Prompt #98: The Return

Writing Exercise, November 2023

Hi Friends,

As I mentioned last week, I’m writing to you from a little cottage in Fairhope, Alabama, and I have not only returned to a place but to a project, or more accurately, a number of projects. The first time I was here in May 2019, I intended to write a novel based on my grandmother’s life. I stalked around town, the grounds of the old organic school, the beaches on the bay, and the old cemeteries, hoping to find something of my grandmother’s and my young father’s lives here in the late 1920s and early 30s.

Late afternoon on the Mobile Bay

But as far as writing, I found myself drawn to a different topic. My mother died in 2017, and it was so fresh—her illness, her death, my immense grief—that I ended up writing a 80,000-word memoir about our relationship and my taking care of her in the last year of her life. That project is still sitting in a file on my computer, and maybe always will, but I don’t think that was wasted time. Any time spent writing is time well spent.

I’m here again, and I’ve returned to the original novel project which has morphed into something else, something feral with four points of view and a mind of its own, spanning 100 years and four countries. This is the first novel I’ve attempted, and it feels like I’ve set out to build the Taj Mahal when I have never even built a dog house.

I’ve been having trouble returning to the project this week and have ended up doing a whole lot of plate-clearing—writing craft essays I’ve been meaning to write, revising essays, even starting new essays from scratch (I wrote an essay from this prompt, just for fun as I’m not entering the contest—plus my essay ended up at about 1,200 words and not 250). It’s fun to write from a prompt, because I never know what I’ll get.

I even sketched out an idea for a children’s book, something I’ve never done before. I know this is normal for me—the way I circle the big project, procrastinating my writing with other writing before settling in. I ended up writing two poetry collections while I was putting off my dissertation (but finally did finish the dissertation—so I have learned not to worry too much about this roundabout way in).

Some of the greatest novels were written in exactly this way. If they could do it on this machine, well then, we can do it on ours.

A friend I met in a Story Studio’s Novel-in a-Year-Course, the novelist Melissa Rivero (check out her forthcoming novel out here), said, “the best part of writing a novel is