Pivot

This week I executed a quick turn-about, put aside a book I'd written only two chapters of and started another. For me, this is unusual; ordinarily I'm a compulsive finisher.

I was seized, though, by a thought that has been with me since I was about eight years old. I first heard this mental chime ring at an outdoor fair in my hometown of Wilmington, NC. I know I was young enough that day to be running through the crowd, laughing and yelling, chasing and being chased by my younger brothers and a friend.

That day I heard--or overheard--about a woman who had lived on the street where the fair was held, until her death two years before I was born. This woman was an artist who lived in a "cottage" and was almost unimaginably odd. And these were the 1950s in a small conservative Southern town. The image I conjured of her felt charged with magic. I've never forgotten her.

Recently I decided to do a little research on who she was. Wednesday afternoon, sitting in a library at UNC, I came across a bit of evidence that clinched my decision. It was a line in a xerox of a page of her diary: this woman (I don't know why I feel I shouldn't say her name just now)had the same peculiar experience as the main character in the novel I'd just begun. I'd already written that scene.

My course seemed clear then: write both books, and because of my flood of excitement, write the biography first. Though I was in a library, I made some sort of ecstatic crowing to celebrate the moment, though not at the level of uninhibited sound as that afternoon at the fair. (I don't think anyone even looked up.)

However quiet, it was a big deal, this turning. I don't think I've ever performed such a pivot, professionally anyway. Yet I feel certain of the rightness of this course, whether anyone but me ever wants to read this book. Have you ever made such a sudden about-face in your work? How did it turn out?