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Okay,
I'm going to assume that you've already read the book if you're
reading this. Please don't read this article if you haven't
finished the book because there are lots of plot spoilers.
Besides, I can't imagine anyone being interested
in this article unless they have read the book. (Or maybe even if
they have.)
Enjoy!
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How
this Book Came to Be
(for those who are interested)
I first had the idea for the second
book around 1993 when I was writing the first book. As I remember rather
distinctly, I was in the back of my family's van, in a parking garage in
New Jersey on an extremely sunny day. I thought to myself that since the
first book was based on the fairy tale Snow White and Rose Red, it would
only be poetic to cast Blanche in the fairy tale "Snow White."
The first thing I did NOT do was come
up with a title. This manuscript went through almost a dozen titles, including
(but not limited to) Snow White in the Woods, The Seven Small
(!), White as Snow, Reflections of the Missing Maiden, and
Her Name, Snow White. Black as Night seems to capture a bit more
what the book is actually about, even though it bothers me that the phrase
doesn't appear in the original tale.
By far the oldest section of the book
is the opening chapter with a girl with short hair in a ragged yellow dress
running through the bombed-out section of the Bronx, and then the opening
section with the friars up until the point where they find her. I wrote
the opening two chapters back around 1995 or earlier. Almost all the elements
that appear in the published chapters were there - the mugging, the snatching
of the purse, the chase to a church, and the punks discovering that the
purse is full of money. But I assure you that I had little idea of what
had just happened to Blanche. Just that she was escaping from something
horrible, that someone had cut her hair, and that her life was in danger.
I had no idea where Bear was and why he wasn't around to save her, nor where
the rest of the family were. Or why she hadn't told the friars her real
name.
But I was fascinated by this beginning
that I had created, and for the next nine years fought to try to write a
story that would justify the beginning.
First of all, whose story would it
be? Blanche's? Bear's? Or the young friar Leon's? (he started out as "Juan"
but quickly became Leon). As seasoned writers will tell you, the viewpoint
of the story changes the story drastically, so I knew this wasn't a light
question. First, I started writing it as Blanche's story. Then I conceived
the idea of limiting the story to only the male characters - Bear and Leon,
to make a study of how guys think about girls (as I'm a girl, I'm always
interested in this question). This was a useful and long exercise, but when
I finally gave my publishers at Bethlehem the draft based on this, Jean
Sharpe said she thought the story begged for Blanche's viewpoint. And she
was right, as it turned out.
About six years into the writing, I
finally hit upon the three-pronged narrative device, with everything happening
either simultaneously or consecutively (at least most of the time), and
it has turned out to be the best solution.
The plot itself went through many twists
and turns as I read, re-read, studied, absorbed, and memorized the Grimm's
fairy tale "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves," as if it had been a passage
of Scripture. In doing this, I gained a tremendous respect for it, and elsewhere
I've published a more scholarly article on my reflections on it.
Here is a rough draft of the chronology
of the evolution of a young adult novel:
1. First draft.
One central figure in any novel based on "Snow White" is the Wicked
Queen, who is obviously the most important stepmother in fairy tale literature,
aside from Cinderella's. As Blanche had a mother and her father was dead,
there was no question of giving Blanche an actual stepmother. She needed
a figurative one, perhaps someone who was a role model for her or a mother
figure. Since I was writing for teens, I thought to myself that perhaps
Elaine herself was a young adult, perhaps several years older than Bear.
Perhaps she owned that posh apartment that was introduced (but never explained
by the author) in the first book. Perhaps she was a friend of Bear's family,
also wealthy, who had been through several heartaches and found herself
interested in Bear when they met up again as young adults, after Bear got
his money back. But when she found out about Blanche, she conceived an insane
jealousy of her, fueled by her spoiled rich-girl background. The
problem was, in the fairy tale, the queen tries to kill Snow White - not
just once, but three times! And in modern days, even very rich, very spoiled
girls don't kill someone just because they're jealous of them. They don't
need to. Merely smearing a reputation or humiliating a rival is enough.
