Caroline Leavitt's Blog, page 72

The fabulous Jon Clinch talks about Belzoni Dreams of Egypt, being unpredictable, fictional autobiography, and so much more.

 I so deeply admire Jon Clinch. Not only is he a fantastic novelist, but he's just one of the most generous writers around. And he's also very, very funny, which counts for everything. His first novel, Finn—the secret history of Huckleberry Finn’s father—was named an American Library Association Notable Book and was chosen as one of the year's best books by the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Christian Science Monitor. It won the Philadelphia Athenaeum Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Sargent First Novel Prize. His second novel, Kings of the Earth—a powerful tale of life, death, and family in rural America, based on a true story—was named a best book of the year by the Washington Post and led the 2010 Summer Reading List at O, The Oprah Magazine.
His latest, Belzoni Dreams of Egypt is a novel in serial form--and I'm reading it now and it's extraordinary. It's also an idea so interesting, I'm going to let Jon tell you about it.




Tell us about what’s so different about Belzoni Dreams of Egypt? How is it a departure for you–and for most of publishing?

If the apparatus of publishing appreciates any quality in a writer, it’s predictability. Do more or less the same thing over and over again, and everybody stays happy. Everybody except the writer, in a lot of cases—including mine.

I’ve never been one to repeat myself. Shortly after Finn appeared in 2007, someone asked me what villain from literature I’d be writing about next. I answered that I didn’t want to be the guy who does that, and my questioner laughed and said, “The guy who does that makes a lot of money.” That’s probably true, and it might have been an easier course to take, but it didn’t interest me. So I went ahead and wrote two follow-up novels that were as different from Finn—and from each other—as they could be.

Belzoni Dreams of Egypt takes that fondness for variety to a whole new level. Finn and Kings of the Earth and The Thief of Auschwitz were all deeply serious, for one thing, and there’s nothing whatsoever serious about Belzoni. It’s a tall tale, an adventure, a romance. It’s a yarn narrated by a braggart who’s in love with the sound of his own voice. It’s a Saturday morning serial and a coming-of-age story full of carnival freaks and mummies and poison gas.

It’s the last book anybody ever figured I’d write, I can tell you that.

Why did you decide to release it serially and in parts?

Publishing is in such a state of uncertainty these days. Everything’s in flux—right down to the act of reading itself. Ebook or paper? Nook or Kindle? iPad or smartphone?

And more to the point: does anybody even read at all anymore?

Of the many forms that books take, big serious literary novels in particular tend to suffer most from the current dislocation. Readers have trouble finding them, for one thing, since book sections in newspapers and magazines are almost gone. Many folks have been trained by Amazon’s discounting model to think of reading as a kind of incidental activity that doesn’t take much investment of either money or time—and those folks are drawn more to the genres than to literary fiction. (I saw first-hand how the genres can still thrive when I self-published a science fiction novel, What Came After, under a pen name a couple of years ago and watched it rocket up to #8 on Amazon’s sci-fi bestseller list).

So I thought, “What if I take this unserious book and divide it into a half-dozen 50-page chunks and sell them for a dollar apiece, reaching casual readers at what ought to be a sweet spot of time and money?” Low commitment, low investment, low risk. Read it for a buck and move on. And Belzoni has the kind of pacing and narrative that will keep people coming back for the next installment—or at least I hope so.

The first installment, ”Rome,” is out now. The second, “Water & Bone,” arrives on July first, and the series continues through November. On December first I’ll release the complete novel both electronically and in paper.

Readers can check out an excerpt of Part One at Medium  or find it at B&N or Amazon  (Kobo and iBooks are coming soon.)

So what the heck is a fictional autobiography? What are the challenges of writing such a book?

I discovered Giovanni Battista Belzoni a long while ago in a book about British maritime history. He wasn’t much more than a footnote, but what little I learned about him fascinated me. So I did the usual Googling and then tracked down the one or two books (out of print) that had been written about him at the time. He was a colorful figure, a self-made archaeologist who pillaged Egypt while Lord Elgin was busy pillaging Greece. Born in Padua, raised in Rome, and educated by the Capuchins, he stood nearly seven feet tall and easily found work in England as a circus strongman. His strength and agility, along with his expertise in hydraulics and pyrotechnics, brought him to the attention of of Mohammed ‘Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, and from there it was short work to begin ransacking the Valley of the Kings.

The more I thought about Belzoni, the more curious I grew about what kind of outsized ego he must have had. I imagined telling the story of his life—more important, I imagined him telling the story of his life—and I saw that the modest amount that I knew about him could be turned into an entire lifetime’s narrative by remembering that he must have been an enormous bullshit artist. So there you have it. Belzoni Dreams of Egypt finds him on board a British warship, bound for the coast of Africa and his final adventure, nearly dead from dysentery, lying about his extraordinary life to an attentive seaman. The line between truth and fiction fades in a hurry.

Readers should be warned to take nothing at face value, and to look for signs of duplicity everywhere. In Belzoni’s voice, in particular. But elsewhere, too. One of the scholarly books quoted as introductory devices seems to have been written by a certain John Ray, Jr., for example—and if you haven’t reread your Nabokov lately, you probably should.

What surprised you about writing this?

How much fun it can be to write about true love. Belzoni and his wife, Sarah, were perfectly matched for one another and undertook many of their adventures side by side. Here he is, catching sight of her for the very first time:

“Heading straight toward me was the most ferociously beautiful young woman I had seen in all my life. Her walk was purposeful and confident, somehow easy and forceful and businesslike all at once, like the perfectly self-assured stride of a lioness. She was tall and slim and elegantly proportioned—not quite so tall as I, to be sure, but tall nonetheless—and she was gifted with the powerful shoulders and narrow waist of a lady pugilist. Her hair, lightly drawn away from her face and gathered loosely behind, was the color of honey mingled with chocolate. And her face—that face! its delicate shape! its clear-eyed expression!—her face was beyond improvement or description. As I watched her move toward me, I was possessed of a single thought: if the blind poet had known this woman, he’d have possessed his model for both the glorious Helen and the warlike Achilles in one matchless figure.”

You’ve taken such an unusual career path, that I’m wondering, what’s going to happen next for you?

I have a much more conventional novel in the works right now, a contemporary family story called How We Got Here, which is likely to be published in a more conventional way. Finn has been optioned for feature film development for a while now, and things have gotten extremely active over the last few months—down to casting and final script revisions and location scouting. I can’t give any details yet, but the people attached are extremely well-placed, enormously gifted, and hugely devoted to bringing that very complex novel to the screen. Kings of the Earth is under development too, as a limited-run cable series. I’ll keep you posted.

What’s obsessing you now and why?

First—in the context of these film projects—the waiting. Tom Petty was right.

Second, the idea that technology has given us so many opportunities to let projects like Belzoni take the shape that suits them best. This book is perfect for serialization, but where could that have happened in the last fifty years or so? Or the last hundred years, for that matter? Serialization in magazines and private editions worked for Dickens and Twain, but those days are gone.

