dogwoods and feeling around in the dark

The dogwoods are blooming.

They are like these floating, white, clouds among the trees. Even if it is quite dark, the white flowers catch the light and just burn. The blooms only last a week or so. We probably have twenty of them visible out the windows of the yurt, windows which go all the way around, so we seem to be inside and outside at the same time. Dogwood time is always magical.

Here is a close up of one of the flowers.

(Okay, that’s two flowers, the dogwood, and my beautiful daughter.)

I am working on a revision of my third novel now (while also drafting on #6) and I have been thinking about how the process of this one has been so much groping in the dark. Some books get planned and plotted and some writers are really good at that. The advantage of that approach seems to less angst–like traveling a foreign country with a map.

This book, however, has sprung from flashes in the dark–flashes like dogwoods!–and then feeling my way towards the flash with only a tiny flashlight, maybe one of those stupid ones you have to keep squeezing to make it work. It makes me feel hopeless and at sea a lot of the time. It takes a lot of faith to try to come with a novel this way and it certainly isn’t very efficient. I started this novel from a single image seven years ago, wrote a large section of it three years later, and didn’t even realize it all came together in one story until recently when I began this revision.

The payoff: the book seems to be smarter than I am, is a lot more than I could have planned if I had set out to do so. I hope my test readers agree (biting nails)…