The "You" of It All: First Lines & First Drafts in KINDLING
In which I walk you through a series of discarded first lines from my early drafts of KINDLING, plus a perfect episode of television...
First Lines
Last month I revealed a sneak peek of the first line of Kindling on social media, and I thought that exploring some of my thinking and some of my previous drafts might provide some interesting insights into my creative process when I’m taking the first steps into a new project.
The war took you many places on the Kindar Peninsula (and in the years since the war ended, you’ve pretty much seen the rest), but you’ve never been to the northlands until now.
First lines have to do a lot of work, from setting a scene to drawing in readers, but as an author whose books tend to be dramatically different in narrative voice, I also think a lot about the way first lines also establish expectations for who is telling the story and who they're telling it to.
We Are Not Free has thirteen first-person narrators (one of them plural) telling their stories from their own perspectives. A Thousand Steps into Night has one third-person narrator telling Miuko's story (and layered on top of that is the idea that the manuscript had been "found" by some hermetic scholar of these fictional Awaran folktales, who added their own explanatory footnotes to the text).
Kindling is written from a second-person perspective that roams from character to character in the present tense. (Although if there’s a “you,” there’s also necessarily an “I”—a person, or in the case of Kindling, persons, who is/are speaking.) I’ve loved this point of view for years, and I usually jump at the chance to use it, like in Keiko’s chapter of We Are Not Free, but I dreaded the idea of taking it on for Kindling. I mean, a whole novel? A multi-POV fantasy novel? Written in second person? How could I ever keep that up over 400 pages? How could that possibly be sustainable? And reader, let me tell you, I tried to resist. I tried to write it in third. And then first. And then third again. But the story refused to go anywhere (I couldn’t even get past the first chapter) until I embraced the you of it all.
I thought it might be fun to take you through some of the first lines I tried out and discarded for Kindling, with commentary on why they didn’t work and how even though it took me thirteen attempts, each one brought me a little closer to the story Kindling was always supposed to become.
Draft 1: Aleum—now Leum—Kindling Septenary Class of Her Queen Commander’s Army—now no one—wore her sword across her back, for she did not now need it at her side.
I always knew I wanted a jaded, detached sort of character to introduce readers to the world of Kindling, and you can see here how she first appeared to me: as a battle-worn kid who’s had her sense of self obliterated many times over, who’s clinging to the remnants of her old life, even though they no longer serve her as they once did. But the voice felt wrong. A bit too stuffy. A few too many contortions in the tense. So I had to try something different.
Draft 2: We scatter after the war. Sparks, skittering across a unified Amerand—the wooden cities, the plains-now-graveyards, the graveyards proper, the temples smelling of sage and slate—flaring (for a while) and then, yes, then flickering out, as we all do, as we were always supposed to, consigned at last to that unimaginable windless dark.
As you can see, I hit upon the idea of an unconventional narrator very early in the process. I think first-person plural (colloquially known as “the royal we”) is such a fascinating perspective—those of you who’ve read We Are Not Free will recognize it from the “All of Us” chapter—and I feel like I hit upon something here. The urgency of present tense. The lists and sentence fragments. Even the musicality of the diction and syntax: scatter, sparks, skittering, sage and slate. Here, the story is told by a tragic chorus of dead kindlings who float about the characters, narrating their every move. I still love this paragraph, and even though it didn’t make it into the final draft, this attempt informed so much of what the voice of Kindling eventually became.
Draft 4: Leum’s ghosts drive her, grumbling, from the grain shed where she’s spent the past few nights.
Despite how much I loved my Draft 2 experiments, I just couldn’t fathom writing an entire novel in first-person plural. The poetry of it just seemed unsustainable. (Although I recently started The Spear Cuts through Water by Simon Jimenez, an adult fantasy, and the voice in that one is dense with poetry.) So the only thing I retained from Draft 2 was the present tense, and I went back to starting with Leum, who with every draft was growing more and more clear in my mind’s eye: a battle-worn veteran, a scruffy vagabond, and a total grouch.
Draft 6: Leum could sleep almost anywhere as long as it was daylight. Barns, boarding rooms, the battlefield, it didn’t matter.
Here’s where I balked. For Drafts 6-10, it’s like I ran screaming from all the good, interesting stuff I was doing in those early drafts. Gone is the unconventional perspective. Gone is the poetry. We’re back in third person past, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t right for this story, and it took me five unsuccessful attempts to realize it.
Draft 11: The Kindar Peninsula had been at war so long, we had forgotten the taste of peace on our tongues.
Draft 11 is when I finally returned to the first-person plural from Draft 2, when I finally accepted that Kindling required a different sort of narrator. Not a first-person confessional or a narrative overlord who sees all and knows all, but something more unexpected and, hopefully, more delightful. But this attempt, like Draft 1, felt too stiff. I needed to find again that playfulness from Draft 2, that personality from Draft 4. I had the pieces, but I needed to bring them all together.
Draft 13: You wear your sword across your back, for you do not now need it at your side.
Then, after twelve failed attempts at getting this book started, I hit on the right combination of somber and playful, battle-weary and urgent, beautiful and to-the-point. (You’ll actually find this entire sentence made it all the way through to the final book, where it now appears on page 3.) After twelve drafts, I understood, finally, that this story had to be told by that dead chorus from Draft 2, which gave it the flexibility of voice—both soaring and ethereal, petty and down-to-earth—but that this dead chorus was not a character in its own right, exactly, but a lens that I could turn with equal parts insight and petulance and frustration and love on the main characters themselves. Now, they draw the reader through the narrative, telling the stories of these seven warriors, these children who survived the war, these kindlings searching for a place in a world that was never meant for them.
In case you missed it
I revealed the cover for Kindling back in June and I wanted to thank all of you for the outpouring of excitement.
Buy links are live at Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, or inquire at your local independent bookstore! As always, remember to save your pre-order receipts, because I’ve got something cool in the works for you.
What I’m into these days
What I’m watching: The Bear Season 2 on Hulu. Season 1 of The Bear is about a world-class chef who returns home after his brother’s death to run the family sandwich shop. It’s a fascinating study of the pressures and expectations and snobbery and soaring heights of fine dining set in a grimy sandwich shop populated by incredibly detailed, incredibly compelling characters who learn, kind of, to love and trust one another. The first season was tense, and in that respect the second season slows down a bit, but easing the tension allows the characters to breathe a bit more. I’m particularly in love with Season 2 Episode 7, “Forks,” which I think features one of the most dynamic and interesting characters of the season. It’s a magnificent journey squished into a mere 35 minutes, and rewatched the entire season just to experience it again. There aren’t a lot of perfect episodes of television, but I suspect that this is one of them. Highly recommend!
What I’m growing: Dahlias! I’m trying my hand at growing more flowers this year, and my dahlias are finally coming in. I’m naturally drawn to decorative dahlias with their formal rings of perfectly formed petals, but the bumblebees love the only single dahlia I’m growing this year, a bright red beauty called “Waltzing Mathilda”—the other day we found a bumblebee taking a nap in one of the flowers! I’m going to wait to decide if I want to grow dahlias again next year—I worry that storing them over the winter might be more trouble than it’s worth—but when I choose flowers for next year, you bet I’m going to choose more of the single-flowered varieties the bees love so much, because it’s the most wonderful feeling to step out into a garden humming with life.
What I’m eating: Today I had the most delicious grilled cheese on Jane the Bakery’s three-cheese rosemary bread with gruyere and sharp cheddar. I’m thinking it would be amazing with this NYT Cooking Tomato Soup recipe, and I’m dying to try it again!