Unless they’re back. And I’m betting they might be.

What question didn’t I ask that I should have?

How about, “How did it feel to write something that’s basically funny?”

Good question. My other books have actually had a good bit of humor in them, depending on where and how you looked. But Belzoni is light-hearted and funny from start to finish. I hope people are ready for it—by which I mean ready to grant me permission to do it.

On the other hand, moviegoers are only too happy to follow Woody Allen from the slapstick of “Take the Money and Run” to woeful depths of “Blue Jasmine.” So why shouldn’t readers follow me?

Elizabeth Eslami, author of HIBERNATE: STORIES talks about what the muse is not, whether or not writing is really fun, and so much, much more

Elisabeth Eslami is the winner of the 2013 Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction and the author of the short story collection Hibernate, as well as the acclaimed novel Bone Worship. She teaches at the MFA program at Manhattanville College, and here, she's written a knock-your-socks-off piece on what creativity is---and what it isn't. I'm so honored to host her. Thank you so much, Elizabeth!


On Creativity:No Room for Wings
1: Avoid wings and excuses.
Have no patience for winged things, or easy things, or that which requires a spell or a potion or circling three times fast, unless it’s you in your desk chair, where you’ve been sitting for four hours, and now you’re spinning only to resume the blood flow to your numb feet.
What I’m saying is that the muse is a distraction, she is the enemy, and if you see her, you’re best advised to gather her diaphanous gown and use it as a slingshot to send her back to whatever version of Asgard she came from. The muse is the one who tells you you’re not ready, that you need to sketch out your character’s family tree before you write the next chapter. The one who tells you to search the internet instead of writing because you haven’t done sufficient research to know how much socks cost in 1942.
You fell for that?  You wasted a perfectly good writing day waiting for some figment of your imagination to tell you you don’t have the authority?
Here’s the thing about research. Whatever the time and place, it’s your version of that time and place. Put the furniture on the ceiling if that makes sense in your story. You’re worried about the Authenticity Police? When they show up, ask them how many books they’ve written. Then point to yours. Then point to you, the authority. The prime mover of worlds. 
Given the choice between a cookie or the promise of a cookie, you’d choose the cookie. So why do you talk about the book you’re going to write instead of actually writing it? At your age, whatever your age, you know what’s behind you, the work you’ve produced, and you have a better sense of the shape of the time in front of you, which is called Books Not Yet Written.
You know what you see in front of you before you die, right? Books Not Yet Written.
What I’m saying to you is, do rather than pray.
2: What the muse also is not.
Every semester, by dint of teaching creative writing, apparently I kill somebody’s creativity. I’m always shocked when the student comes in to tell me this. It’s like that scene in the movies when the expert who’s going to save the world trips and shoots himself.  It’s meant to shock.
What happens now? What do we do now that the creativity is dead?
Perhaps you’re wondering how this tragedy happened on my watch. Well, I’ll tell you. I asked what might happen if this student shifted the POV. If she worked to raise the stakes. “It was going well,” the student says now, postmortem, all big eyes and slumped shoulders and defeated sighs, “and then you made me do this.”
This means that creativity is a Pamplona bull, running free in the student’s loamy cranial pastures. Behold his might, the heat burning off his sweaty flanks. The miniature inverse world in the orb of his eye. He’s wild when you pursue him, and pursue him you must – another muse, with horns this time! – as he runs down those streets, a clatter of keratin hooves on cobblestones.
“You want me to do what?” the student asks. Revise? Make changes? To listen to you, Professor, is to hobble him, neuter him, pen him up. Magic is what comes from his unfettered flight through the streets.
But if this bull is your muse, you’re in bad shape. What I see is a dying animal, impaled and weak. What I see is you, breathless, chasing after something that will fail you. Unchecked, unchallenged inspiration is useless. If you’re a writer, nothing I throw at you can screw you up. You will rise to meet each challenge because you understand your gift is thatstrong.
If a muse is anything, it’s a guard dog. Put a chain around his neck. Now put the chain around you. Now chain you to the chair. If you move, the guard dog bites. At first, you’re petrified. Then you forget he’s there. When you don’t go anywhere for an hour, every single day, you’re a writer. 
3: No one said this would be fun.
When you hand your story back to me and I ask, how did it go? I’m pretty much fucking with you. If you tell me it went well, I know you’re lying. If you tell me it was hard, I assume you mean you were able to breathe while you worked on it, and battle viruses – that your GI system was auto-piloting your digestion.  Basically that all was status quo.
Because it’s supposed to be hard.Because if it’s not, you’re doing it wrong.
Sit back down, writer. This room is too small for wings.
All right. You want wings? I take it back. The muse can be a turkey vulture. A harpy eagle. Something with a beak designed for rending flesh, a head born red because most of the time, it’s rooting through a carcass, festooned with intestines, just, you know, surviving. I’m sorry, am I grossing you out? Good. You know who’s focused? The damn harpy eagle. Because killing, eating, surviving isn’t a game. Writing isn’t either.

4: Follow the blood.
At some point, you will find something under all those lousy first and second drafts: the good pages, the glittering scales of the monster that you know better than to touch. Not only don’t you cringe when you re-read these pages, you find your blood going to your chest supernova-style, geysering out to your fingertips. You could read these pages a hundred times, and whatever it is that makes them special will not diminish. You could have no faith in yourself, in what you can say and do on a page, but even youwill read these pages and feel something weird worming above your chin. You’re smiling, and you’re doing it because you know it’s good. Let those pages sustain you. Pull them out when you need them, consult them for the promise of what this book could be, even if it’s not there yet. Put them down on the desk, and watch where your blood flows. That’s where you go next.
Conversely, when you get lazy, follow the blood. It’s those twin boiling points on your cheeks, the eternal threat of shame. Don’t embarrass yourself. You keep trying to skip past the crappy paragraphs, but you know better. Your shame will wait for you, in your cheeks, souring in your gut. Go back, eventually, and fix the damn thing(s).
You owe it to the better angels of your best pages.
5. Run from creativity.
Muses aren’t the only danger. Beware the inspiration peddlers, the role players, the “Find Your Voice” workshops. The fifty dollar a pop get-togethers where you sit around washing down your write-a-novel dreams with Styrofoam coffee and crullers and new friends. I’m not supposed to say that. I’m supposed to give you an ice breaker or a fun exercise or a sing along, but I’d be cheating you if I did.
What you need is to do the work. What you need, forever and always, is the work.
No one has the secret because there is no secret. Inspiration and creativity are pretty words we use to describe the work but otherwise are completely useless. If you let it, your mind will make a red herring out of those words. Your mind wants you to play Bejeweled Blitz and click on a picture of Justin Bieber pissing in a bucket.  Override it. Take control.
If you only talk about the books in your head, you’re not a writer. Donuts and fun times with nice writing groups are great, but they don’t make you a writer either.
Did you do the work? Did you write today? Words, not excuses.
Work, not wings.

