LIFE BEFORE GENIUS

Following is the first paragraph of the first draft of LIFE AFTER GENIUS:

Theodore Mead Fegley was named after his mother’s uncle who had money. It was hoped that, for this reason, little Teddy might be looked upon favorably by his great uncle, possibly even included in his will, since the senior Teddy was an old man who’d never gotten married and had no children of his own. It didn’t happen that way though. Theodore Mead, the original, met little Teddy only once. At his eightieth birthday celebration. The infant was placed in the aging man’s lap and tickled repeatedly in an effort to get the small child to smile up at his namesake. But the reaction the tickling induced came from the wrong end and little Teddy was removed in a flurry of apologies, leaving a wet stain on the senior Teddy’s trouser leg. At the reading of the will seventeen months later, it was revealed that Theodore Mead had left all his money to the First Presbyterian Church, an act that little Teddy’s mother took to be a personal affront. It was the first of many times that little Teddy would feel that he had failed his mother.

In this first draft, when my novel was titled The Undertaker’s Son, I followed Mead from birth to 18 years old. He experienced several childhood mishaps but nothing ever really “happened.” One agent, who liked the above paragraph enough to ask to see the first 100 pages, sent them back with the comment that I had written what seemed like more of a character exploration than a novel. At the time I was at a loss as to what that meant. Only after I learned more about plot and structure was I able to go back and read his comment and know what he was talking about.

That’s the way it happened for me. I learned in fits and starts. Herman made his first appearance at the end of my fourth draft (or was it the fifth?). My readers liked him. So I went back and wrote what I came to think of as the Herman chapters. Then I took a class where the instructor focused on Structure. Out of that I got the idea to go back and forth between the Herman chapters and the Home chapters leading up to the climax where the two storylines meet.

With all this in place I got an agent. A couple of drafts later he was ready to send it out to publishers. And even after I had a signed contract there were more drafts.

Revisions, revisions, revisions. They are a fact of every writer’s life. I used them to learn.

Copyright © 2008 by M. Ann Jacoby