You thought I was kidding, didn’t you?

You didn’t really imagine we were going to discuss all the ways to screw up a book and eventually get on the right track again.

Well, like Harry Hyena in the immortal Richard Scarry books, “You were wrong.” We read a lot of Richard Scarry books when my kids were little and Harry Hyena was a favorite character — mostly because he so often was wrong.

But I digress . . .

There is another way to go wrong — the dead end. You can take the wrecking ball to whatever ‘road construction’ you’ve got up to that point. And, as I pointed out when writing about Charlie’s book, sometimes it’s justified. But it’s not the option of first resort.

The ‘dead end’ approach is to back up slowly. This is also known in our house as “the Cornish road” approach to book writing. Anyone who has driven on Cornish roads will not need an explanation for that. They know the “I’m a pinball” feeling you get when going blindly down an extremely narrow — and narrowing further, not to mention switching back and going uphill and down and whoops, there’s a bridge — lane with hedges higher than your head on either side. The fact that a large part of the hedge seems to be native granite doesn’t encourage forays across country, either. And here comes a truck — er, sorry, lorry — heading your way. Or sheep. Sometimes it’s sheep. Sometimes it’s a lorry full of sheep or the book equivalent thereof.

So you back up. Carefully. Studying, as you go, all the possible outlets in the hedgerows, looking for glimmers of light that might lead you into a road thus far unexplored and certainly more likely to lead you into the light than the one you’re on.

Sometimes you have to get out and move a few rocks. Sometimes you have to widen things a bit, put up a signpost or two, do a little paving. But very often what you need to get to the end is already in there — the tiniest gap between two boulders. Something you didn’t see earlier when you were hurtling along unawares.

That’s why it’s not a good idea to go directly to the wrecking ball. It’s always there if you need it. But sometimes it’s better to go back, painstaking and annoying though it is, to see what you might have passed up that you can use to get to The End. What little hints and directions and useful people or places or sheep or pubs along the way can you make use of in ways you might never have imagined.

It’s sort of an exercise in mining your own subconscious. You write along, blithely putting stuff in because it seems to work, and then, when you have to stop because you’re lost or stuck or staring into the headlights of a lorry filled with sheep, you have to back up and look for alternatives. And most of the alternatives you will end up using are already there. The subconscious part of your writing mind (which is to say, 95% of it in the case of my own) already knows you’re going to be coming back and has helpfully provided pubs, dogs, cranky old ladies, boys playing catch and in my current ms — a Brazilian property developer on the telephone saying, “Psssst. Follow me.” — to give me an out.

Who knew? Not me. But I can see potential in him.

I can see a way to get Sadie out of this scene. Even better, I can see a plot complication that Mr Brazilian could offer quite a ways down the road. This is the best part of the backing up from the dead end. It’s the fork in the road I didn’t see the first time through. The road not taken.

Until now.

Somebody should write a poem about that.

Jakob Nielsen says that the headline is the most important bit of blog writing, that it grabs readers — or not. So, I have put considerable thought into what to call this.

I had thought a more ‘blanket’ title — Theories of Deconstruction — would be the best because that is, after all, what I intended to talk about. But then I recognized that if someone suggested that I read something called Theories of Deconstruction, I’d run in the other direction. But definitely something about deconstruction, because apparently (from the comments I got the other day) there are a lot of people interested in ripping their books apart.

So in the interests of thoroughness, if nothing else, I thought we’d take them one at a time. So, today, class, we are discussing the advantages of committing wholesale havoc.

On every book I do that here and there. Like taking out a room or a fireplace or something, I knock out a chapter or a scene. Whap, it’s gone. Because, like as not, I gave it plenty of opportunity to prove itself worthy of inclusion, and it just swanned around being pretty in its own right, but not contributing anything to the book — NO MATTER HOW MANY CHANCES I GAVE IT.

I can’t tell you the number of scenes that has happened to. But I can tell you that every book but, I think, The Marriage Trap, had at least one. It may have, but the rest of the book just basically wrote itself, so I have such fond memories of that book that I never consider it an angst-producer.

And at the other end of the spectrum, there was A Cowboy’s Promise. Every time I began to write that book, for which I had already written a synopsis of the story and which I knew — and had known — for over ten years because Charlie had been something of a teenage troublemaker in an earlier book, I stopped dead on page 31. Sometimes I stopped dead on page 29, but then, if I struggled, I could make it to 31. But I never got any further.

I wrote that damn first 31 pages for something like three months, looking for the key to get out of the Dew Drop Inn where Charlie was playing pool with a couple of locals, and into the rest of the story. And while I loved the scene with Charlie playing pool in the Dew Drop, I knew the whole book wasn’t going to take place there. But I gave the book every chance. I gave the story every chance. Heck, I gave the heroine every chance. But she didn’t do what she was supposed to do — like show up. And Charlie couldn’t play pool forever while we waited for her to get her act together.

So . . . eventually I went to the wrecking ball. One morning when I couldn’t stand it anymore — and the deadline was approaching and my editor was turning grey and my friends were totally tired of hearing me say, “Let me just run this past you one more time” — I sat down at the computer, opened the file, highlighted all of chapter two that I had (because that’s where it stopped) and hit delete. Then I took a deep breath, opened chapter one, and did the same thing.

Bye-bye book.

Hello, freedom.

It was drastic, yes, but it had to be. If I hadn’t done it, the temptation to keep trying to fix it would have continued. It had to be totally gone. There could be no going back. And once I got rid of it and had the clean slate, I found a new story that was apparently the one Charlie and Cait were really waiting for me to discover and that one went very nicely. There were no glitches. There were the usual stumbling blocks and stutters, but no dead ends. No complete blank-outs. Nothing insurmountable.

I fear that if I hadn’t done it, I’d be still here, six years later, writing Charlie in the Dew Drop for the 11 millionth time (and Cait would still be wherever she was, refusing to take part).

It was a little scary, yes. But it seemed like the best thing to do at the time. And in fact, now I wonder why I waited so long.

Spence is not a candidate for the wrecking ball. Yet. But I do not like the funny little echo I hear in the back of my brain which seems to be saying, “Give him time.”

Well.

This might be too much of a good thing.

The map cabinet has arrived and, as I said to Kate Hardy in one of my comments on yesterday’s post, we might have to build it a room of its own. My lord, that thing is HUGE. If it stays in the living room, where it is now, it will be the conversation piece for years to come. And somehow I don’t think I want it being the never-ending focus of our lives. So on the weekend it’s moving to the dining room where it can hang out in the corner and work at being inconspicuous (not). At least it can try to blend in.

I do like it though. So does The Prof. Of course he sees it as “no longer paying rent on the locker” and therefore he doesn’t care if it sits in the middle of the blinkin’ kitchen and has to be skirted every time we go near the sink or stove. I think he pats its handsome oaken head every time he walks past.

At least nothing will be falling out of it and bopping him on the head now. When we get it situated, I’ll dare to take its photo and stick it up here (probably before we put the tv on top of it and thereby ruin its feng shui or whatever it is that makes it — or us — feel at home.

Can’t worry about it today. I’m taking my mother to visit her 98 year old cousin who lives about 100 miles from here. We’re going out to lunch for cousin’s birthday. It’s always such a treat to visit with her. If I get to be 98, I want to have the same enthusiastic outlook on life. She still drives and still shovels snow in the winter and will doubtless haul us all over the county telling us the history of everyone who has lived there since her grandparents settled there in 1855. I love that sort of thing. Except I keep thinking I’m not doing a good enough job of recording what she knows. The county is going to lose an incredible font of information when she goes. Thank God I don’t think she’s going anytime soon!