Patry Francis talks about The Orphans of Race Point, trying not to obsess, and so much more

Here are the facts: Patry Francis is a three time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, and has twice been the recipient of a fellowship from Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her first novel, The Liar’s Diary, has been translated into seven languages and was recently optioned for film.  Now here is why you really need to know: Patry Francis is a genius writer who also happens to be one of the warmest, kindest people around. The only thing I'd like better than hosting her on my blog is having the chance to sit down with her over tea. Her book, which I blurbed, is truly haunting (Haunting being my litmus test) and I urge everyone to buy several copies. Thank you, Patry, for being here on the blog!



What sparked this book?
            The Orphans of Race Point which I began in 2001, has been a part of me for so long I really had to ponder that question! Was it the spectacular landscape of the lower Cape? The close-knit Portuguese community I admired, and into which my son had recently married? Or was it some element of the long and twisting plot that came first?             However, I didn’t have to think long before I saw the face and heard the voice that haunted me from the start. It was Gus, the wounded, impulsive soul who transforms a tormented childhood into a fierce compassion for others. Though I didn’t know where his story would lead me, I saw him as both a child, hiding in the closet where he was found nearly catatonic after his mother’s murder, and as the man he became.
What surprised you in the writing and research?
            What surprised me was that Gus, my spark, my obsession, wasn’t my main character. In the early drafts, the story began in what is now the middle, when Ava, a victim of domestic abuse comes to him for help, triggering visceral memories and bringing up the unresolved guilt from his past. Everything that preceded the visit, including his complex relationship with Hallie, the girl he’d loved since childhood, was revealed through backstory and it had the murky quality that flashbacks sometimes have.             But Hallie refused to play a secondary role. She knocked forcefully on the door of the novel, just as she had when she first showed at nine years old, demanding admittance to the house where Gus was staying. Six months had passed since his mother’s violent death and he hadn’t spoken a word. In town and on the playground, a rumor was circulating that he had become the victim of a feitiço, a kind of Portuguese spell. Following in the footsteps of her father, the town doctor, Hallie attempts her own cure by presenting him with two fish in a leaky plastic bag, and a challenge to keep them alive. Then, she returns daily to read aloud to him about an orphan who becomes the hero of his own story.             Once Hallie assumed center stage, much of Gus’s story was filtered through her, first as a precocious child and later, as a brilliant woman who felt it as strongly as he did, and often understood it more clearly. I also discovered that she had her own secrets to reveal.
This novel, for me, hooked me so emotionally. Did you feel that hook while you were writing?
            Yes, definitely. Just this morning, I read a quote in a piece about censorship which was printed in The Guardian. Jenn Doll wrote:
            “(Art) is not meant to shield us from pain so much as offer a vessel through which we can cope, grow and even move past tragedy.”
            I believe that one of the most sacred tasks of the writer is to inspire the reader to feel, and we can only do that by experiencing the emotions ourselves.           Perhaps because Hallie and Gus first appear as motherless children, I had a particularly powerful connection with them. And then, as I say, we spent a lot of time together. This is a long, twisty novel, spanning thirty years, and stretching to include a large cast of characters. Over the years, I developed empathy for all of them, even the most hopelessly devious.
            What's obsessing you now and why?
            What’s obsessing me is trying not to obsess--which is really the challenge post-publication; don’t you think? Though it’s something like telling yourself not to think about the color red,’m attempting not to look at numbers, or seek daily validation that the book is doing “okay,” or to peek at too many on-line reviews. Though I’m eager to get the word out in any way I can, I also know I have very limited control over the novel’s fate. It’s time for the story and the characters to speak for themselves now, to enter the hearts and minds of readers and engage with them on their own terms.             I remember debating a friend and early reader about what Gus looked like. Was he short and muscular or a lean runner type? “Listen he’s my character. I know what he looks like,” I finally insisted, thinking that settled it.             But of course, I was wrong. If characters are to become real in a meaningful way, they can only do it by interacting with a reader, one on one, and by being imagined again as if for the first time. My job at this stage is to let go, trust them, and move on to a new story.
What question didn't I ask that I should have?
You should have asked how we “met,” though you may not remember yourself! It was many years ago on the wonderful, though now sadly defunct, writer’s forum, Readerville. I was in awe to be talking with one of my favorite authors on-line. Then, as now, your generosity to all who asked for advice or help, was an inspiration and a great, great gift.
What's your writing life like?

Slow and laborious! I wish I worked from an outline like many of my author friends do, or that I had a clear sense where a novel is going before I began. But I tend to be a radically organic writer. I only find out where I’m going by sitting down to write. The surprises I encounter along the way are part of the fun, but they also throw off any timetable I might set for myself. In the end, it takes many drafts before the heart of the story emerges. And then it’s time to begin revisions...sigh.

The extraordinary Jane Ciabattari talks about CALIFORNIA TALES, her sublime new collection of stories from SHEBOOKS, and why chimera is her favorite word

Jane Ciabattari is amazing. She's not only the author of the highly acclaimed collection, STEALING THE FIRE,  as well as numerous short stories, she serves as the Vice President online of the National Book Critics Circle, in charge of the Critical Mass blog and social networking. Her reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and just about every other major newspaper and magazine. And as any writer who knows her knows--she's a tireless champion of the written word. I'm thrilled to host an interview here with her about her wonderful new collection of stories, CALIFORNIA TALES, from SheBooks. Thank you, thank you, Jane!


 
Q. When did you first decide you were a writer?
I grew up in a book-loving family (my father was on the local library board). I read continuously growing up. My first efforts were poems—I was haunted by the myth of Sisyphus as a child, and wrote a convoluted poem about it. I edited the literary magazine at my small public high school in Kansas and dreamed of getting out. And I did, starting with a National Merit scholarship, which gave me the chance to study creative writing at Stanford.  Nancy Packer at Stanford was tough and because of that, encouraging.

I wrote “Hide and Seek,” a taut suspenseful––and withholding––story about a young girl being abused by an older neighbor boy in her workshop. She told me it was good but I didn’t go far enough. I wasn’t able to at the time, but she taught me you could.  That lesson helped me write my first published story, Hiding Out, which ended up in The North American Review, Redbook and LiteraryMama.com.

In graduate school I was most deeply influenced by Herbert Wilner. I was doing directed writing with him while working full time as managing editor of the Sunday magazine of the San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle. I was working on a novel. He was clearly ill from a heart condition caused by treatment for a lung cancer years before. He had surgery and died. I couldn’t continue that novel. I got a scholarship to Squaw Valley Writers Community and got back on track up there. “Stealing the Fire,” the title story in my first collection, uses some of that emotion and that setting. It’s about a writer finding her voice. So that’s what I was up to then.

A group of us in Herb’s writing workshop (including Molly Giles and Jane Vandenburgh, who all went on to publish novels and story collections) started a writers’ group. It went on for years. We’d gather at each other’s houses and drink wine and critique the work. We weren’t always kind. But we all ended up being better writers.

