April Davila is a novelist, and she explores how mindfulness can help writers.
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April Davila is a novelist, and she explores how mindfulness can help writers.
April Davila’s first novel is about ostriches. It may be the only novel about ostrich farming, and it was a bit of a random discovery that led her to use this setting. “When I started writing it, it was very loosely based on my mother’s experiences growing up on a dairy farm. I was very intimidated about trying to write about a dairy farm, because there are a fair number of dairy farmers in the world who would know if I got it wrong. And I asked my mom, ‘would there ever be a dairy farm in the desert?’ And I think she actually laughed out loud. So I googled farm Mojave, and this ostrich farm popped up. It was 50 miles from my front door, so I pitched it as a travel story, and I went out there and I did a story on this ostrich farm, and I fell in love with the place.”
Ostriches are not friendly animals, at least not at first. “They’re terrifying birds. They’re nine feet tall. They have these killer claws, but they also are really graceful and beautiful with these Lancôme eyelashes. As soon as I arrived, I said to myself, this is the perfect setting for a story about family because family is very much about handling contradictions.”
You can buy ostrich eggs in many locations, but this farm didn’t focus on raising ostriches for eggs. “I did fudge a few things. Originally, most ostrich farms were meat and leather farms, it would be almost impossible to make a living on eggs alone.”
The novel begins with a car accident, which seems to be a suicide. “It’s a little ambiguous, but in my mind, it’s a suicide. My main character, Tallulah, has been taken to live with her grandmother because her mother’s doing a terrible job. Grandmother took her granddaughter thinking, ‘I didn’t do a good job with my daughter, so now she’s a terrible mother. I’m going to step in and I’m going to I’m going to make it right.’ It doesn’t go as she planned. As humans do, we just repeat our old patterns, and she falls into the same old rhythms and finds herself exactly where she was when she was a bad mother 30 years ago. You learn very quickly in the first few pages that Tallulah wants to get off the farm.”
Many first-time authors start a novel, then learn, when they’ve got an agent, that they started their story too early and that they have to cut the first few chapters. It was different for April. “A mentor of mine read the book, and said, ‘You started too late. Give it 100 pages before you get to where you think you’re starting.’ I didn’t want to actually show grandma’s death, but I thought of picking up right after that because that’s where Tallulah’s story becomes interesting.”
April started writing this novel as part of a Master’s degree course in creative writing, and ten years later, approached an agent who she had met in graduate school, and who had told her to query him when she was ready. “I queried him on a Monday, and on Friday, he asked to be my agent.” After that, however, it took a while to sell the book, and it was rejected many times. After a while, April asked her agent if she should rewrite the novel. He told her, “If we were getting the same feedback from every editor, I’d have you rewrite. One editor loved the characters but not the story. One loved the story, but not the characters. It just has to find its home.” And they eventually found a publisher who loved the book.
April focuses on mindfulness and writing, and is working on a book on the topic. “My writing career didn’t really take off until I had started meditating regularly. At first, when I looked back and thought, ‘What did I do differently?’ I thought it couldn’t be meditation. But when I stopped and looked at the things that I’d gotten better at in my writing, they were all nurtured and directly related to my meditation practice. Things like being able to find really deep focus, being able to get comfortable with discomfort so that you can write really awkward or painful scenes, because stories are not much of a story if they don’t have conflict.”
April said she is a “Scrivener nerd.” She started writing the novel in NaNoWriMo, but “it was all over the place. You don’t think too much about it in NaNoWriMo, you just get it on the page. When I first typed it in Scrivener, that really helped me to break it up and think about it in terms of scenes.”
April likes Scrivener’s word count targets and writing history features. “So often when you’re writing, you could write for three hours and feel like you did nothing. Opening Scrivener and realizing that, ‘actually, I made some progress on my project today;’ for me, that’s a great feature, because I often feel like it’s easy to get down on yourself as a writer. To even just have a little bit of data to say ‘No, you actually did some work today,’ so you can hold your head high. Go do the rest of your day and move forward. It helps a lot.”
“My writing group teases me because I’m always singing the praises of Scrivener, but many of them have come to see the light of what a wonderful bit of software.”
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener.