Masha & Vova

I am good at remembering the moment of conception.

The Persistence of Memory was born seventeen years ago, when I was thirteen and writing down a daydream. It evolved from there over the next fifteen years, but the seed came from a June night and a Broadway fantasy. My muse was Michael Crawford.

The Death Clock began four years ago, when I said to my husband, 'What do you think our lives would be like if we knew when we were going to die?' It was an interesting concept, but it took a while to come up with a plot and characters for it. So I started at the beginning: a suicide dinner party, based on a striking scene from Quo Vadis. My muse was Benedict Cumberbatch.

Those are the two novels I've finished that I'm really proud of. Now I'm working on a third - working title, Masha & Vova. It's about a Romeo & Juliet type myth that has evolved around two eighteenth-century Russian lovers. This one was born in St Petersburg's Hermitage museum, and the central plot sprang fully armed out of my head like Athena. The two characters - their names, their faces, their village - are based on a young married couple I met in Siberia. They were sweet, passionate, friendly, and seemed much in love.

I came home from Russia and started writing the book - formulating scenes, a structure, over the course of a year and a half (yes, a slow burner). I decided to change Vova's name to something easier on English ears - my husband has had a number of incidents of mispronouncing it with disastrous results.

Early this year, a mutual friend told us that Vova, the real Vova, had beaten cancer a few years ago, and it had now come back.

This fall, Vova died. He was twenty-eight.

Masha is devastated, angry. She is only in her early twenties. She doesn't understand.

The character has always remained Vova in my own mind, and now I can't countenance the idea of calling him anything else. The writing is still in the early stages, but I hope one day I'll be able to send Masha a copy of a novel about two immortal lovers who bear their names.

Saying Goodbye

Even a year ago, I never would have believed I could fall out of love with Patrick.

We met on a summer night when I was only 13 and waiting for something to happen, already longing to get up in the middle of the night and just turn the doorknob and start walking: disappear one night and show up a few years later under a different name and a Broadway marquee.

Patrick was the perfect man, or what at 13 I expected the perfect man to be like: handsome, melancholy, sensitive, gifted, passionate. We grew together. We shared the same friends. I can't say I knew everything about him, but I knew him so well that there were things I knew about him that he didn't know about himself.

We were together for 16 years and even until last year I was as much in love with him as ever.

I had a vacation in Phoenix with my parents over the New Year, and when I got back, it just wasn't the same.

There was no reason. He did nothing wrong. Perhaps I'd just come to know him too well; perhaps  I couldn't think of any more secrets of his that I wanted to discover.  Perhaps I'd outgrown his melancholy. I started to stay away and when I did try to spend time with him, I found myself slack, unmotivated, even faintly repulsed. I could never stay long.

Clearly I was the one who grew away. Patrick has not changed. I know now that he never will. He will always be glad to see me - and in truth, when he crosses my mind, it's with a sweetness and a true affection.  I can imagine that someday, in months or years, I'll have a sudden urge and meet him again and find myself amazed to think I let things drift so long. I could fall in love with Patrick again. After all, he's handsome, melancholy, sensitive, gifted and passionate.

But for now, I have  Jonathan, who has eyes like lightning, and Asher, who's so unpredictable, and Vova, who's no good but is a genius, and Michael, who's beautiful but weak. None of them will stay forever; none will be the love of my writing life. That will always be Patrick - no matter how long we're apart.

Happy Shiny Fictional People

One of my greatest struggles as a writer is overexcitement and undercommitment. Let me explain:

-Patrick was my first love. Every once in a while I think, I'll spend some time with Patrick. I'll empathize with him for a little while, I'll enjoy his beauty, I'll give him a few new adverbs and sharpen his motivation. I'll summarize his story in a way that makes everyone want to read it.
-The moment passes.

-I'll read a blog about how London's West End is currently full of jukebox musicals and I feel a sudden wild passion to create something new, to be backstage, to make something magnificent and start a theatrical renaissance.
-I get discouraged by how hard it is to break into theatrical writing. The moment passes.

-I listen to the 'soundtrack' for my WIP on the walk home. The songs sound like characters speaking to me. I feel every emotion that I want to see poured out on my pages. I'm ready to fire up the laptop the moment I walk in the door.
-Dinner, tidying the kitchen, putting in a load of laundry, watching an episode of Glee, phoning Mom, a little reading, bed.

-I read over my 'current projects' list. Five of them appeal to me and I'm excited to see where the stories and characters are going to go.
-Overwhelmed. Choose none of them.

There's a danger of magpieing - getting distracted by the latest shiny story idea but lacking the dedication to sit down with it for an hour. I want to be the Olympic swimmer of writing, constantly honing my craft, constantly using those muscles. What I seem to be instead is the retired gardener of writing, potting around in my mind-shed, which is like a mind-palace but smaller and underfurnished because I haven't given it the time and materials to achieve magnificence.

And that's just one writing struggle. Sometime when I'm feeling ambitious I'll have to write about plotting.