Q. Are there any themes, characters or imagery that you find recurring in your writing? What are they and what is their origin?
I tend to be drawn to taboos. I can’t seem to help it. Although I’ve lived for many years on the Upper West Side and in Sag Harbor, quite a few of my stories are set in California—Squaw Valley, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, the canyons and bars of Southern California. For some reason that landscape inspires me. I like to write about experiences I haven’t had.

Q. What’s the greatest risk you’ve taken in your writing?
Writing about brutality. Writing about addiction (“Arabella Leaves,” in California Tales, is about a crystal meth addict; I wanted to show what a sparkling girl she was before she was lost to drugs, and how she was loved). Writing about troubled families (“Aftershocks,” which is about a boy, a girl, and a dog who meet in the Viper Room during the devastating Los Angeles earthquake, deals in part with the aftermath of suicide). It’s terrifying to take on the realities we’re living now.

Q. What advice do you have for an aspiring writer who is just starting out?
Expect to throw a lot away. Expect to work hard, and revise constantly. Love it. Or don’t do it. Isn’t that what we all say?

Q. Do you worry about not having the authority to write about situations that you don’t know firsthand?
I use my background as a journalist to research stories. Then I wait for images to come. While I was writing “Arabella Leaves,” the first story in California Tales, I  researched Harley Davidsons, methamphetamine addiction, southern Californian flora and fauna, and biblical references to Lazarus.
Many of the seemingly unrelated details I added to information based on this research come from the business of living life, taking notes on the small things that most people never notice - the sound of coyotes, the smell of the arroyos, a stainless steel motorcycle I saw on the Port Jefferson ferry, a street in New Orleans, Arabella was named after a street sign in the Garden District of New Orleans. Her mother had spotted it on a brief visit to the Big Easy. Her boyfriend D has a a custom Screamin' Eagle Deuce, with a Twin Cam 95 V-Twin engine. It’s the thing he loves most in the world.
I collect photos, pressed flowers - all kinds of things connected to characters or stories. This physical evidence helps me make the transition into writing the story.

I looked through newspaper archives reporting the Northridge earthquake while I was writing “Aftershocks,” a story about a boy, a girl and a dog who meet in the Viper Room on the eve of that devastating quake. ‘Payback Time’ came out of my fascination with the dotcom boom and bust awhile back.  The story is about what happens when the corporate world turns malevolent.  But I also was inspired by Chekhov. The Cherry Orchard. Silicon Valley, once filled with apricot orchards, becomes a dream killer for a workaholic just as he’s on the verge of cashing in.

Q. Do you currently have a job other than writing? I’m a book critic and columnist. I write the Between the Lines column for BBC.com, and contribute regularly to NPR.org, The Daily Beast, the Boston Globe and others. I’ve been involved with the National Book Critics Circle for  many years. I’m a past president and currently vice president/online in charge of the Critical Mass blog and social networking.

Q. What's an odd fact about you that not many people know?
Not sure if it’s odd, but I have a webcam on Mavericks, the surfer spot; I love to go to Lagunitas taproom live concerts; I rode a Honda 250 scrambler until I got married and settled down (I was still an undergrad). I’m still married to  my first husband: I met my darling on a blind date and we were engaged after two weeks.

Q. What is your favorite word right now?"Chimera." It came to me when working on my novel in progress, in connection with the character I call Shanika. Here's an excerpt:

Shanika took her laptop from the table, opened it and sat quietly for a moment.
“Chimera,” she said.
“What?!” Abby snorted with laughter.  This girl was so unpredictable.
“It’s a word I learned on the Internet. It’s got a lot of definitions. One. A fire-breathing she-monster in Greek mythology having a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail.  There are lots of pictures. Two. An illusion or fabrication of the mind; especially an unrealizable dream.
“And here are the synonyms,” she continued. “A fantasy, illusion, daydream, a vision, or hallucination. Something you see but it’s not there.”
Shanika smiled, clearly delighted with what she’d learned, thanks to the mysteries of Google.
“Chimera,” she repeated. “That’s what I’m going to call my business.”
“And what will you sell?” Abby asked, amused and curious.
“Not things for sale,” she said. “It’s a massage thing. You come in, you relax, we make you feel peaceful. It’s an illusion. But you’ll feel good for awhile.”
How will I keep up with this one? Abby wondered.

Q. What writing projects are you working on now?
I’m finishing a novel I’ve been working on for several years. Revising is so humbling. I’ve spent a lot of time researching and drafting. Now I have to let most  of that drop away. But I needed that back story so I could feel the truth of the story as I wrote the first few drafts. It’s called The Road to Eastville. It’s about Abby,  who grows up in a small Illinois town founded by her abolitionist forebears. She falls in love in high school with Zeke, a classmate who is the fourth in a line of men whose ancestor was a runaway slave who worked on the underground railroad with the abolitionist founders. He becomes radicalized and leaves her when their son is not even two years old. The book is set in 2004 during the Obama-Keyes senatorial campaign in Illinois. Abby is living in New York and quietly going about her chosen business as an American history post-doctoral fellow. As the novel opens, she gets a call from her son, who is in jail for being highly successful in the drug business. His girlfriend, who also is in jail, shoplifting for drug money, is pregnant. Twins. So Abby goes back to Illinois. A heap of trouble comes from that phone call. Like the story of Ruth, the novel tells of the love between generations that transcends family blood ties.

I've been workshopping the novel with my husband Mark, who also is a fiction writer, and Greg Sarris, a novelist whose work I admire greatly. We're all coming toward completion of our manuscripts. It helps to have others along on the long journey.

Elizabeth Crook talks about her extraordinary novel MONDAY MONDAY, finding true endings, why she doesn't want to write funny stories, Charles Whitman and the Texas shooting, and so much more

I walked around clutching Elizabeth Crook's Monday Monday to my chest the whole week I was reading it. About how we save ourselves and others, about Texas and the Charles Whitman shootings, about love and really, about life itself, it's the kind of book that's so real, so grippingly alive, that when you tear yourself away from the pages, you feel disorientated. 
She's also the author of The Raven's Bride, Promised Lands, and The Night Journal. She's written for periodicals such as Texas Monthly and the Southwestern Historical Quarterly and has served on the council of the Texas Institute of Letters. She is a member of Western Writers of America and The Texas Philosophical Society, and was selected the honored writer for 2006 Texas Writers' Month. Her first novel, The Raven's Bride, was the 2006 Texas Reads: One Book One Texas selection. The Night Journal was awarded the 2007 Spur award for Best Long Novel of the West and the 2007 Willa Literary Award for Historical Fiction.
Monday Monday is one of my favorite books of the year, and I'm just honored to have Elizabeth here. Thank you, Elizabeth,


