![]() It felt like, Rembrandt has nothing on this hand! And then I started doing the rest of it, but it wasn’t coming along. And I remember I was drawing this guy, and I drew the most perfect hand. I went to Parsons School of Design, and I used to have this six-hour, life-size-figure drawing class. How did you push past those doubts and keep going? RS: For writers, it can be terrifying to put aside a project you’ve been working on, even when you know it’s necessary, because, as you said, you have no idea if you’ll come back to it or what’s next. ![]() It was really the best writing experience I’ve ever had because it was just like, boom. The first draft just kind of flowed out of me. I think I wrote it in six weeks or two months or something. I mean, I slept, I ate, but basically I just kept at it. And I just started writing, and I didn’t stop. Then during lockdown, there was just this moment where I was just like, okay, I think I’m ready to write it. They were in my head like, “Tell my story” - they just wouldn’t let go. There was just nothing to salvage in the end, and so I was afraid of starting again.īut those characters just kept on. I took a wrong turn early on in terms of pacing, in terms of just everything. And knowing every day for a long time that it was the wrong course, but you just don’t know how to course-correct. It really did a number on me, two years of work just kind of wasted. It was heartbreaking, I have to tell you. So, I threw it out, and I cried for a long time because I thought I’d never get back to it. I really wanted to save it because it was two years of work, but ultimately I just thought, I can’t save this. I was boring myself writing it, and I figured if I’m boring myself, my readers are gonna be bored. I was 400 pages into the manuscript, and I just realized, this is just not working it’s not the book I wanted to write. I worked on a first draft of it about eight years ago, and I spent two years on it. PALACIO: My son had a very, very vivid dream about a kid in the Old West with a half-red face, and I was like, that’s a really good image. RACHEL SIMON: This book is such a departure from your previous work in the Wonder universe. Speaking to Shondaland from her home in New York, where she wrote Pony and rode out the pandemic alongside her husband and two sons, Palacio opened up about her decision to leave Wonder behind, her process as a writer, and the years-long journey to create Pony that was as dramatic as the book itself. And don’t let the age of its protagonist fool you just like Wonder, Palacio’s latest book tells a story that will feel just as affecting and compulsively readable to preteens as to 30-year-olds, which is exactly what its author had in mind when she first set out to write it nearly a decade ago. Part Western, part magical realism, part coming-of-age tale, Pony is a novel unlike all others. Accompanied by his longtime companion, a ghost named Mittenwool, and the titular pony, who shows up at his door after his father is taken, Silas embarks on a quest to find his dad - and along the way encounters enough obstacles, mysteries, and close shaves to fill, well, a 285-page book. Set in the mid-1800s, just before the Civil War, Pony follows 12-year-old Silas, whose beloved father is kidnapped for reasons unknown to our hero.
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