It takes a tremendous shift to start a new novel. Space and time have to be prioritized. I find myself preparing to begin in the same manner that I prepared to bring home a new baby. Nesting.
Over the past few months I've gone through just about every closet in my house, hefting bags of toys no one's thought about in years, clothing everyone's outgrown, and board games with missing pieces, out of the house. Salvageable items were all donated. One family carted bins of stuffed animals away in a pick-up truck to distribute to kids on their block for Christmas.
Once the clutter of the house was brought to a manageable level, I zeroed in on my writing desk. I set up files, each labeled with topics that will be woven throughout the new books. I filled each file with the downloaded research articles I need. I organized the books I'd ordered. Books on genetics, the science of vision, Africa, Il Libro dell'Arte. I turned down the pages where I'd begun highlighting passages in Letters to Theo. I feel myself falling in love with Van Gogh as I immerse in his words in the same way I had fallen in love with the Prophet Jeremiah, and the familiarity of that love agitates me to want to channel it into stories. Love is the green light that makes me want to write.
I created a bulletin board filled with pictures of people who resemble the characters I've dreamt. I've outlined the book from beginning to end. I've written a draft of the prologue and three chapters, and begun contacting various people around the world, from Canada to Swaziland, who have access to information that will authenticate aspects of my story. Activists, artists, prosecutors, ophthalmologists. A network of strangers who each unknowingly owns pieces of a grand puzzle.
When you prepare to write a new novel, it is as if you are preparing for world travel. For Drawing in the Dust, I shipped myself to Israel, both modern and ancient. It is a disconcerting means of travel, however, because you propel your soul far and wide and then leave the orbit of your writing desk to touchdown again smack in the midst of family and work. The concrete here-ness and now-ness of children's need and professional responsibility takes a moment of adjustment, when just moments before you were descending into a 46,000 year old ochre mine, covered in gold dust, or posing nude before a painter in a converted garage while the sun reflecting off a starched sheet of snow through the window bathes you, and him, in light.
Space and time have to be prioritized to start a new novel, and space I've taken care of. It is time now that I need to wrangle. Carving the next year into well-defined compartments of time. Identifying the hours well in advance that will be set aside, and digging a moat around them that distraction cannot cross. I'm searching inside me for the strength to plunge headfirst, and the stamina to sustain the swim.
