Director's Cut: Chapter Three

My agent asked for “more longing.” I gave her a spear stabbing. Plus the real drug sponge behind blue coral, and diving the real atolls I'd already written.

📹 This is the Director’s Cut for Chapter Three of MAY WE PLEASE THE SEA: You can watch the video or read the written version below.

🌊 Chapter 3 went out last Saturday. Read it (or listen to the audio version 🔊) now if you haven’t yet!

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It’s time for Chapter 3’s director’s cut. Ready to dive in?

Every draft, rearranged

While planning what to talk about for this scene, I went back to my very first draft. I hadn’t looked at it in years. I thought I remembered it. I did not.

I wrote my 1st draft in San Francisco. This was at the South End Swim Club at Aquatic Park. The perfect ocean view for this book!

The beats have stayed surprisingly similar, but everything has been rearranged.

This was my word tracking, back in November 2019!

There was always this village. There was always going to be a ceremony of the girls and an offering of the boys. But I rewrote it every which way. I have scenes where she’s given to a Prime. Scenes where she’s trying to stop the offering of her own baby brother. Scenes where her mother is still around and gets banished on the page.

Where do you start a story?

At the very beginning, watching everything happen? Or later, after the banishment, after the relationship with Relfy has already been destroyed, so that everything lost is something she’s looking back on?

There’s no one right way. Think about telling a story at the dinner table. Do you go A to Z, or do you jump in and fill in as you go? We all know the person who gives every unnecessary detail. “It was Fri—Well, actually it was a Thursday. And it was…Was it raining?” And you’re like, “Come on, get to it!!”

So when do you add details, and when do you skip them? I told you I’d release these chapters as-is, exactly as they were already written. But for this chapter, and every chapter I’ve released so far, I’ve actually been adding more. Hee-hee, why not?

“Be weird. Go for it.”

My first agent wanted me to cut, cut, cut, cut. She wanted the book fast & snappy, because it was YA.

When she first read it, she gave me an R&R (a revise and resubmit). I rewrote the book, resubmitted it, and she signed me. Then she said we needed one more rewrite, and after that, a polish. But for that rewrite, she said, “Be weird. Go for it.”

Honestly, if I hadn’t had an authority figure giving me permission to be weird (oh dear, am I my character?), I probably wouldn’t have gone as weird as I did.

Because that original version? It is so YA. She’s playing with her friends in the canoe. They’re fishing, gathering for a feast, wondering which boys they’ll be paired with, teasing each other. Very much girl drama.

This latest version?

A friend read it recently. I’d always called it YA, and both of my agents repped it as YA. And he said, “Caroline, this is not YA. This is a really heavy book. This is dark. You hit some pretty heavy topics pretty quick.”

That’s when I realized all my beta readers have been women in their 30s and 40s. Young adults have never actually read this book. And comparing the first draft to now, it’s like…  Caroline must have been going through a dark time because 2019 Caroline to now just got progressively more intense with this book.

My kind of longing

Which reminds me. One time my agent said, “This is good. There’s a lot of violence, a lot of intensity. What if you added a little more romance?” I don’t really like writing on-page romance. It’s just my preference. So she said, “You don’t have to do romance, but what if you added a little more longing?”

I’m like, “longing?!” By then I’d had so many rejections and done so many rewrites. I wasn’t feeling romantic. I was feeling violent.

So I told my critique group, “My agent wants more longing. Let me get back to you.” I rewrote the first few chapters and sent them over. One of them messaged me: “Caroline, are you okay?”

“Yeah, feel great. Why?”

“Well, your agent asked for longing, and it’s only chapter two and you’ve already stabbed someone with a spear.”

That’s my kind of longing.

I was really pleased with that spear stabbing. There was a squelch, a great sound for a spear stabbing. But alas, I un-stabbed that person, because they wanted more longing.

And that’s part of how this character Relfy came to be.

Upgrade to In the Cave to keep reading:

• The dating-profile requirement my husband barely met

• The five-word TV line that unlocked my creepy religion

• The “mistake” a sharp reader might’ve caught in Chapter 3

• Why I need to release this book faster

Plus the full video.