The Jewel and the Key, beloved second child that it was, was
also the difficult child, and the difficulty was definitely compounded by the
element of time-travel. Writing time-travel means taking on historical and contemporary
fiction simultaneously and creating two different worlds, with two different
casts of characters. You have to make both these parallel worlds equally complete.
This book was
about nine or ten years in the making, with a big gap in the middle (from 2003
– 2005 while I revised my first book The
Amethyst Road, for publication). Compared to The Jewel and the Key, Amethyst
was straightforward. The story-line was clear and simple: a girl’s search for
her disappeared mother and her quest to put her family back together. It
engaged a topic about which I was passionate: racism and what it’s like to be caught
between two cultures. I got to invent a culture and alternative history and set
it in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. It was a story that was waiting for
me to tell it.
The Jewel and the Key was entirely more complex. As soon as I
realized I had a time-travel narrative on my hands, I had too many stories I
wanted to tell, and, like a cook who has just gone wild at Market Spice in Pike
Place Market, I wanted to throw them all in the mix.
I started
writing the week the U.S. started bombing Baghdad. That was the spark for
linking two different eras.
Whatever I’m teaching
always informs my creative life, and my college students had been studying
World War I. I’d assigned Pat Barker’s brilliant novel, Regeneration, which focuses on Siegfried Sassoon, the British poet,
who was sent to a psychiatric hospital when he returned from the front to
launch a protest against World War I – a war whose slaughter never justified
its aims. I felt there were just so many
parallels between our new war and World War I – the stifling of dissent, the
rampant nationalism, the questionable grounds of the conflict, the role of big
business, the PTSD that soldiers suffered. Soon, though I didn’t know it then,
I was to have students in my class who were veterans still coping with their
combat experience. All of them made a very deep impression on me.
This is how my
time-travel narrative came about: I saw these parallels and wanted to bring
them to life for my readers, because they were so vivid and pressing to me.
But I also wanted
there to be a creative counterpoint to all this, a note of hope, so I wrote
about a character, Addie McNeal, who was in love with the theater, and intent
on ‘bringing back to life’ a grand Seattle theater which had become derelict.
This seems
pretty straightforward, doesn't it? However, when I started researching 1917 in
Seattle, I realized there was another
war going on besides the war overseas: a war between organized labor and management.
The Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, a union which organized
unskilled laborers regardless of race, gender or national origin, were
agitating for organizing rights. Cities such as Everett and Spokane, WA tried
to stifle the union by denying workers the right to speak on street corners
about their union struggles. So the Wobs started “Free Speech Fights” -- speaking
out despite the ban and filling the jails when they were arrested: civil
disobedience.
When one
shipload of Wobblies arrived in Everett, Washington in November, 1916, they
were met by the Snohomish County sheriff’s office and vigilantes. The sheriff
demanded who the leader was. When the Wobblies replied, with typical brashness,
“We are all leaders!” the sheriff prohibited them from landing. Things got
ugly. Shots were exchanged. Most say the sheriff’s department fired first. Lives
were lost on both sides – more on the Wobblies’. At this point, 74 of the
Wobblies on the ship were arrested and an important political trial was set in
motion.
OK. So that was
fascinating. I couldn’t leave it out. So I decided to intertwine my story in
1917, as the U.S. entered WWI, with the escape of a single Wobbly prisoner from
jail, with my 1917 hero and my twenty-first century heroine hiding him and
trying to spirit him out of Seattle.
It all just gets
more complicated from there.
All of that
material is still in the novel. It’s a complex but very fun plot. But when I
submitted it to my editor in 2006, it was insanely complex, because I added a
lot of other complications: Addie has just moved because Dad has lost his job.
She is dislocated and misses her friends. She meets a Sudanese girl whose
brother was a lost boy. He gets into a tangle with other Sudanese refugee kids
– I can’t even remember why! He and his sister have a brother missing in Sudan
who has been found, and they need money to get him to the U.S. There were even
more plot complications than that, and, blindly in love with all of them, I happily
sent the manuscript in.
My editor liked
it, but there were problems, she said. Not surprisingly, the main problem was
the intricately complicated plot! Another was that Addie’s best friend Whaley, who
gets the action going by his gung-ho desire to go and fight in Iraq (which
Addie wants to prevent at all costs), appeared in the first three chapters and
then never again. Why did I just drop him out of the plot? she wondered. Why indeed?
I mourned
cutting anything. However, I saw that there was a natural parallel between the
two boys – Whaley in present day Seattle, wanting to fight in Iraq, and Reg in
1917 Seattle, wanting to fight in France. The Sudanese story didn’t fit into
the plot in the same way, and much as I loved it, I knew my editor was right;
it had to go. Admittedly, along with some other extraneous plot twists!
So I wrote a
vastly re-focused version. I developed Whaley into a fully-fledged character:
always in fights, always playing his guitar, always longing to change the
world, always getting the short end of the stick. And I fell in love with him.
When you let something go, like the extra plot lines, you gain something in
terms of focus and depth. Meanwhile, my boy in the past, Reg, got to spread his
wings as an aspiring journalist, connecting him more firmly to the Wobbly
story as he attempted to investigate what really happened.
This is the
draft my editor took to the publishing house, and they offered a contract for
it. Happily ever after, right?
Well, of course not.
This is what I mean by it’s not that easy. At least three major revisions
followed, and then lots of copy-editing and fact-checking. And each revision
felt MAJOR. I’ll discuss the process of revision in my next blog post. See you
in February!
My website: louisespiegler.net
My website: louisespiegler.net
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