A few weeks ago I started taking tentative first steps towards a second draft of the novel I finished last year. It’s a story that reads like a love letter to the Massachusetts coast, and an unintentional goodbye to a place I’d lived and loved for the better part of my adult life. As I was writing it we knew we’d be moving north, to somewhere in Maine, there was loads of uncertainty about where we’d end up.
I tried to read that draft after we settled here last August, but it was too close.
My novels have always had a strong sense of place, and as I was searching for my place in a new state, in a new home, I couldn’t find a way to ground into where I was if I was still lingering in my past - even if it was in a fictional town and a made up story. I could barely read a few chapters, let alone the whole thing, and shoved it back into the proverbial drawer.
Honestly, I didn’t think I would be able to revisit that draft ever again.
Fast forward to this year, and I wanted to give it another go. The reread went smoothly and brought back my excitement for the story. I was able to see its potential and also had somewhat of a clear view of where the story needed to go in subsequent drafts. The characters felt like old friends, the setting filled me with nostalgia in the best way, and when I came up from the words I was able to ground myself in the here and now the way one needs to find their way through words and stories and plots.
Once I started working on the draft, I needed a bit of a refresher as to how I’d worked through a second draft in the past. I revisited the notebooks I’d kept while writing and rewriting Farm Girl, and was happy to see I’d left myself guideposts and a {somewhat scattered} roadmap. But what made all the difference, and what propelled me forward in an unexpected way, was a note I remembered writing - and at the time it felt so insignificant that I almost didn’t write it down.
It said, “I want it to feel like ‘Killing the Blues.’”
Memories flooded into my head from those nine words. Killing the Blues is a song originally written by Rowland Salley (Chris Issak’s bass guitarist) but I first heard a version of it by Shawn Colvin while I was in a creative writing class as a high school senior. It’s been covered by countless artists, including John Prine as well as Robert Plant and Allison Krauss’s duet. But it was the combination of Shawn Colvin’s voice and the slow, ease-filled melody that embedded that song into my writer’s mind and heart.
I remember sitting in those metal desk/chair combos in Mr. Cameron’s classroom, our desks formed a horseshoe shape that encouraged class participation, and in this particular instance, sharing our work. It was a small group, made up of mostly other high school seniors, and a few juniors. We started each class with freewriting - but not just any freewriting exercise. Mr. Cameron would play music for fifteen minutes, and that guided our writing. Cameron was a musician as well as a writer, and he knew how music could unlock memories, take away some of our inhibitions while getting our thoughts onto the page, and feel a little less pressure to ‘get it right.’ That combined with the fact that we were never asked to share our freewrites made for a safe environment for our teenage creative hearts to thrive.
The only song he chose that I remember to this day was Killing the Blues.
That song brought me back to the metal desks with plastic seats, waiting to hear what we’d work on, hearing my voice shake as I shared my words, being in awe of classmates as they strung words together in combinations I never would have thought of, getting a glimpse into not just their minds, but hearts. That class took away the facades we all clung to, and was a haven as what was shared in that room wasn’t allowed into the locker-lined hallways. That class taught me the importance of having someone in my life who could see past typos and grammar, and get to the core of the story. Validation is a wonderful thing, but more so is knowing someone believes in your story, in your words, in your writing, regardless of the shape of your current draft.
Now, however many decades later, that song brought me back to who I wanted to be way back then - not who I was dating, friend drama, or teenage angst - a Shawn Colvin listening, creative writer with a tender soul, lost in story and wonder.
Seeing that hastily jotted note reminded me of not only what I wanted that one story to feel like, but it was also what I wanted all my stories to feel like, maybe even my life.
And if I’m honest, it’s right here in front of me. I hear the whispers of “somebody said they saw me, swinging the world by the tail…” when I walk through our fields, hands dancing over Queen Anne’s lace, “…bouncing over a white cloud…” as I’m rolling my comfy chair up to my desk, “…killing the blues…” as I type and retype word after word, conjuring stories out of thin air and memories.
I’ve started listening to that song each morning as I get ready to write, and it grounds me in a way that nothing else ever has. The melancholic wistfulness of the lyrics and guitar, combined with a hot mug of tea and a blinking cursor on the computer screen turns out to be the recipe I didn’t know I needed for novel writing.
What’s yours?