Today’s post is the last installment of my series on the writing process of taking Cassandra’s Daughter from idea to print, a process that took years in the making!

If you haven’t read the series from the beginning, you can start HERE. In the previous post, I got my draft pretty darn close to being finalized. The main step that was left at this point was preparing the manuscript.

This was the stage where my experience with Clara’s Journal proved the most valuable. I should probably also point out that what a lot of people may not realize is just how much the traditional publishing world has changed. I had pretty much decided that I would go the self-publishing route. The cons for going with a traditional publisher simply had too many cons on the ledger. 

What follows is Part 5 of my discussion of the writing process I went through to get Cassandra’s Daughter to print. In this installment, I am coming close to feeling like I might actually have a final draft. And I should point out that when I say a final draft, by no means did that mean I thought it was nearly finished. I had just gotten it close to a point where I might be willing to let someone (other than my children) read it.

At this stage, the story was not quite told in chronological order. I was still trying to mix things up – for dramatic effect. Each chapter was devoted to the third-person perspective of a single character, and I had chapters devoted to many more characters than just Cora, Leah, and Cassandra. There were chapters for Bessie, Kevin, Dr. Pendergast, etc. 

But I wanted Cassandra’s story to be told differently. I wanted Cassandra to be rendered voiceless and unable to create as a result of the generational secrets kept from her. But as she discovered the truth, she would be able to gain her voice, to create, to tell her own story. This would mean that I wanted her to tell her own story in first person by the end of the book. But how to make that transition?

I ended the previous installment of this journey of how the idea of a novel turned into the physical manifestation of the novel in my (and in many other people’s!) bookcase with the decision to move to the Outer Banks where I could begin to do the actual writing. (You can go back to the beginning of the story and start with Part One if you haven’t read that yet.)

As I mentioned in the Part Two, I spent two weeks in Africa at a writers’ workshop. While there, I focused my time on developing the premise of the book as well as pinpointing the emotions that I wanted to elicit from readers both throughout the book and then at the end.

I was curious about what I had come up with while in Africa, so I pulled out all of my notes from that trip to see what I might have jotted down.

In my previous post, I explained a bit about my writing process for a screenplay that I wrote before I started working on Cassandra’s Daughter. And the process involved a tight outline and index cards taped to my bedroom wall. That was definitely not the process with this book. 

The spark for this book came not with a desire to write a book. It began as a self-imposed writing exercise. My mother passed away in 2013, so this exercise must have taken place quite a few years prior to that, probably in the early 2000s. At that time, I challenged myself to regularly write, whether I had a project I was working on or not. So I would go to the dentist for a root canal and then try to describe my experience using all my senses: the aesthetics of the office, the TV loudly playing as a failing means of distraction, the pushing and pulling on my teeth, the taste of chemicals, the horrific sounds of the drill and the saliva sucking tube, and finally, the smell (of burning flesh? Tooth? What IS that smell??). Or other times I would people-watch and single out someone to ascribe a personality to. And then I would do a character sketch of that person. One of those writing exercises ignited the spark for what became Cassandra’s Daughter.