Q: I always want to know a novel’s origins. Can you talk a bit about what sparked the novel?
A: This might sound hard to believe but I initially intended for this book to be a comedic story about a mother and two daughters--nothing to do with Charles Whitman. I’d written books with heavy themes before and wanted to do something different this time. But from the beginning, the story I planned to write just wouldn’t happen. I couldn’t get excited about the mother or her daughters. It all sounded soft and completely irrelevant. And then one day a Texas Monthly with a dark cover image of the UT tower and the title UT’s Darkest Day: Charles Whitman 40 Years Later landed in my mailbox, and my heart started pounding the minute I saw it. The story was a chilling account of Charles Whitman’s 1966 massacre from the tower as told by people who were there, and it was written by Pam Colloff—a spectacular writer. My heart pounded the whole time I was reading it. The next thing I knew, the mother in my story had developed a past as one of Whitman’s first targets. The story had shifted backwards by forty years. And nothing was very funny anymore.     
Q: The novel spans those forty years. What was the research like? What surprised you about it? 
A: This book required less research than my other three, which were more specifically historical novels—one set in Tennessee in the 1820’s about Sam Houston’s disastrous first marriage, one in Texas during the revolution of 1835-36, and one in New Mexico in the 1890’s. With this one I was writing a story that people I knew had actually lived through or watched live on television, and that was a whole different kind of research. Along with the usual online search for information, I could call up friends and say, “What did you wear in 1966? What did your eyeglasses look like? What did you carry your books in?” I live in Austin where most of the novel takes place, and a lot of the people who were involved in the Whitman incident are still around. During the time I was writing, I would go to a dinner party and find myself by chance seated beside Neal Spelce, the reporter who broadcast the event as it was happening. Or I would read an article about the shooting and discover that a dear friend of mine—a retired history professor whom I’d known most of my life—was the person who had placed the initial phone call to police when the first shots were fired. I would learn that one of the reporters on the scene when police entered Whitman’s house after the shooting and found Whitman’s wife stabbed to death in the bed, was Mike Cox, whom I knew, now forty years later, as my fellow member in the Texas Institute of Letters. The person who owned the apartment building where Whitman killed his mother before he went up in the tower, and who admitted police into the apartment and found her body, was also someone I knew. Just recently I was at a party for the faculty of the Plan II program at UT where my husband currently teaches, and when one of the faculty asked me what my book was about and I told him, he said he had been there that day. He knew four people who were killed. He had tried to revive one of them on the Drag. This is how it is in Austin today. We’re a big city, but this story is still with us, and researching was often as easy as making a phone call. With my first two books, in the early nineties, I relied on libraries. With my third book I relied on the internet. With this book I relied on friends. Pam Colloff kindly gave me the numbers of others to interview, and everyone was extremely gracious.  
Q: What I loved most about your novel was how blazingly alive your characters are, how we come to know and care about all of them deeply. Can you talk a bit about how you develop your characters?
A: I wish I could say that creating these characters was easy for me, but I had to do it by trial and error—the same way I created the narrative. My friend Steve Harrigan, who’s been nice enough to edit early drafts of my writing for the past twenty-five years, kept telling me Shelly and Wyatt were not yet interesting enough to carry this story—and he was right. So I kept going back at them. I changed their backgrounds, their ambitions. I changed their relationship—a lot. About six drafts in, I changed Wyatt’s name: he originally was Philip. Both of these characters—and all the rest, really, were unclear to me for a long time before they became clear. It makes me incredibly happy that you found them real and cared about them.  It’s important to me as a writer, and as a reader, to have characters behave as they would if they were real people. And it’s tricky to make that happen—you have to know your characters thoroughly, and see everything through their eyes, in order to know what their authentic reactions would be. And if those reactions don’t go with the plot you envisioned, then you have to alter either the plot or the characters. It’s essential that they fit together and that everything makes sense, because, for me at least, it’s hard to care about characters if you don’t believe in them or their story. 
I’m tremendously lucky to have intuitive people like Steve Harrigan, and like my agent (and yours!) Gail Hochman and my editor Sarah Crichton, who will notice when something about a character doesn’t ring true. I always take that kind of comment seriously and start making changes. I had to stick very close to Shelly all the way through, and ask myself, what does she really feel here? Not what do I need her to feel—but what does she feel? That’s what’s going to determine how she reacts and what the story becomes. Would this character really do this? Would he say this? Would he say it this way? Is this what would actually happen? These are the questions that matter to me when I’m developing characters.   
Q: For me, so much of the novel was about how we are saved by others--and how we save ourselves--both in the light of one terrible tragedy and the numerous tragedies that life bestows on us. Could you talk about that please?
A: That’s a huge theme in the book, starting with the Whitman shooting. I think all of us wonder how we would behave in the case of a mass public shooting. Would we be heroic and risk our lives to rescue others? Or would we not? Charles Whitman ushered in the age of these heinous school shootings that have become so commonplace, and at the time people had no frame of reference for something like that. While you and I, today, can consider ahead of time how we would hope to react, in 1966 people didn’t have any reason to wonder about that. School shootings were unheard of. Most people didn’t believe it was happening even as they watched it: they thought they were seeing an act put on by the drama department or a study invented by psychology students to see what people’s reaction would be. They thought the sound of the gunfire was construction on the Drag. There were those who ignored the wounded—actually stepped over them—believing it was a drama. There were others who ignored the students standing at doorways trying to warn them not to go outside, and then walked right into the path of the bullets. One couple out touring the tower deck stepped inside and encountered Whitman holding a rifle and standing over a trail of blood from Edna Townsley, the receptionist whom he had just bludgeoned, and they thought he was a janitor who had come to shoot pigeons. They thought the trail of blood was varnish he had wiped on the floor. That’s how unsuspecting people were at the time. They said hello to Whitman, and stepped over the blood, and started down the stairs, having no idea that Edna Townsley was bleeding to death under the sofa where Whitman had stashed her.
But as the narrative unfolds, we see it’s not the shooting that causes the worst damage and the worst suffering for Shelly and Wyatt, and from which they need rescue. It’s their own actions—the love affair and its consequences. It’s their own grave errors from which they have to save themselves and each other. Their lives aren’t only determined by brutal happenstance, but by the choices they make afterwards—just as destructive, but in the end beautifully redemptive.    
Q: Monday, Monday took you seven years to write. Was there ever a moment in the process where you felt you had lost sight of the novel or it took a turn you didn’t expect? How did you manage to keep on track and keep going?

