A Seed In the Sun: Planting and Growing the Verse Novel
The first pages of my new verse novel, A SEED IN THE SUN, were written in prose. In what has now become my custom, the main character’s voice came to me while in that wondrous space between sleeping and waking. As a dutiful scribe for the voice calling to me, I jumped out of bed and began to write Lula’s story and it was in full sentences. She had so much to say! Of course it made sense because it is a historical fiction about the first days of the 1965 Delano Grape Strike. But after six months of historical research and after writing 30K words, I hit a block. The lyricism that started the book was gone. I was no longer making music, so clearly, the words could not dance on the page. Frustrated, I went out into my garden and took on a tangle of weeds until my hands ached. Now near tears, I complained to my husband, “There is no song, the poetry is gone!” He encouraged me, “Well, from this point forward, write it in verse and see what happens.” But that attempt felt dissonant so I scrapped the entire 30K words of prose but kept the story. I started from the beginning. I returned to verse as if a child running into the open and loving arms of a mother.
In verse, I drew from what I knew and loved about poetic craft. The work came alive because I could lean on metaphor, economy, imagery, figurative language, rhythm, music, music, music. The ways to tell this story artfully felt limitless. I was home.
Whenever I write a verse novel, I consider the relationship between storytelling and the emotional truth at the heart of poetry. With each book, the balance of these can tip in either direction - the introspection, color, and revery possible in poetry or the scene, dialogue, and narrative tension building necessary for story. When I rewrote A Seed in the Sun in verse, that relationship tipped in the narrative direction more often than not, mostly because the echoes of that original story were still present. I believed in the story I needed to tell but that meant that other characters beside my main character needed to speak, often in long monologues or bouts of dialogue, and the events and arcs still needed to materialize. At times, it felt too unbalanced. But, I remembered that the prose poem and narrative poem are valid and can be very artful. That realization made me not only relax around this tension but enjoy the process. Then, it occurred to me that because political theater played an important role in the book, I could push against the hybridity of verse novels one step further and fold the theatrical written form into the telling. I decided to offset all of the dialogue by indenting and encapsulating it in quotation marks like a script. This was so different from what I had done in the past where I only italicized sparse dialogue. I also used the script form to write a play within the story. This book had different rules, rules that felt true to the inventive nature of poetry. In this way, I finished writing the first draft of the book in one month.
A Seed in the Sun was by far the most challenging book I’d ever written. Not only because it was a historical fiction but because I lost the song along the way. Luckily, poetry saved it like it’s saved me but that, is a story for another time.
Aida Salazar’s third novel in verse, A Seed in the Sun, releases on October 25, 2022. It can be pre-ordered online anywhere books are sold.
Photo by Lluvia Higuera
Aida Salazar is a founding member of Diverse Verse, active member of the team and an award-winning author, arts activist, and translator whose writings for adults and children explore issues of identity and social justice. She is the author of the critically acclaimed middle grade verse novels, THE MOON WITHIN (International Latino Book Award Winner) and LAND OF THE CRANES (Américas Award, California Library Association Beatty Award, Northern CA Book Award, NCTE Charlotte Huck Honor, Jane Addams Peace Honor, International Latino Book Award Honor). Her most recent novel A SEED IN THE SUN releases on Oct. 25, 2022. Her other works include the picture book anthology, IN THE SPIRIT OF A DREAM: 13 Stories of Immigrants of Color; and the forthcoming bio picture book JOVITA WORE PANTS: The Story of a Mexican Freedom Fighter (Spring, 2023) and the anthology CALLING THE MOON: Period Stories by BIPOC Authors (Spring, 2023). Aida is a founding member of LAS MUSAS - a Latinx kidlit author collective. Her story, By the Light of the Moon, was adapted into a ballet production by the Sonoma Conservatory of Dance and is the first Xicana-themed ballet in history. She lives with her family of artists in a teal house in Oakland, CA.
Photo by Lluvia Higuera