But I tend to not be interested in plots that have no chance of someone
dying, and I knew by the frightened expression on Blanche's face in the
opening sequence that someone was doing more than trying to humiliate her.
So back to the drawing board?
Draft 2. ? what was Bear doing while
Blanche struggled with her rival, a blond girl named Elaine? Bear was off
in Europe. Doing what? How about tracking down his ne'er do well father,
who was dying in France of some terrible disease? He and Fish, distracted
by grief, weren't around to answer Blanche's cries for help, as Elaine,
who was now several years older and owner of a company based in Long Island,
plus a gorgeous mansion nearby, stalked her recent employee. You see, now
Blanche, looking for work, had been hired by Elaine as a personal secretary,
but really Elaine had been looking to put Blanche out of the way so that
she could go after Bear? the only notable thing about this draft was one
half of the climax, which took place through several levels of an office
building and featured, of all people, Lester, one of the bad guys from Blanche's
high school. I really liked the climax, and the general flow of the story,
but it felt nothing like the fairy tale Snow White. So I ditched it.
Draft 3. I knew Bear's role in the
book had to be important, and having him away in Europe for much of the
book was frustrating. So I figured I needed to have him on this side of
the Atlantic. And I had a feeling that Bear's relationship with his dad
was what was causing him to delay getting closer to Blanche. So I was trying
to link my two plots - Bear and his father, Elaine and Blanche, more closely
together. Then on October 2, 2000, I wrote in my project diary, "Elaine
is married to Bear's FATHER." That was the first important key to the book.
So I did have a stepmother - though not Blanche's stepmother. Bear's
stepmother.
Draft 4. So I rewrote again, installing
Bear's dad, (who somewhere along the line acquired the name Jack) as Elaine's
husband in a posh Long Island mansion, and having Elaine being snide to
Blanche and doing nasty things to her like locking her in the basement laundry
room "by accident." I dallied between having Elaine being phony nice to
Blanche or having her be callous and cold. Either way, I had figured out
that Elaine's house was important - a house with long twisted corridors,
perhaps even secret passages. And an oversized, exotic mirror, maybe in
her bedroom. I had one scene where Elaine forces Blanche to try on all sorts
of fantastic ballgowns that used to belong to her. What starts out as an
older woman doing a favor for a young girl turned into a venomous attack
of jealousy which became more and more frightening for Blanche with each
dress she tried on. Alas, but I let that version go too.
Draft 5. At this point (March 2001),
a young editor from Bethlehem, Peter Sharpe, stepped in to try to help me
do surgery and reconstruction on the book. He said, "Just like a girl, you're
trying to build a plot around relationships. You can't do that in an adventure
book, because it just rings hollow unless you do it really well. Use concrete
motives and you'll get further." So we tried finding another motive for
Elaine: she wasn't just jealous of Blanche, but concretely wanting to get
her out of the way. Along the way, we were still trying to figure out what
Bear was going to do with his life. We discussed his vocation numerous times,
filled out imaginary quizzes for him, but Bear's life direction kept eluding
him (and us). At last we settled on working in a museum, because Bear seemed
like the sort of guy who would enjoy being around that kind of culture.
I had the idea of making it into a stained glass museum, showcasing the
work of Tiffany, one of the premier makers of stained glass in the previous
century. Peter wasn't crazy about the idea of Elaine being attracted to
Bear, so he suggested creating a younger rival we called Jane, who was supposed
to be Elaine's daughter. I was still attached to some of the young Elaine
sequences I had already written, so I thought I'd give it a try. So enter
Jane and the museum of stained glass and the idea that someone was trying
to frame Blanche because of a robbery. Peter said, "If you're going to have
this much glass around, the climax has to involve some of it getting broken."
I thought that was a good idea.
Draft 6. The plan was that Jane would
be the red herring villain, openly nasty and spiteful, who would throw everyone
off that it was really Elaine who was trying to get rid of Blanche. I wrote
a large part of this draft before I realized how silly it was. Of course,
anyone who's following the fairy tale is going to know that Jane isn't the
villain - Elaine, the Wicked Queen, must be. And of course a Jane character
isn't in the fairy tale. The whole book was starting to feel less and less
like the story of Snow White, so in the end I scrapped almost everything
from this draft. Except, in the end, for the stained glass mirror. And a
lawyer named Charles.
