fictional characters who might have populated its history, but nothing stuck. In my mind, I went back to an old mantra, one I’d been repeating to myself since I first started noodling with fiction when I was in my twenties: I’m a writer without a story.

The first time I said this was to my father. We were at a brick-oven pizza place where he’d taken me for a father/daughter lunch. Over coffee, he asked when are you going to write that novel?

There were many things I could have said: I could have explained how many short stories I had written and how I didn’t know how to expand from there into a full-length book. I could have talked about how authors say their characters spoke to them and demanded attention, or they felt an overwhelming drive to write a particular plot line, and how— despite my love of both reading and writing— it made me nervous that that type of compulsion had never happened for me.

But I didn’t say any of those things. Instead of expanding the conversation, I shut it down with a quip: I’ll write my novel as soon as I have a story!

Over the years, that quip has morphed into a little mantra that keeps me good and stuck: I’m just a writer without a story. Ho-hum and woo is me.

But this time, I’d caught the gleam of possibility. Already a published author with a new-found sense of how to structure fiction based on finishing my first memoir, I sensed that story might be stalking me, lurking in the underbrush waiting for me to notice it.

So I kept an eye out for glints of mystery as I traversed my daily life. I read up on Catherine de Medici (and wrote one of my favorite pieces ever about her… but it didn’t go anywhere) and researched a certain figure from the French Revolution (I suspect her story will be a future book). Then one afternoon, as I was down some architecture rabbit hole (I have two years of master’s level architecture study so this is a warren in which I often find myself), I became fascinated with the early twentieth-century trend of buying old European buildings, deconstructing them, and moving them by boat to America.

As I dug deeper and deeper, I stumbled across a character named George Grey Bernard, a sculptor who was responsible for the transport of the French buildings that would become The Cloisters, a museum on New York’s Hudson River. Something sparked in me, the same way it had when I walked into the Chelsea Physic Gardens. It was as though the story were familiar. I started tracing George Grey Bernard’s family lines and I felt as though I knew his daughter before I even read her name.

I’d found my story.

But, since this is How to Write a Novel, I want to share how the old story ensnared the new. How I got myself tangled and unable to move forward.

I was (and am) still smitten with the Cheslea Physic Gardens, so when I found this new thread— the family of the man who had moved neglected French cloisters stone by stone to the United States and what enchantment might be found there— I thought it was part of the same tapestry as the Chelsea gardens’ story. I kept trying to weave them together, warp and weft, and the ensuing stories made no sense. I would get started, but the characters always seemed to have nowhere to go, as if they were in the dead-end of a maze.

In a (wonderful) workshop with Alan Watt of L.A. Writer’s Lab, I realized the problem: I thought I was the god of the story and could weave it however I wished. Thus, everything felt forced….

… And it was. I was pushing both the characters and the storyline into absurd tangles in my attempts to get both the French Cloisters and the English gardens to be at the center of the tale. As soon as I stepped back, as soon as I became the observer of the characters I had created (two great-grandchildren of George Grey Bernard), their personalities began to drive the story, and the plot line could then emerge from the morass.

So, here are my beginnings. Just a little this week as I want to keep this writing mostly behind the paywall for copyright reasons. You’ll quickly notice the influence of the Chelsea Physic Gardens, even though they are no longer at the center of the tale!

Remember, what you’re about to read is what we call “a work in progress.” Honestly? If I didn’t have a number of books under my belt and a thick skin because of it, I wouldn’t share at such an early stage. But in the interest of building a creative community, let’s do this!

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER ONE

…Balancing a planting flat against her hip, Evie jiggled her key into the lock. It stuck halfway in. Aunt Jane really needed to replace the hardware. Every knob in the house was finicky and fussy with age.

Evie’s left earbud slipped as she leaned down to put the flat on the stoop. As the music trailed off, the sounds of the estate came alive: a cardinal calling to its mate, squirrels chittering, and a somewhat discordant buzz like honeybees singing off key. Last year, paper wasps had built a nest near the porch’s light fixture but, looking up, Evie didn’t see the telltale mound. She slipped the earbud back in, reaching for the jammed key with one hand and the handle with other. As she grabbed the knob, she felt a small pop reverberate through her fingertips as the latch came unstuck.

The door swung open. It hadn’t been locked. Maybe Aunt Jane was here after all.

Swinging the door wide and using her foot to wedge a stop underneath, Evie grabbed the flat off the ground and started down the hallway. “Jane? You here?” Her car wasn’t out front, but she often took the train up from the city and then walked or Ubered.

The house had a four-square layout with an extremely wide central hall. Jane liked to joke that if they ever got bored, they could use the hallway for roller skating. With typical Jane panache, she had painted the walls an almost-teal shade of green and then had swirls of tiny leaves stenciled in floating drifts of gold. They were irregular, following no particular pattern, like fairy lights leading you deeper into the house. Evie stared at them, suddenly struck by how much they reminded her of the gold leaf that limned the petals of her cousin Viv’s otherwise outrageously accurate botanical illustrations. She’d been in and out of this house near daily since she was a kid but Evie couldn’t recall exactly when the golden leaves were added. Her mother would know. Was the hallway a nod to Viv’s paintings or were the paintings paying homage to the hallway?

Evie contemplated the leaves and what they might possibly mean as she followed their flow toward the French doors that led to the terrace. It was probably sentimental to think they meant anything, but then, in this family, everything had multiple meanings. That slipperiness of meaning and the mythologizing of damn near everything, was a large part of what kept Viv away.

Western light was already streaming through the wavey glass as she reached the back doors. Balancing the flat of plants on her hip, Evie reached for her phone. 4:44. The day had gotten away from her. Still, it wouldn’t take long to get these in the ground. Turning off her music, she shoved the phone back in her pocket and creaked the old French door open, not realizing she expected a cacophony of birdsong and chittering squirrels until she didn’t hear it. The garden was strangely silent except for that odd buzzing sound she’d noticed out front. Evie felt the hairs on the back of her neck come to attention. Raising a hand to shade her eyes from the sun’s glare, she stepped onto the terrace.

“Jane?”

Nothing, just that off-kilter background buzzing.

Evie paused. Really nothing. No squirrels scurrying along the low stone wall, no finches flitting through the hawthorn hedge. Evie’s chest constricted and her spine goose-bumped, as her eyes slowly scanned from the apple tree along the south wall northward to the row of willows that separated the estate they affectionately called Pempty from the neighboring marshes. Nothing moved….

And so it begins!

Join us again next week, when Steph will be sharing how the story for her novel emerged, as well as a scene or two to whet your appetite.

Till then—