The Hearthsinger

When I talk about writing, The Hearthsinger is always first on my list. The main character, Mari, is so unlike me in so many ways, but I love writing her story. If it were real, I hope she'd be friends with me. I would want to be friends with her.

And although Hearthsinger is my cherished, long-preserved, first-completed novel, it is definitely the most difficult to write. Eighteen months and seven (or eight) drafts after the idea first hit me, I know that this story will still be with me for a long time, in my head and my computer. But I can't help but feel that it's a labor of love, and that one day when I see it finished, the memory of labor pains will have faded and I'll still be smitten with it.

The plotline came to me a year and a half ago, possibly brought on by sleep loss, and it's steadily consumed my life. I was sixteen and volunteering for two weeks at a bakery, helping them out during the cramp of Easter bunny baking. That was fun, but it meant getting up at four in the morning and working from five to eleven. I mixed the ingredients, worked the frighteningly large mixing machine, kneaded the dough into loaves, greased pans, and yanked bread in and out of the eighteen-by-eleven-foot oven. Somewhere in the midst of all that, probably around 6:30 a.m., while I sleepily stared at the forty pound mixer arm walloping dough around its metal tub, a story moment touched me. I risked leaving the mixer without supervision to run to the front and scribble my first few lines on the back of a baking advertisement. For the rest of that day, I willed the bakery clock to tick forward onto the eleven so that I could go home and write.

After several (or eight) drafts and a trip to Germany, the storyline smoothed out:

The forest has always been Mari's forest, in the war-torn kingdom of Isar. As a child, she wanders there with her nurse, hearing stories, singing songs, and at last, learning the secret to hearing what the trees sing in return. And her parents' disapproval can't change what she hears, not during the long years of the war, not even when Mari is home and loneliest.
Soon, though, she is sent to the south, to a place completely unfamiliar, to marry an enemy boy. But Montren turns out curious about the forest songs and eager to learn more, and it sets a glow going in Mari that can't be put out. When mercenary attacks send Montren to the king and Mari learns of a threat on both their lives, the question is not whether or how to ride to the captured city: it is how to find him and warn him of the danger, before she herself is overtaken.

That's all I'm giving away! The first chapter can be read on my account on Figment. Please enjoy and (gasp!) critique your little hearts out, if that's what you're feeling.

My trip to Germany provided enormous inspiration for Hearthsinger. Everything from food to trees became an "Oh!" moment for me, a moment where everything stops while Savannah rushes to write down an observation. The long walks in the woods were the best. Our house was just down the road from a forested mountain, surrounded by cows and cornfields and, in the summer, big, glistening, slugs. But the slugs only added to the adventure, and I always emerged from my walks feeling starry-eyed. I wrote and rewrote my chapter sequence and plot summary (I have to write that way, otherwise my story flow becomes either excrutiatingly slow or queasily fast), and felt whisked away by the magic of that stolen half-year. But that's another story. Germany became the backdrop for Hearthsinger, until I couldn't imagine Mari anywhere else. It was unbearably lovely.