Draft 7. Bear was still causing problems,
and I realized it was fruitless and stupid to toy with the idea of his even
being remotely attracted to anyone other than Blanche. Whatever his problems
were, they weren't being caused by another girl, so Jane was given the boot.
Bear's problems were more subtle, and deeper. Despite Peter's warning, I
turned back to relationships: Bear's bad relationship with his dad. I knew
from the enigmatic comments Bear had made in the first book that he was
very angry with his dad. Why? Well, the dad, Jack, was unfaithful to Bear's
mother - unfaithful with Elaine. I had also started to figure out that Blanche
and Jack were clicking as friends. That was it - Elaine was jealous of Blanche,
and not only that - she was plotting to cut Bear out of the dad's will,
and Fish too. Blanche was becoming a bridge by which Bear and the father
could be reunited, so Blanche had to go. The primary motive was no longer
jealousy but cold hard cash.
8. I drew up a synopsis, patched pieces
of text together, and said to Peter, "This is an okay sort of story, but
there's no mystery in it and no suspense." He suggested we try to create
a mystery around the friars, who had been neglected this whole time. Right
now they were not at all involved in the complicated backstory, and were
there just to shelter and condole with Blanche in the present. Brother George
was always avoiding Blanche, Leon was suspicious of Blanche, but I wasn't
sure why. Peter and I tossed around ideas of Elaine's shady lawyer Charles
and something called the Mirror Corporation wanting to buy the friary, or
sabotage the construction going on there. I really wasn't crazy about the
plotline, as it seemed miles away from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
I read through the draft, and was thoroughly depressed. Around this time,
I put the manuscript away for a long time. Anytime anyone asked me about
the sequel, I just asked them to pray. My husband would say to people who
asked, "My wife has written the book, but she doesn't like it, so she's
going to try writing it again when she gets a chance." For a long time,
I thought the motivation to pick it up again would never come.
9. Then (around August 2001, but I
didn't get to writing it down till Jan 2002) I had the second inspired idea:
remove one piece of information from the reader's knowledge. Remove one
piece of information, and it will become a mystery story almost instantly.
What was that one piece of critical information? The fact that Jack is
Bear's father. Once the reader doesn't know that fact - and I worked
hard at hiding it - it becomes a completely different book. There's no obvious
connection between Bear's malaise over his life direction and Blanche's
being persecuted by a woman who seems to hate her for no apparent reason.
The fairy tale would become throughout the drafts a sort of red herring
- people would assume that Elaine was getting rid of Blanche because of
jealousy - heck, even Blanche might suspect that - but in reality, cold
hard cash was still driving Elaine's actions. Pornography had figured in
earlier versions of the book, but now I erased that and started to deal
with euthanasia instead. I wasn't sure how to do it, but I was ready to
start rewriting the book again. So I drew up a new synopsis and went to
work, overhauling the scenery once again.
10. In my attempts to disguise the
fact that Blanche is visiting this old man who is really Bear's dad, I thought
a case of duplicate situations might throw Bear and Fish off the track when
they return from Europe (Bear's extended vacation having entered into the
picture at last) to search for the missing Blanche. Blanche would certainly
be mentioning to her family that she is visiting this invalid man. Where
do you find invalids normally? In a nursing home! Instead of working for
Elaine, or working for a museum, Blanche would be working in a nursing home.
So now Blanche experienced a career change too. Before she had been a receptionist,
even an accountant - now she was studying nursing, like her mom, and working
at a nursing home. Fortunately my two sisters were working at a nursing
home, a huge old mansion with halls that were rather spooky at night. I
liked the images, liked the information my sisters eagerly fed me (one insisted
on being put into the book in exchange for her help - she's still there),
and I created a story that revolved around the nursing home. This particular
nursing home, it turned out, was owned by the Mirror Corporation, a predatorial
corporation who had taken it over for tax write-offs. The CEO was this buff
blond lady who had a taste for costume parties and the huge hall attached
to the nursing home that had stained glass windows. At one of the parties,
Blanche had met a sick man, and befriended him, and agreed to visit him
in his home. From here, the black-and-white ballroom scene emerged in its
essentials. And with it, the idea of the colors black, white, and red being
significant to the backdrop of the story. Also the idea of a chess game.
