Craft of Writing

In my classes, we always talk about how authors have made choices: when Dickens begins Bleak House with the one-word sentence, "London," that is a choice. When a megalosaurus waddles through London later in the paragraph, that is also a choice. A dinosaur didn't just fall into the novel; Dickens put it there. And he put a megalosaurus there, not a pterodactyl or a t-rex. He made a choice. Students of literature can have great fun wondering about these choices: why a megalosaurus? What does this choice tell us about Dickens' London, or about Dickens' aims in writing about London? This is a conversation I have often and always enjoy.

Now, however, I find myself puzzling over being the one making the choices. I have outlined the sequel to This Powerful Rhyme, and I have written some pages, but I'm not crazy about them. I have a very clear sense of what my characters are up to in this book, and I have some vivid images in my mind that I'm confident I will transfer to the page eventually, but at the level of starting to make choices, I find myself flummmoxed. Does the book begin in the present or in the past? After some drafting and some outlining, I will surely know the answer to this question, and my readers (when I have some) will talk about my choice. Why did the author choose to begin in the past? What does this choice tell us? For now, I can't answer these questions because I don't know yet what choice I will make.

When I have this conversation about choice with my students, I imagine a decisiveness that I now discover is sometimes elusive. Dickens may have agonized for weeks over what sort of dinosaur to put in the middle of London, and I suppose that agony just means his choice is careful and important. So, I am in the stage with this second book of making careful choices. Will I begin in the past or the present?

For the moment, the choice I am leaning toward is the present because that's where my readers are, and I think they are most likely to choose to enter into the book if I meet them in their own time. There, I just made a choice. Stay tuned to see if it sticks. After all, Dickens may have started off with a pterodactyl!