I rewrote the whole thing

Help Wanted: An Ending, Part 5

Last week, I told you about the strange and confusing seven months when my editor and I unwittingly entered imaginary leaden rooms that did not allow for us to communicate with each other. In November of 2019, we were back in touch, and the book was rolling along again. (If you need to catch up, here are parts one, two, three, and four.)

When we last left the manuscript, it ended with a Rooster School, where each of the rooster candidates could learn to be the rooster they were meant to be. 

When I look at the revisions, it’s funny to me how much I can see the energy of how I was feeling at the time in what I wrote. At the end of 2019, I wrote a version where Rooster was burned out. The job has changed, and it’s too much. “Back in the day, being a rooster was easy,” said Rooster. “You’d get up early, wake the farm, and spend the rest of your day eating cheese and reading philosophy. There used to be an art to it. Now it’s all about getting the job done.”¹ They were hiring more roosters to help him out. In the end, the rooster candidates all like the farm, they all stay and work together to get the job done in their own particular ways.

This ending still wasn’t quite there (come on, it’s only been seven years), but I continued revising. Then, as you all know, a few months later the world changed. While I still needed to figure out the ending, I was also doing it while all four of my kids were doing school at home, every grocery run was a fraught and confusing ordeal, and every headache was a cause for concern.

At the beginning of 2020, I excitedly signed on to be one of the teachers for a class in October at The Writing Barn about writing funny books. Of course, by the time October rolled around, we were all still holed away in our houses. I sat in our RV in the driveway and spent four days teaching and participating in the event virtually.

The last day of the class was a raucous read-aloud, and it was energizing and inspiring to hear everyone’s funny manuscripts. Something stood out to me as the readings went on, though: pirates. There were a lot of pirates.

There is nothing wrong with pirate books! Pirate books are fun, and there’s something so appealing about a pirate picture book — there’s so much room for “safe” rebellion, and for upending expectations. I had been working so hard on the ending of Help Wanted: One Rooster, that I hadn’t looked at the rest of the book in years. And it was now that I looked at one of the rooster candidates, a salty parrot who threatens the cow, and realized he didn’t look so hilarious anymore. Just like I realize now that a farm is perhaps too obvious a setting for a picture book, a pirate is perhaps too obvious a character. (I’m not trying to take away your pirate manuscript! I’m just saying, make sure it’s really good. You can’t expect it to survive on the fact of a pirate alone.) I didn’t realize it when I wrote it in 2012, since I was just getting started. But in 2020, I realized that the pirate parrot had to go.

I got rid of the pirate and replaced him with a chicken, and she was much better, but something else was better. Me. I was a better writer. Of course I was! At this point, it had been eight years since I first wrote Help Wanted: One Rooster. I had written dozens of manuscripts, and published four picture books and four chapter books. 

Andrea Stegmaier signed on to illustrate Rooster in the beginning of 2021, and in April, Maggie sent me another round of editing notes. She wanted me to consider the spreads, to make sure there was room for the illustrations to be in different places (not all in the barn), and ended by saying she felt like it was “very close to a final manuscript.” I read over her notes and reread the manuscript, which I hadn’t really looked at since I’d killed off the pirate in the fall of 2020. And suddenly I realized that I could make it better. The whole thing. And so, even though it was almost done, I tore it apart and completely rewrote it. 

Here’s what I said to Maggie in my email to her with that new version:

Hi Maggie!

So, uh...I know this isn't what you were expecting, but I rewrote this whole manuscript. (Don't panic! It's not all that different.)

I did a lot of thinking about your question regarding the potential for varied illustrations if the cow is in the barn for all the interviews, and I get that, but I kept thinking: Why? Why would she move? So I contemplated that for a bit.

But there were some other things that kept nagging me. The truth is, I wrote the first version of this story in 2012. I was a much different writer in 2012. And while every revision we've done has made this story better, there were still some dusty bits of my 2012 writer voice hanging in the corners of this, and some of it was reading as...dull. Flat. (I bet you felt that too!) 

With the last version (the one you sent me notes on), I feel like we finally got the structure of the story -- what's really happening, the plot points. And that gave me the space to see all those dusty cobwebs. The opening felt weak. Every time it said "said Cow" or "said the quail"² it somehow deflated the story a little bit. Parts of the storytelling felt very almost-ten-years-ago-Julie, although I couldn't quite put my finger on all of them, so I started again from a blank page.

I ultimately decided the narration needed some life in it, so I've given this a narrator (a sheep). He was there all along, really, now he (or she) is just talking out loud more.

It also wasn't really funny enough, or weird enough for me. I was no longer wowed by it. 

Sometimes a picture book is a lovely straightforward affair, but I personally love when you can add layers of story into it. It’s such a trick, right? You’ve only got 700 words (or fewer!) and you and the illustrator can play off of each other, until there are layers of story in those few words and layers in the illustrations, and together those create more layers in the reader’s head, so it’s like there’s a hologram book existing on top of the actual book. It’s hard to pull off (obviously, in this case it took me ten years). But very satisfying when it works.

It took this many years with the manuscript for me to see everything that could happen in the story. When I first wrote it, it was the straightforward story of a cow who needs to hire a rooster. There was still a lot there, and it was funny, but it never quite got off the ground (much the way a chicken flies), and it wasn’t until I saw all of the story possibilities in the farm that I figured out how to make the book better. I’m convinced Andrea Stegmaier was able to do all that she did with the illustrations (which are AMAZING) because I had finally given the book interesting layers. Her illustrations add so many more layers!

Next week: the actual book comes out!³ There will be a post on Tuesday, as well as the book trailer, and I’ll announce one reader who will win a copy of the book, and two paying subscribers who will win either a picture book manuscript critique or a half-hour creative coaching session.

Preorder links:⁴

Print: A Bookstore for signed and/or personalized copies

Bookshop

Amazon

Penguin Random House

Barnes & Noble

From your local independent bookstore

1. If you’ve subscribed to this newsletter for a while, you may know that I’ve spent the last five years reorganizing my days and my relationship with the internet, in order to, essentially, get back to eating cheese and reading philosophy. In my case: drinking coffee and freewriting.

2. I have no memory of a quail being in this book.

3. Four hundred million years in the making.

4. If you’re considering buying a book, preordering really does help. It lets publishers and retailers know that there’s interest in the book. If you aren’t going to buy, consider asking your local library to order it. THANK YOU.