11. I still had a significant problem
I had not conquered: all this was backstory. In other words, so long as
the book HAD to begin with Blanche running away, her hair cut and tears
on her face, all this complicated affair of nursing home takeovers and costume
balls had to be told in retrospect. But I really, really wanted my beautifully
sinister beginning. So I kept trying to simplify and simplify to make the
backstory simpler and easier to narrate. Peter had warned me to use as few
flashbacks as possible, and I was trying mightily. He said "only two per
book" but I decided in the end that it was a stupid rule and I was going
to ignore it. Also, for most of this draft, I was STILL omitting Blanche's
point of view, except in flashbacks. Bear and Leon were the viewpoint characters
for the entire book. Incidentally, it was the need to omit Blanche's point
of view that created significant elements of the climax in the published
book. We needed to see what Blanche was doing once she left the friars,
and we needed to see her secret visit to Jack late at night, but we couldn't
do it from her viewpoint! This was the conundrum. The photograph of Blanche,
and with it, the Vincent Van Seuss scene all came in one graceful sweep
of writing, and right along with them came Bear's recognition of Elaine,
the trip to the Fairston house, and before I knew it, Bear was standing
on the doorsteps picking through his key ring to see if he still had the
key to this house. He unlocked the door, went inside, and started hunting
through the house for his father. He wandered through a maze of rooms, got
disoriented, then saw Blanche coming through the front door - and discovered
at the same time that he was trapped behind a mirror! Bewildered, he raced
back through the rooms to find Blanche, hurried upstairs, heard voices and
started walking softly over to a door with light showing at the bottom --
By the time I wrote that scene on February 3, 2002, it was far past midnight,
and I was starting to hear noises myself as I typed away alone in a dark
house. When I got to the part where Bear slowly opens the door and finds
only the spy-cam computer mechanically recording Jack and Blanche's conversation,
I got a case of the heebie-jeebies myself. I confess I shut down the computer
and hurried to bed quickly.
12. Other important elements emerged
in this draft: Fish and Bear's arrest (originally happening at the airport)
plunged the beginning of the book into immediate tension. I worried over
this exceedingly, because it took the focus off Blanche (and gave away the
secret to some people) but I couldn't deny it made the story far more exciting.
Around this time, Hunter entered the story. First he was Elaine's bodyguard,
and for a while he was actually a crook named Gregory Simon, but now I figured
out at last that he was an FBI or DEA agent that had been sent after Blanche
by Elaine, and later after Bear by his bosses. Hunter gave me another opportunity:
I realized that although I've always implied that Bear is big, strong, and
extra-tough through living on the streets, etc, we have seen little evidence
of his super-manly strength. So I decided that Hunter should be as big as,
or bigger than Bear, maybe more than his match, but that Bear, when given
a choice, would go after him anyhow in order to find Blanche. And with those
actions, Bear started to emerge more fully as a character. Somewhere along
the line my husband and I figured out that his career path should involve
some element of working with his hands as well as art and culture - and
the stonemasonry idea came out. In this version, the witch started to emerge
with more clarity. For some time, a hideous witch (and the Santeria scene)
had figured in the plot, and I had a masked witch showing up at the friary.
I thought now that the witch mask was a costume Elaine had seized at the
black and white ball to use as a disguise. I also realized that for Blanche
to go to the friars and hide instead of going to the police, Blanche had
to feel that she had been framed. So I had the witch framing Blanche at
the party: assaulting her in a prep room at the back of the hall, immobilizing
Blanche by jamming her long braid of hair into the crevice of a door, and
then leaving her to call Hunter. Blanche, who thinks that Hunter is a stalker,
cuts off her own hair to escape, climbs out the window with her purse, and
runs away. This was all very interesting, but it still felt too complicated,
not like the fairy tale, and sort of stretched my suspension of disbelief
too tightly. WAY too tightly.
