Rita Williams-Garcia Q&A Part 3: The Nitty Gritty Details

Photo by Charl Folscher on Unsplash

For the last third of my conversation with Rita Williams-Garcia about her historical YA novel, A Sitting in St. James (Quill Tree Books, 2021), we shifted to practical matters like revisions and time and critique groups.

(We discussed some of her creative decisions in Part 2 and several of her characters in Part 1.)

Michele: How many times did you revise A Sitting in St. James?

Rita: Full revision, I think no more than three. But sometimes I know something is wrong. So then I go back, and I have to wait for it to get cold before I go back. I never deal with the problem right then and there, because I face it with problem head. I face it with that same noggin that put me in that fix to begin with.

So I go on and I will deal with something else. I might jump ahead and write a scene that’s delicious and fun to me. It gives me incentive to get to that good place.

Then I can start to prescribe what to do next, what to cut. It’s usually about cutting. It’s always about cutting. [chuckles]

[Rita sets a stack of notebooks on her desk.]

A sample from Rita’s handwritten “getting-it-out-draft.

I do handwrite. I handwrite all of my novels. It’s very strange for me to type them.

In [my notebooks] are a lot of my research notes, a lot of little drawings that I did, like about the soil and about production, paint and painting in the 18th century. I had to make little maps about the different parishes of Louisiana and where everything is in relationship to everything else.

Rita’s notes on colors. Madame Sylvie intends to sit for a painted portrait.

Handwriting everything kind of makes it mine, because I drew it or wrote it or scribbled it. It’s the source material. It’s where the dialogue first appears, and a lot of the set up.

Then by the time that I am typing it, I am adding more to it, and then dealing with it as we deal with manuscript. But the [hand]writing is the getting-it-out-draft.

Rita’s story calendar.

Michele: How long did it take you to go from the “getting-it-out-draft” to ready for submission to your editor?

Rita: It took me a good two years to write and deliver the manuscript.

Michele: That doesn’t sound like very long for a book as complex and hefty as this.

Rita: Well, remember, I had the one year to do nothing else but drown myself in this world. To read the newspapers of 1859 and 60 and what have you. And it still had to be vetted because again, it’s not my world.

One of the things I do is I talk my story out all the time. I go for my walk and I start talking. I get away from the house because I share a home with a husband. He’s a musician. Sometimes I need to have my own space, so I might go away to some undisclosed location and talk.

I have to talk my story out, because when I do, I know the good parts. I know the good parts.

It helps me to say, ‘Hmm, okay, these are the parts that you talk about. You don’t talk about that. You don’t talk about this.’

It’s not that those parts are waste, but it’s perfunctory things that need to be included so that I can get to the story. I have to put those things in perspective, or there has to be a way that I tell them and use them so that it’s not painful for the reader so that they’re not skimming and that they are reading.

Michele: Do you have a critique group or trusted readers that you share drafts with before you submit to your editor?

Rita: I don’t show anything to anybody before it’s readable. I try to not do that to anyone because [chuckles] I know what my mess looks like when I’m writing it. It does not look like anything near what you all read. It is pure crap. It is so bad.

So I wait until I’m about to hit “send” to my editor before I send it to a few people. They are my colleagues at VCFA. I am so indebted. I cannot say enough. But yeah, I have a few trusted colleagues who read and ask me really good questions and point things out.

Okay, this is me. I wouldn’t take a novel that I am trying to write, trying to figure out, trying to deal with my prose. My prose is never good when it first comes out. I have to make it good.

I would never do a critique group with that, and it’s not vanity. It’s that it takes me a while to say, ‘Oh, okay.’ And I can’t have anything interfere with that….

I don’t want to encourage anybody to have my bad habit, but I have to be honest about where I am.

Michele: I think plenty of people work alone for a lot of their manuscript, but there’s some point where everybody needs some feedback.

Rita: Without a doubt.

Michele: One more question. What are you working on now?

Rita: Believe it or not, A Sitting in St. James is not the novel that took me the longest to write. It is what I’m doing now. [chuckles]

After I wrote One Crazy Summer [HarperCollins, 2010], I knew I was going to do the sequel, but I had this other thing that I was obsessed with. It was my gaming novel.

It’s a story about these kids who are raised apart from their society and to game. When I submitted it, it wasn’t quite ready. So after I finished A Sitting in St. James, I came back to that novel and I said, ‘Okay, I can see how this is just really too much work for someone to actually read.’

So I revised that completely, but it needs a sequel, and that’s what I’m working on now. And that is taking me a while to do, for a couple of reasons.

Number one, I’m not always at home doing setting, doing nature setting. A good deal of this takes place out in the open because the kids are on a trek.

And what is the other problem, of many? I think book one is middle grade, and book two is tween-ish, not quite YA.  

And I’m still negotiating—whose story is this? So it’s those kinds of things….

The writing is pure hell. The writing part is crapola city. It’s so bad. [chuckles]

So once I figure out everything else, then I can go back and give it the right voice and make it pleasurable to read. That will be the last part.

Michele: Thank you so much for sharing all of this. Very fascinating.