Race to the Bottom of the Sea
by Lindsay Eagar (Author)
Booktalk: When her parents, the great marine scientists Dr. and Dr. Quail, are killed in a tragic accident, eleven-year-old Fidelia Quail is racked by grief — and guilt. It was a submarine of Fidelia’s invention that her parents were in when they died, and it was she who pressed them to stay out longer when the raging Undertow was looming. But Fidelia is forced out of her mourning when she’s kidnapped by Merrick the Monstrous, a pirate whose list of treasons stretches longer than a ribbon eel. Her task? Use her marine know-how to retrieve his treasure, lost on the ocean floor. But as Fidelia and the pirates close in on the prize, with the navy hot on their heels, she realizes that Merrick doesn’t expect to live long enough to enjoy his loot. Could something other than black-hearted greed be driving him? Will Fidelia be able to master the perils of the ocean without her parents — and piece together the mystery of Merrick the Monstrous before it’s too late?
Guest Post by Lindsay Eagar
Lindsay Eagar is the author of the middle-grade novels Hour of the Bees, which was an International Latino Book Award winner and was short-listed for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, and Race to the Bottom of the Sea. A Utah native, she lives in Salt Lake Valley with her husband and two daughters.
Q. Describe your writing process.
A. With two (and a half) books published and over ten novels written now, I can safely say that I have figured out my process, and it is described best with two words: organized chaos.
There are some things I have done the same for every book. I always write a very thin, skeletal zero draft by hand with blue Crystal Bic pens in lined or unlined notebooks (the prettier the notebook, the better–life’s too short to save the pretty notebooks for the perfect words). It’s messy. There are blank spaces. I write chronologically. Sometimes a sentence will be whispered to me from the cosmos, and I will write it down in the zero draft and it will stay until it’s in print. Sometimes, I have entire chunks summed up as “they run back to the cathedral” or “flirting and an almost kiss.” Sometimes, even, I know the gist of what I need to say, but I don’t have the proper words yet, so I’ll write something like, “some metaphor here that uses the color blue, but not blue specifically–cerulean? Sky? Turquoise?”
My zero drafts are very much like renderings–I am looking for the shifts in value. The shadows. The textures. Once I wade my way through the whole book, which I can do very quickly (like within a couple of weeks) I have a sense of the terrain, and I can begin writing it in earnest.
This is slower. I type up what I have, I write a list of things to fix or change and a list of the things I love about this book (a very important tool to have when I am in the midst of revision despair), and then I print the whole thing out and begin fleshing it out.
Lather, rinse, repeat, until it’s readable.
Sometimes there are variations. Sometimes books want to be written exclusively outside, in public parks or beside alpine lakes. Sometimes I need quiet, sometimes I need to blast “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” on my speakers as I search for the ideal way to describe a fern. Usually, though, it is this cyclical pattern of writing, typing, printing, musing, and dreaming, until it’s time to turn the book in. I very much love my process and have resolved to stop trying to change it.
Q: Tell us about your latest book.
A. This is the sharky, science-y, swoon-y book of my heart.
Back when I was a young, snub-nosed, freckly seven-year-old, I had a handful of obsessions. Tree-climbing. Piano-playing. Book-reading, of course, and making up stories . . . But also sharks. I loved them. I lived in Utah, which isn’t exactly crawling with chances to see these creatures up close, so I watched National Geographic specials. I got books. I learned about shark-finning and took to activism (my “SOS: Save Our Sharks” posters went over well at recess). Twenty years later, it’s still a love affair I am committed to.
When I sat down to write my first middle grade novel, I turned to my obsessions to guide me through the story. Sharks, of course, made my list. But also pirates, particularly morally gray ones such as Long John Silver or Captain Hook. And also libraries, and librarians, who, for a book-loving child, have always taken on a kind of mythical quality. On my list of obsessions was also old-fashioned candy shops, marine biology and scientific technology of the Jules Verne era, forbidden love, and brainy girls with equal amounts of heart.
I wove them into a tale of grief and invention and absolute joy in the natural world, and then I revised it until it was a bloody cadaver and put it away because it was too broken to fix.
This was in June of 2013, and I truly did mourn my pirate book, and stick it into a drawer to think about what it had done and see if it couldn’t figure out a better way to act, and in the meantime, I started something new. Instead of the ocean, I went to the desert. Instead of sharks and jellyfish, I went to rattlesnakes and buzzing bees. I wrote a contemporary magical realism novel called Hour of the Bees, and within a year it was revised, agented, and sold to my dear publisher Candlewick in a two-book deal.
All book ideas want to be written. Some books, I have learned at this point, are not for you, and when they tease, you must flick them away from your ears and tell them to go find their true owners. Some books, however, are patient, and wait quietly for you to become the writer they require to reach their full potential. RACE was one such book–after we finished edits on BEES, my editor asked to see the pirate book I had spoken of so passionately online (she did some serious Twitter stalking before she published me).
And of course I was nervous, because it was a broken book, because it had broken me, because it was so important to me to make it right, for freckly child Lindsay’s sake, and for the sake of my publisher who was about to take a risk on an extreme departure from the sparse, strange magic of BEES on a nautical tale of obsession and loss–but we did it. Together, my editor and I rebuilt it from scratch while still keeping its heart beating, and I am so immensely proud of the final copy.
Ten-year-old Lindsay would have been obsessed.
Congratulations, Lindsay!
Thanks for sharing your new book!
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