My 8 year old son recently asked me what my memory was of the best feeling I'd ever had. While I thought it over (laughing so hard I peed in my pants? swimming in a lake on a starry summer night?) he told me that his happiest memory was of the time he and a couple of classmates worked together on an art project, creating one section of a collage that their whole first grade collaborated on. As he said this, I thought: of course. I knew exactly what he meant, because one of the best feelings I'd ever had--a consistent sense of joy, purpose and fun--was when Helena and I worked together to come up with and write the novel that is SPARKED.
Helena and I were both relatively new mothers when we met at a mutual friend's wedding. We bonded over (what else?) the books that we loved. It turned out they were almost the same books. We'd also loved many of the same books as kids, especially everything ever written by Roald Dahl. We were both also the authors of "adult" novels. While we'd loved writing our books, loved writing period, we were both feeling a little isolated at that moment (babies are great but not great conversationalists), which was why our conversation about books and writing practically bubbled out of us as we each recognized a kindred spirit.
The next time we met, on a full moon night that happened to be a Friday the 13th, our conversation shifted to what we wanted to write next. It turned out that once again we had an eerie overlap. Both of us had been thinking of trying to write a young adult novel, branching out away from strict realism, trying to reconnect with the sense of fun and adventure that had brought us into writing (and books) to begin with. I had actually started and abandoned some very rough pages, based on a dream I had been having since I was a kid. In this dream, which I had often.
In this dream, I was able to move things with my eyes--like Matilda in my beloved Roald Dahl novel. I'd wake up and squint really hard at the things in my room, absolutely positive that they would move, and more than a little disappointed when they didn't. One day, I'd started to write a scene about a teenaged girl who wakes up from a vivid dream of telekinesis and discovers that her older sister, with whom she shares a bedroom, isn't in her bed. I also had some scenes about other girls in this small town who start being able to do things that ordinary people can't do, but who aren't sure whether they are manifesting "powers" or not. I had no idea how or if these scraps could fit together, but when I found myself telling Helena about what I'd written, she immediately saw connections and possibilities for how to start building this into a story.
By the time we separated that night, we had pages and pages of notes. (Helena, bless her, is incredibly organized, whereas I try to keep an organized head (ha) and often fail). I wasn't sure whether we'd ever do anything with any of it--would our ideas hold up in the light of day? But sure enough, not a day had passed before Helena sent me those notes, all neatly typed up. I sent her my very rough early scenes to play with. We started a Google doc and began pinging and ponging scenes back and forth, developing our outline into the beginning of a novel, then getting together once a week to figure out what should happen next, what new scenes we needed to write, and which of us should write the first drafts of them.
I found myself thinking about this process while talking to my son about the joy and exhilaration he felt while working on a creative project with a few friends from his class. I think that while Helena and I were writing this novel together, we were able to tap back into that feeling that all of us had as kids: where you get so lost in imaginative play with your friends that the world you're co-creating becomes more real (and certainly a lot more interesting) than the one you're living in, you enter what people now call "the flow state," time stops mattering and the imagination takes over. I don't think this is possible, to the same extent at least, when you're working creatively alone. Building a world with someone else is a unique joy. Someone else cares about these made up people as much as you do! Someone else wants this to be the best story it can be!
I remember at one point having another great dream, while working on this book. In it, I was walking through a Victorian house full of corridors and doors, and suddenly I realized that one of the back doors of my house led directly into a house that turned out to be Helena's. We had a secret open passage between our homes. When we were working on this novel, Helena often reminded me, "Two heads are better than one," when we'd hit a stumbling block. Writing this book with her, I feel like I was able to knock down some of the barriers to my imagination that I hadn't even realized were there, accessing the chambers of her mind and allowing her to roam around and play in mine. It was at times an almost mystical experience, which is no doubt why it produced a book full of magic.
Helena and I spent a couple of years writing and then revising SPARKED while also raising (and having, in Helena's case) our kids, teaching writing and working on other projects. It's exciting to be done with it now, and ready to share it with readers. We wrote this novel with the idea that we wanted to write the book we would've wanted to read when we were teenagers. Whenever we got stuck, we'd channel our own teenaged selves and try to figure out what would've delighted us, frightened us, kept us wanting to turn pages. Since we've finished it, our proudest moments have been hearing from our teen beta readers (thanks, Lily and Kiki!) one of whom read it twice (I can't imagine a better compliment, eva!) and more recently hearing positive feedback from a very scholarly woman in her mid-eighties. We can't wait to connect with more readers!
With you in mind, we are going to keep this space where we'll share our thoughts on books and the writing life (both of us teach writing at Stanford) and answer questions from readers or aspiring writers. Helena, in addition to being a novelist, is also a former etiquette columnist, who's used to fielding questions. So if there's anything you want to ask or find out about, whether it is a writing craft related question or something to do with the novel, please ask away!
Warmly,
Malena
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