 Without giving anything away, I’d love to ask you about how you came to your perfect ending. Though I yearned for something else to happen, it felt exactly right. Do you know your endings before you start, like John Irving, or is it more of an organic process for you? 
A: The entire story was absolutely up in the air when I started. At some point along the way—some later draft—I knew the book would begin and end at the tower, on a Monday, and a Monday. It takes me forever to write a book—seven years is about average for me. I read slowly and write inefficiently. I don’t have much vision when I start out—it’s really a matter of finding the way. Ideas don’t come to me out of the blue; I have to figure them out. And often I figure them wrong and have to go back and refigure. But I like this process. It means exploring a lot of wrong roads before I find the one I want to be on, and then I can be on it happily and with some certainty that this is the one. One gift I have as a writer is flexibility. I re-write everything dozens of times. If something doesn’t work, I change it. I ditch characters. I veer off. I lop off scenes and replace them with others. I listen to criticism. And of course, the days—the years!—add up.
None of this is to say I wouldn’t choose to me a more prolific writer if I could. I envy authors like you who can write so many great books. And you’re a prolific reader, too! I’m deplorably slow at reading, which is not only a handicap to my writing, but a deep personal regret. The only upside is that I hear the words aloud, which arguably helps me write better dialogue.
As for your question of whether there was a moment when I lost sight of the novel during those seven years, there were plenty of moments when I didn’t know where I was heading. But I never felt I couldn’t at least go somewhere. I’m compulsive, and write every day. Sometimes it’s worthless stuff that I toss aside the next day. But that’s just the way that I do it. 
And Caroline, you guessed correctly about the ending—it was different in earlier drafts. It was what I wanted the ending to be, but it was not as true. I went back and made it true.
Q: What question didn’t I ask that I should have?
A: You’ve asked the perfect, intuitive questions and I’ve gone on too long. Thank you for being so generous to so many writers and readers. Your blog is extraordinary, and I appreciate your hospitality and the chance to take part.     

Read an excerpt from Jennifer Haupt's wonderful new SheBook, Will You Be My Mother? The Quest To Answer Yes

Jennifer Haupt writes poignantly about the connections and missed connections between mothers and daughters -- the love, the silence, the longing." -- Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters


I'm thrilled to host the amazing Jennifer Haupt here today, with an excerpt from her new book, Will You Be My Mother? The Quest to Answer Yes.  (You can buy it here or here.) Jennifer's the author of I'll Stand By You, and her essays and articles have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Readers Digest, Woman's Day, AARP: The Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and various other magazines. 

Thank you Jennifer!

Breath by Breath
Courage. This word has its roots in the French coeur, which means “heart.” Love. The Hebrew term for courage is ometz lev, or literally,“ strength of heart.” The heart is characterized by its continuous, unrelenting rhythm. I believe this is true of courage as well. It’s not a single moment that changes everything, but rather a series of beats in a lifetime. Opportunities. The trick is figuring out how to listen to those beats, and heed them—again and again—until fear dissipates and courage becomes as reflexive as breathing.             Will you be my mother?             This is a deceptively simple question. A multifaceted question, one that has changed—and changed me—as I’ve asked and answered in the voice of a child, a mother to my own children, and a daughter coming to terms with nurturing aging parents. A question that has guided my career as a journalist for the past twenty years.            I’ve travelled as far as Africa and Haiti to interview women who nurture wounded and abandoned children. I’ve made a successful career of writing about women who mother the children of the world, many times to heal their own pain. I ask them the questions that I want most answered about finding forgiveness and letting go of the past. The unspoken question remains: How can I recover the missing piece of my heart, the piece that I fear went missing when my sister died? I was eighteen months old, too young to remember Susie. But what stays with me is the sadness in my mother’s eyes, the tension in her touch, the distance between us still when we embrace. All of this has translated into something quite unsafe.            As my mother turns eighty this year, she is asking me to nurture her. I must let go of my unmet expectations and needs as a daughter and learn to be a mother in a new, more mature way. This is second coming of age that many empty nester women, like me, go through. It can be a time of expanding the definition of motherhood and discovering ways to nurture ourselves, our families, our communities, and sometimes even the world. And yet, I still clearly hear a small child’s voice asking, demanding. Longing.            Will you be my mother?            My SheBook started out as a single essay about a Rwandan girl who asked me to be her mother. The question was, in a way shocking. Confusing. Confronting.            Maybe it was the setting, the genocide museum in Kigali, or the fact that I missed my two sons like hell. Maybe it was that I had spent a month interviewing genocide survivors. Maybe it was that I had come here on an assignment that had dead-ended and wasn’t quite sure what I was taking home. What had started out as a magazine assignment that dead-ended became the beginning of my quest to answer this girl’s question.             The girl in the genocide museum is still with me, in a piece of my heart I had always feared went missing when my sister died and my mother disappeared into her grief. For the past eight years, I’ve tried—not always successfully—to find the courage to answer, yes.             Breath by breathe.
Jennifer Haupt contributes to a wide variety of magazines. She is also the editor of the Psychology Today blog, One True Thing, an online salon of interviews with best-selling authors and essays about the moments that matter most. Haupt's mini-memoir, "Will you be my Mother? The Question to Answer Yes," is available on Amazonand Shebooks.net. All author profits ($1/book) during May 2014 will be donated to mothers2mothers, a nonprofit that is working to stop the legacy of AIDS in Africa by creating a network of mothers with the disease mentoring pregnant women.

