For the last 6-8 weeks, I’ve been poring through microfilm of newspapers and magazines from the ’50s … reading books about the lynching of Emmett Till and the urban renewal of Chicago’s South Side … surfing the Web for articles about long-forgotten radio DJs … and doing various other things that add up to research for writing a novel.

I’m trying to fill my imagination so full of facts that said imagination starts spilling out what-ifs. The what-ifs are the beginning of the dream that will become my fictional world.

After a while, if things go the way I hope, my dream world will become at least as real to me as my “real” world. My characters will begin to breathe, take on a life of their own, and start doing what they want to do, not what I want them to do.

(This really happens. Ask any novelist.)

The more I write, the more the dream will deepen. There may be times when I’m talking to you that I seem dazed. The reason is, my mind will have slipped me back into the dream world and, at that moment, I’ll be more in that world than I am in your world. I apologize in advance.

I apologize specifically to My Agent Michele, who asked weeks ago for a precís or outline of this novel. She hasn’t seen one yet because, frankly, when she requested it, I myself did not know what the story would be. I had the broad outlines in mind but hadn’t filled in the blanks. I needed to do research and to muse, to take long, aimless walks while my unconscious played around with the building-blocks of research, until hopefully my mind reassembled them into some sort of structure.

That hasn’t happened entirely. The old minderino still is bubbling with questions and unsolved problems. But more than a few are now solved — hopefully enough of them so I can write that outline at last.

Now my principal task (after writing the outline) is to keep the dream alive — by writing every day, without fail, first thing after morning coffee. I can’t allow the dream to flicker. In the past, I’ve let that happen with other projects and it has cost me dearly. It is the worst mistake a novelist can make.

Yesterday morning I started writing the first chapter of the second novel in the “Chicago Trilogy,” tentatively titled To Walk Humbly. Even though the outline isn’t yet written, I now know enough that I am able to open the door and step into the dream.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Many many of you have expressed your delight in this blog. For that I’m deeply grateful although slightly astonished. After all, I started it purely as a way to market my first novel, To Love Mercy. Others probably view these posts as a pain in the blog.

Anyway, I have slightly bad news for blog fans (though perhaps good news for the rest of you): I need to stop posting on a regular weekly schedule, at least while I’m trying to plunge into the dream. You’ll still hear from me, but as the mood strikes, not once a week. When I’ve finished a first draft, I’ll likely start posting weekly again.