13. So I kept working on ways to make
the story more plausible over the course of an entire year. Jean urged me
to make Elaine's evil actions towards Blanche more subtle. One encouraging
thing was that Jack's character finally clicked, when I wrote the scene
where he and Blanche first meet. He was funny, odd, and likable, with the
right balance of world-weariness and vulnerability, a pleasure to meet.
I was afraid that either my mystery story was too lame or far too difficult
to figure out, so I wrote out an entire draft, and gave it to a few friends
to read. Then I realized something extremely significant. In fact, so significant
that I can't even mention it here. Suffice it to say that the nursing home
had to go. Pronto. So exit the nursing home, and with it, the complicated
backstory about a corporate takeover. Remembering to simplify, I picked
out the most plausible summer job for Blanche: a caterer/waitress. It made
more sense for the black-and-white ball to be at a banquet hall than at
a nursing home anyhow. I felt I was homing in on the plot at last.
14. A few problems remained: I was
set on having the three temptations of Snow White, as in the original tale.
But I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to do it. At this time,
drugs were still playing a really big role in the plot. Elaine's three visits
to the friary basically involved three assaults on Blanche, where each time
Blanche was drugged and made to look like an addict. It just didn't work.
Blanche is not interesting as a victim of physical assault because she's
not strong enough to present a real contest. Psychological assault along
the lines of the movie Gaslight was far more interesting, and that's
what I settled on. Playing with Blanche's mind was one thing, but I thought
it might be more fun to play with the reader's mind. What if we couldn't
figure out ourselves if the attacks on Blanche were actual attacks or not?
What if for a while we were wondering if Blanche really was slightly insane?
I went a bit overboard with this, and reined myself in, but it was a neat
avenue to go down, and I felt at last that the book was starting to feel
like the original fairy tale. I finally found ways to explore the spiritual
and psychological significance of the three temptations while making them
plausible as well. I also decided that, despite the fact that the flashbacks
rounded out Elaine's character slightly, she functioned best if we saw less
of her. I tried to pack as much as I could into the two big scenes she has:
the ballroom/hair cutting scene with Blanche and the two-part confrontation
with Bear. The rest of her character had to be revealed through Bonnie,
who we don't realize is the same person for much of the book. I think it
works, because the Wicked Queen/Witch is such an iconic figure that she
can handle the short shrift.
The last element of the story was more
inclusion of the friars. I had to figure out whether Leon was going to be
friends with Blanche or not. I had to find out for sure what Brother George
did for a living in his previous life. I had to come up with more things
for the friars to do, so I called up my religious brother friends and canvassed
them for stories. The whole airport scene is lifted from a real incident
that one brother told me (and created the characters of the annoying Rottweilers
in the process). I tried to remember things I had experienced with the friars
while working with them in New York City. And eventually I got my material.
Emily Dickinson and Through the Looking Glass were latecomers to
the story, but fit in well. The plot changed in bits and pieces throughout
the final rewrite, particularly as I checked my facts with the DEA, the
police, and medical people. But at long last, I had my "Snow White
in NYC" story. And I think it does feel like the fairy tale.
Normally I wouldn't go through this
entire saga of how a certain book was written, particularly as I might be
giving away material that I'd like to use in future books. But although
this was definitely the most difficult book for me to write, I learned a
lot about writing through writing it. And as I said, I feel some explanation
is due to those who asked me, years ago if I was writing a sequel to The
Shadow of the Bear, and I said yes and that it would be out soon...
but then it wasn't. And also to those who asked if the book was finished
(and who even read it!) and were dismayed when I told them I had decided
not to publish the version they had read and liked after all.
So that is the story of the book, or
of the writing of the book, and I hope it goes to prove that I really have
been trying hard these past few years to write a sequel to the book like
I promised! And I hope you all enjoy it.
Let
me know your thoughts.
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