Read an excerpt from my SheBook e-book, The Wrong Sister

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We were a family of women, my father having died four years before. He had had a heart attack, falling in the very garden that had been a selling point when we had bought the house. He left my mother enough insurance so the house was hers, but not enough so that she didn't have to work long hours as a legal secretary, forcing my sister Rose and me to tend to ourselves, often well after dinner.<br /><br />I didn't mind. There was no other company I wanted to be in than my sister's. She was beautiful back then, sixteen and reed slender, with my mother's same river of black hair, only hers wasn't tied up into a corporate bun, but skipped to her waist. She had luminous pale skin and eyes as blue and clear as chips of summer sky. I was almost everything Rose and my mother were not--studious and shy, shaped like a soda straw with frizzy hair the color of rust. Before Rose fell in love, she adored only me. We had grown up inseparable, a world unto ourselves simply because we didn't like anyone as much as we liked and needed each other. Tagging along with Rose, anything was possible. We roamed the woods behind our house looking for the secret landing places of flying saucers. We walked two miles to the Star Market just to steal fashion magazines and candy and cheap gold-tone jewelry we wouldn't be caught dead wearing, for the pure shocking thrill of doing something dangerous. We ate ice cream for dinner with my mother's wine poured over it as a sauce.We dialed stray numbers on the phone and talked enthusiastically to whomever picked up, pretending we were exchange students from France looking for a dangerous liaison or two.<br /><br /> "Adventure is the code we live by," Rose declared, hooking her little finger about mine to shake on it. We were always going to be together. We were both going to be famous writers, living in the same mansion in Paris, scandalizing everyone by the hard, fast way we lived. We plotted out our books together. They were always about young girls like us on some quest or another, for stolen diamonds or lost love, and the only difference between my books and Rose's was that Rose's heroines always ended up riding off on the backs of motorcycles with any boy she felt like kissing, and mine were always teaching school in some quaint little town in Vermont, with two Persian cats warming themselves at her feet.<br /><br />And then Rose met Daniel, and everything changed for all three of us.<br /><br />Daniel Richmond was a senior in Rose's high school, a science major who loved cells<br /><br />and combustions, who said words like mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum as if they were poetry. Rose had met him the first day she started tenth grade, when she had wandered into the wrong room and found him there peering into a microscope. The first time Daniel saw her, he looked stunned. "I'll take you to the right room," he said, and by the time he got her there, going the longest way he could manage, he had her phone number, and a date for the following night.<br /><br />He was Rose's first boyfriend. She was giddy with the incredulous joy of it. She walked with a new bounce. She brushed her hair a hundred times every night and stared dreamily at herself in the mirror. Daniel called her every night before their actual date. She curled protectively about the phone. She whispered into it and even after she had said goodbye to him, she held the phone receiver up against her cheek. "Wait until you meet him, Stella," she told me, out of breath. "You're going to die."<br /><br />The first time he came over, I didn't know what to do. I wanted to dress up, to shine the same way my sister did. Both Rose and I tried on three different outfits. We both braided our hair and took it out again, put on perfume and washed it off, and when the doorbell finally rang, we both went to the front door together.<br /><br />Rose was beaming. She seemed lit from within. "I told you about each other," she said to both of us, and pushed Daniel toward me. He was taller than she was and the handsomest boy I had ever seen, with shiny brown hair so long it fell into his collar, and lashes so lush, they seemed to leave shadows across his face.<br /><br />"Stella, so you like science fiction," he said, and handed me a book, Brave New World. I had never read it, had never even heard of it back then, and I took it gratefully. "I'll be careful with it.<br /><br />He shook his head. "No, it's yours."<br /><br />Astonished, I turned the book over and over in my hands. It was brand new. The spine hadn't even been cracked and broken in the way I liked, the pages hadn't been stained with fruit juice or chocolate, torn by my own two careless hands. A virgin book, I thought, and blushed.<br /><br />"See, Stella, I told you you'd like him," Rose said. Her hands reached out to touch<br /><br />Daniel's shirt sleeve, his hand, the bare back of his neck, and could only let go to reach on for another part of him. My mother came in, still in her silvery corporate suit, her makeup, and Daniel handed her a bottle of wine. "Rose said you favor red."<br /><br />My mother smiled. She undid her top button and gave Rose an approving glance. "You come for dinner tomorrow," she ordered. "Late dinner. The way they do in Europe. Say around nine."<br /><br />He came for late dinner the next night, and almost every other night after. It became a sort of ritual. We'd all eat late dinner, huge lavish spreads my mother was delighted to cook for all of us. She loved the way Daniel would engage her in conversation, the way he'd sometimes bring her books he thought she'd like or flowers.<br /><br />"You're over here so often, we ought to charge you rent," she said, but she smiled at him. She told him he'd have to taste the Beef Wellington she was planning to make the next night.<br /><br />One day, though, I came home to find the house quiet. "Where's Rose and Daniel?”  My mother shrugged, she put hamburgers into a pan. "They're out on their own tonight,” she said.<br /><br />"They are?"<br /><br />We sat down to dinner, to fries and burgers and a salad, and although my mother put on the radio to make the meal more festive, although she chattered brightly about her new boss, who had taken her out to lunch and flirted with her, who she was sure might not be married, something felt wrong. I kept looking at the two empty seats and I was suddenly not hungry anymore. My mother tapped her fork against the table. "It's not a tragedy, Stella" she said sternly. I put my burger down. "I had a big lunch."<br /><br />Daniel and Rose began spending more and more time alone. I watched them walking away from our house, and away from me, their hands so tightly clasped, I was sure they must be leaving marks. They couldn't seem to be together without touching, hands or shoulders or heads. They couldn't seen to talk but instead were whispering, as if everything they shared were some great, perfect secret, as if they were in a foreign country where I didn't speak the language or know the customs.<br /><br />© Caroline Leavitt, SheBooks</span>

Leah Hager Cohen talks about the brilliant No Book But the World, how do we love difficult people, and she asks me why I started the blog

I loved Leah Hager Cohen's The Grief of Others, and I couldn't wait to read her new book, No Book But the World. It's dazzling. About secrets, family and imagination,  it's also about how memory can transform us. Leah is the author of ten books, including Train Go Sorry and The Grief of Others. She's a distinguished Writer in Residence at the College of the Holy Cross and on the faculty of Lesley University's MFA in Creative Writing . I'm so thrilled to have her here. Thank you so much, Leah.


I 'm always interested in what sparks a novel. What was the moment when you entered this particular story?
Each of my previous novels began with an image – some detailed-yet-highly-circumscribed snapshot, tantalizing me with just a glimpse of character, setting, situation. Like finding a smattering of clues. As I moved to piece them together, I’d begin to understand the larger ideas they hinted at.

This novel worked just the opposite. It was born of an abstract question: what do we do about the problem of people who are difficult to love – people whose differences place them on the margins of society, and who tend to elicit our fear or animosity?

This question tugged at me for quite some time before I began to see how a narrative might spring up around it.
What's so haunting about No Book But The World are the questions the book raises, about what we owe the ones we love, and what that might cost us. Could you talk about that, please? 
Well, “owe” is such a funny word, isn’t it? It raises all sorts of questions in itself: are we born with an obligation to be generous and good, or does a sense of what we owe grow in accordance with what we have received? And how do we balance our responsibility to others with our responsibility to ourselves?

Ava and Fred, the sister and brother at the heart of the novel, were raised with an unusual degree of personal freedom, encouraged to develop (or not) their own sense of both autonomy and responsibility. That upbringing, it turns out, has been a mixed blessing. And because they are such different individuals, the liberties they have been granted spell very different results for each.

Of course, the most haunting part is that it’s possible to love someone – with every good intention – and still fail to do right by him.
So much of your brilliant novel is about the power of imagination, and how it guides our life. Ava keeps trying to give shape to her past in order to make sense of her present.  Could you talk about that please?
The first draft started, “I have never been fond of stories.” I wrote some twenty pages before I realized – oh! No, no, the first sentence must actually be, “I have been too fond of stories.”

For Ava this tension is everything: On the one hand, she gravitates toward narrative as a tool for making sense of life. On the other hand, she abjures it as something that might foreclose on the fullness of comprehension. Her struggle with these competing urges – her alternating resistance and succumbing to the storytelling urge – this is what gives the novel its shape, its rhythm: at once pushing forward in time and being drawn back into memory.

I had no idea how the book would end, and was quite literally amazed when the final pages came to me. In them, Ava finds a solution to her dilemma – she figures out how to use storytelling to grow, while staying free of storytelling’s tendency to finalize and therefore limit understanding.
What's your writing life like? Do you have rituals, do you map out the story first, or do you let the story evolve? 
Rituals, no. Maps, ha. I am pretty much a wandering pilgrim.
What's obsessing you now and why?
My skin. How self-involved is that? But it’s true. Figuratively thin-skinned since I was a child, I’ve lately noticed my body seems to be, well – embodying – or punning on the idea. My skin splits and breaks damnably easily, no matter how much I minister to it with lotions or creams. And although I’m drawn as a writer to porousness, to exploring frontiers and crossing borders, I wouldn’t mind my own somatic boundary maintaining a bit more integrity.
What question didn't I ask that I should have. 
But no! – I want to ask you a question; may I? It seems to me such an outpouring of goodwill, of generosity, of, as Forster might have said, the impulse to connect, that you offer when you engage other writers with these questions. I’d be curious to know what led you to this undertaking in the first place; if you see it as an act of service; how much energy it takes to reach out in this way, and what sorts of energy it might deliver back into your own life.

