The Boy Who Loved a Swan began with only the vaguest idea after reading Mark Halprin’s Swan Lake trilogy to my children. I’ve always loved the story, but I didn’t know for sure whether it was open for a retelling, so I searched, instead, for a fairy tale, most of which are solidly in the public domain.
The fairy tales that tell of swans and birds are few and far between, and they’re all a little different. So I decided that I would focus on the actual transformation of a character into a bird of some kind.
I studied the tales for a while; I know, from past experience, that when I study them, a story starts taking shape—usually by way of a character coming into sharper focus. And that character, for this story, was Oscar: a book loving boy with a hole in his boot. Oscar came alive in our first few “meetings.” I loved his personality, the chip on his shoulder, and his great love for books.
After brainstorming for a couple of months, I felt comfortable enough to start drafting this story. And once I’d finished that draft, I went through draft after draft after draft of perfecting language, fact checking, tweaking small things here and there to get the story just right, whittling it down to what it needed to be. The revision process, as I’ve shared elsewhere, can be endless.
For this particular project, I had to slap a stop date on it. I loved Oscar so much I probably would have hung out with him forever, just for pleasure.
But, alas, I cannot spend forever with any of my characters; there is always another character waiting for their story to be told.