Article: It's hard to write a...

It's hard to write a full-length novel. You want to tell a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end, but you also want each scene to stand on its own. You want drama and conflict, but you want to keep things grounded and real. You want to make people laugh, but you also want to move them, and sometimes those two things work against each other. You want to have control over your story but you also want to keep yourself entertained by not always knowing where it's going.

What you don't want is to do a lot of rewriting. But that's what you do, more than anything else. That's been true for me, at least.

Knitting under the Influence has undergone so many changes that whenever people ask me about the writing process, I compare it to that old riddle about the guy who has a boat and keeps replacing planks as they split and rot. Over time, he replaces every plank on the entire boat, so the question becomes, is this the same boat he started with or a completely new boat?

The first glimmer of Knitting had nothing to do with knitting at all. I wrote a book about a young behavioral therapist who goes to live with a family whose child has autism. There was a lot I liked about it, but it was a little dark, a little sad, and a little claustrophobic. The fact that I wrote it when my mother was dying of cancer may have had something to do with the tone.

I decided I had to trash it, but I still liked certain elements of the autism storyline and wanted to keep then. I thought, "What if I make this book about a group of friends, not just one young woman? That'll open it up, and the other stories can be more lighthearted." I needed some excuse for a group of main characters to come together regularly, and my husband said, "Knitting seems really popular now." I loved knitting, had taught myself all the way back in high school. The fact that it was having a renaissance made me happy. A knitting club was perfect.

I decided I wanted four main characters. One was already mostly written--I just had to figure out who the other three were. I cast around for some new ideas and found inspiration in old ones. Back in college, I got to know a guy who worked in a lab where they used animals for experimentation. One night, when he was a little drunk, he admitted he always wanted to be a veterinarian and that killing animals instead of saving them made him miserable. I thought that was a good jumping-off point for a female character. While looking back through some old files, I rediscovered a partially written manuscript about a girl who wanted to marry for money and whose friend and counselor was a much older guy. That became the third storyline. Finally, I wanted a married woman to round out the group and act as a counterpoint to the three single girls, so I created a character who was pregnant-and terrified of everything that could go wrong with the baby.

Concept in place, characters in place . . . I wrote the book.

Of course, if you read Knitting under the Influence, you'll discover that there aren't four main characters-there are only three. Notes from my agent convinced me that the fourth storyline, about the pregnancy, just wasn't as much fun as the rest. I cut the character (sorry, Jen) and changed the second half of the book so my girls could go on a trip to Hawaii (I've always felt that, in some parallel universe, they were very grateful for the unexpected vacation). I also made the knitting club move from place to place, so I could open the book up to different locations. Lucy's boyfriend changed drastically in that rewrite from old and established to young and hot.

And so on and so. I kept rewriting, kept changing those planks . . . until finally it all felt í. I had a finished book and I liked it. Is it ultimately a rewrite of the first book or a whole new book? I have no idea. And, so long as it's a good read, I don't really care.

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