Beth Kephart: Living it Over Again

Maybe I can't stop writing because I have never figured out a way to be the real-live person I always wish that I could be. I make mistakes—put things off until it's truly too late, react impulsively when a counting to ten would be in order, allow myself to say out loud what might better be kept locked up in some private chamber. Not all the time, of course, but enough of the time to wish I could press the rewind button.

In writing my second novel for young adults, HOUSE OF DANCE, I was trying to make right on the page something that I'd failed to make right in actuality. A friend with whom I'd sat every week in church went missing one Sunday, and I didn't call to find out why. I didn't call the next Sunday either, when she again went missing; something inside told me I should, but I was tired and busy and packed myself out with excuses. Next week, I told myself, I'll call, but there would be no chance for that. My friend had of a sudden grown gravely ill, and before I could tell her goodbye, before I could even leave a phone message so that she'd know she'd been on my mind, she passed away. You don't get second chances in a circumstance like that.

In my grief I began to imagine a young girl who might be asked to care for a dying relative—a girl who has to decide, on her own, what love looks like at the end, what gifts might be given to someone who learns that he is living his last days. I named the girl Rosie, a name my grandmother once had for me, and I gave her backbone and sass and the sort of goodness I can only rarely claim for me. I conjured a voice for her, a situation, a town, a fragile family life, and then I listened to see what might happen. I followed her through a long, hot summer.

Many things happened in my own life as I was writing HOUSE OF DANCE, but the writing of this book kept me somehow grounded as I worked to see things through Rosie's eyes, to brand a story with her hard-edged goodness. I wonder if it works like this for all of us writers—if in some small way we are always working our own selves through on the page, even as our fiction takes us further and further from the "truth" of our daily living.

I'd love to know your thoughts on this, and I look forward to your thoughts on HOUSE, when it debuts on May 27th.

Beth Kephart
Author of Undercover & House of Dance

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www.beth-kephart.blogspot.com