Bartography

I just finished the first complete draft of J.R., which will soon be in the hands of two key readers — my wife and my agent.

Many thanks to those who chimed in with their support earlier this week as I struggled with how to end the thing. I think I managed to strike a balance between hopefulness and jaw-dropping realism.

But what I know for sure is that I’m done with the thing for now, and can take the weekend off.

I could, anyway, except that this great idea for a new picture book came to me yesterday morning…

With a self-imposed deadline of one week from tonight, I need to figure out how on earth to finish my first complete draft of J.R. — not to find time to finish it, but literally how to conclude the manuscript.

More often than not, it seems I have some inkling of an ending in mind fairly early in a project, and I write toward that ending. I picked J.R. as a topic because his life and times are fascinating, but the more research I’ve done, the bleaker the story becomes. I didn’t set out to write a downer, but at this point, I’m not sure how to avoid it.

So maybe I shouldn’t even try. Surely there are some examples out there of picture book histories or biographies that succeed despite — or even because of — the depressing nature of the stories they tell. Right?

Right?

As I did a sort of pregnant-woman waddle into the elevator at the university library yesterday, carrying an 11-inch-tall stack of books in front of my belly, I kept hoping someone would comment on them. Something like, “Wow, that’s a lot of books you’ve got there.”

“Yes,” I would have replied. “I’m writing a 1,000-word children’s story.”

But nobody asked. Sheesh — it was like they were used to seeing someone carry a stack of books through the library.

Last night, while getting in order the next two lists of books I’ll need for my J.R. research, I realized just what I’m trying to accomplish with all this digging beyond the man’s autobiography: I’m trying to become intimately familiar with elements of his life that were so commonplace to him that it never would have occurred to him to write them down.

Earlier this week I sent my critique partners the first draft of my manuscript for J.R. No one besides me has seen it yet, not even my wife (my usual first reader), and it’s not even a complete draft.

J.R. is a picture book biography covering the first quarter-century or so of my subject’s life, and so far I’ve gotten him only to age 21 — there are some momentous developments I still have to get to. I’ve been working on this project pretty much exclusively since early November. What’s taking me so long?

Three things. One is that my subject’s autobiography is maddeningly light on personal details for much of the period that I’m focusing on — especially maddening when compared to his blow-by-blow accounts of political maneuverings he witnessed. So, it’s taken an unusual amount of research (with more still to come) just to flesh out my own understanding of his circumstances.

On top of that, whenever my subject quotes someone in his autobiography — be it about his personal life or his political one — whatever that person actually said is buried within a too-eloquent reconstruction undertaken by my subject when memoir-writing time came half a century later.

An example:

A few weeks later I met the bride on the street and asked her how she and her husband were getting along. “Splendidly,” she replied. “He is now acting all right. I now have no cause to complain of him and am of the opinion that I shall have none in the future.”

So, it’s taking me some time to cut through all of that — but without making up quotes more to my liking.

Finally — and part of what attracted me to this project in the first place — there was so much historically significant and relevant stuff going on during the years I’m covering that it’s a major challenge to figure out what to leave out, what to incorporate, and how to keep myself from writing another 6,200-word picture book manuscript.

My solution so far has been to take a more verse-like approach than I ever have before, at least as far the formatting I’m using for this draft.

By breaking my words
into partial-line sections,
I seem to be succeeding
at being more economical
with what I choose to say.

It’s kept my word-count down (below 1,000 so far), but the downside is that what I’ve written may well — and rightfully — be perceived as doggerel. I’ll know more after Saturday.

My research for J.R. has fanned out considerably these past few days as I’ve temporarily moved on from my subject’s autobiography to a stack of other books about the time and place that he lived.

Most of these books are only partially related to his story, which means I’m spending a lot of time in the indexes, finding the most interesting parts, and zipping through those (this is preliminary research, I should add) with notes about other books I should track down. As a result, I’m jumping from book to book with a sense of completion that’s not so common for a plodding reader like me, and the whole thing is loads of fun. I feel like a crow bringing shiny things back to his nest.

So, I’m enthusiastic about this project. But just how enthusiastic? So enthusiastic that yesterday morning when I suggested to my wife that, for research purposes, we add a 550-mile extension to our family’s upcoming 300-mile round trip to NASA’s Johnson Space Center (you know, since we’ll already be in that direction), it sounded eminently reasonable.

To me, I mean.