The Wild Robot was feeling less like science fiction and more like a fable.ĭave Caplan is the creative director who worked with me on the book’s design. The story grew more metaphorical and philosophical. The plot, the characters, the writing all became simpler, and they gradually started fitting together like puzzle pieces. Things were moving in the wrong direction.īut I kept going. But many of my early ideas presented serious logistical problems and I routinely went back to the drawing board. In the first draft, Roz was a soldier who arrived on the island via plane crash. Over the following year-and-a-half I rewrote the entire story. My old friend and editor gave me her notes and I got back to writing. Luckily, the wonderful Alvina Ling was on my side. But Little, Brown & Company liked it enough to sign it up and in July of 2014 it became official: my robot nature story would be published! There was just one problem…I didn’t know how to finish it. I spent over a year cobbling together my first draft of The Wild Robot. It’s great for organizing notes and research and chapters. I used a program called Scrivener to write the story. But I tried not to self-edit and I let the words flow. Up close, I realized just how hard it is to find the right words. I was no longer looking at the story with binoculars, but with a microscope. With my writing rules and my story maps and my research and my notes and my sketches in tow, I drove out to a cabin in the woods, brewed a pot of coffee, and opened my laptop. Understand the motivation behind each of Roz’s actions.Give the narrator a conversational voice, especially during slow scenes.Write with symmetry and repetition, to mirror robots and nature.Keep Roz mysterious by writing in the 3 rd person.You’re not a poet, just tell the story plainly.So I procrastinated by making myself some writing rules: There was so much to consider! How might a robot become wild? Do robots have anything in common with wildlife? What kinds of lessons could Roz learn from a tree, or a storm, or an opossum? And why is Roz on an island in the first place?Īfter I’d mapped and plotted absolutely everything it was finally time to write. I spent a year mapping all the possible directions for the story. I’d always enjoyed reading science fiction, but now I was studying science fiction. In my free time I scribbled notes about a robot in the wild. I had to get back to work on The Curious Garden, but that question never left my mind. I was really intrigued by the image of a robot in a tree, and a question suddenly popped into my mind: What would an intelligent robot do in the wilderness? And that got me thinking about scenes of unnatural things living in surprising places, and I made a few sketches like this. I loved imagining scenes of nature living in surprising places. If you have a few minutes I’d like to tell you about it.īack in 2008, while working on a picture book called The Curious Garden, I spent a lot of time making sketches like this. ![]() It wasn’t a graceful process, but I survived the stress and the solitude and the crippling self-doubt, and now my novel has entered the world.
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