Oh!  Well, I started blogging because I thought I should, but I soon grew bored with my own musings. What really interested me was how other writers did it. Did they feel sick at heart the way I did sometimes when facing a draft?  Do they outline? Do they watch bad TV? Besides wanting to interview other writers, I also had the whole issue of reviews. Ethically, I can't review people I know, which leaves out a whole lot of wonderful books! But I can interview those people--with full disclosure how I know them. It's just been a joy for me to do the blog because not only do I get to connect with the writers I admire, I get to listen in to their thoughts. What could be more magical than that?

Tova Mirvis, author of the sublime The Visible World, writes about what happens if you never finish a piece of writing

I devoured Tova Mirvis' Visible City. About three different families in New York City whose lives intersect, the book delves into how the busiest city can also be the loneliest and how connections can break or bond. I'm thrilled that Tova offered to write something for my blog. And so honored to host her here. Thank you Tova!


What if you never finished? What if this was the piece of writing in which you would find no way to the end, in which you stared dumbfounded, forever, at characters you’d created but were now as impenetrable as strangers? What if you wandered in a world which you’d built but didn’t know how to navigate? What if you’d created a nightmarish maze in which there was no way out for the characters, no way further in for you – what if you remained in that half-made stage, where your characters were blow up dolls only partially filled with air, and now sagging, wilting, waiting for some more blast of breath which you couldn’t summon? What if your novel was bewitched, now a castle where everyone was immobilized for a century, a walled prison whose ramparts were sealed shut?
 And what if you had no choice but to accept that there is no potion to unlock this world, nothing but time and work. The minutes put in that somehow combine to make years. Each day, a small step deeper inside. Each month, a small accumulation of words. Amid the frustration, there is as well the reverence and awe for those rare moments when words gleam, when sentences seem bejeweled. When the ideas seem to exist not in your hand but in your fingers, as though they are a team of fleet footed travelers who suddenly know the way to go.

 And this is why you stay. Stay, in pursuit of that opening – a hole in the wall, a forest whose overgrowth is effortlessly slashed, a magical portal through time. Stay, for the moments when the novel unlocks itself, allowing you inside once again, to a world both familiar and strange, a world where you are both deferent visitor and all-powerful creator.

Sarah Cornwell talks about What I Had Before I Had You, psychics, bipolar disorder, writing, and more, more, more

Mothers. Daughters. Family bonds. Magical thinking. I am so there. That's only part of the beauty of Sarah Cornwell's extraordinary new novel, What I had Before I had you. Sarah, the winner of a Pushcart Prize, the 2008 Gulf Coast Fiction prize, and a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature, also has won awards for her screenwriting--the 2010 Humanitas Student Drama Fellowship. I'm so happy to have her here. Thank you so much, Sarah!

This is your debut novel, but is it your first? Are there novels tucked away in drawers? What surprised you about writing this novel? What didn’t you expect?
This is both my debut and my first novel.  I started writing it ten years ago, in 2003, and I wrote it every which way before it found its final form.  So, because I was learning as I went along, I was in a near-constant state of surprise.  It’s even surprising now, when I leaf through the book, to see what elements of the chapters I wrote at 20 have survived (voice, mostly, and character), and what elements I couldn’t have figured out without the ensuing ten years of study, practice, and lived life (everything else).

Where did the for this novel spark?
My mother had several miscarriages before I was born.  As a child, I wondered if those miscarriages were my own failed attempts to enter the world, or if they were brothers and sisters I would never know, each with a unique soul.  I started writing about Myla and Olivia with those ghost siblings in mind, and it was Olivia’s childhood—the nursery, the beach, the domineering mother, the patterns of domestic life in the Reed household—from which the rest of the story sprang.
To me, there’s nothing more haunting than a missing child. It’s every parent’s nightmare. Did you have moments writing it when you just had to stop?
Though it is a nightmarish, worst-case scenario, no—at risk of giving away too much of the ending of the book, when I invented the present day plot thread in which Olivia searches for Daniel at the beach, I had a pretty good idea of where I was headed.  That whole present day frame narrative presented itself in 2011, toward the end of the writing process. I certainly shared Olivia’s terror, but also her denial of the urgency of the situation, and finally her trust in Daniel and his own power and agency—that he was on his own journey, which Olivia could not control.
The character of the psychic mother was so nuanced and so richly drawn. Where did she come from? Did you do research? 
Thank you! I don’t know where she came from. She is a million miles from my own mother.  I’m interested in the way, when you’re a child, adults seem to know absolutely everything, and Myla is sort of an amplification of that—according to her, she really does know everything, through her psychic ability.  Her rule over her daughter is absolute!  How could Olivia not rebel with great fury?
I did significant research into bipolar disorder, as it manifests both in adults and in children, and that research guided Myla’s character more and more in later drafts, and then Olivia’s as well.  From the beginning, I knew that Myla was magnetic and smart and fiercely protective of her daughter, but I didn’t know for years that I was writing toward a specific mental illness.  When I figured that out, I started into my research and let it color the story.
I went to a number of psychics as I wrote the book, as well, from $5 county fair psychics to more serious operations.  I had one amazing reading from a woman in her home, while her daughter played with a puppy and watched TV a few feet away.  At first I thought the reading was totally off-base, but I kept careful notes anyway. Then, when she was about halfway through the reading, and hadn’t deviated from this very off-base portrait of me and my life—hadn’t veered elsewhere based on my clear skepticism—I realized that while the reading wasn’t accurate about me, it was a 100% accurate reading of Olivia, down to the concept of trauma during her time in the womb that would carry over into her life.  I explained this to the psychic at the end of the reading and she said that it made sense, and that this means that I am a writer who absorbs my characters into myself, and that I should guard myself against taking on too much negative energy.  I tend to write toward what haunts or perplexes me, so I don’t see myself following that advice, but I find it fascinating and a little frightening.
In the novel, Olivia has to explore her past in order to figure out her present.  Do you think we can ever let the past go, or heal it? Or are there always scars?
I think we can only go by our own experiences of these things, but for me, the past is always there, informing the future. “Letting go” is a sort of figurative thing—we don’t actually “let go” of memories; we store them in the brain, and in aggregate, they make us who we are.  Scars, healing, letting go, holding on—I think these are all useful emotional constructs that help us make sense of the often random sequence of events that make a life.  I do think there is great power in how we choose to think about past events, though, and the metaphorical language we use to frame them--whether we choose to think of negative things that have happened as scars or as stepping stones or as water under the bridge…
Let’s talk craft. What kind of writer are you? Do you outline? Do you just follow your pen?  What’s your writerly day like?
I write in several forms, and my process is very different in each.  When I am screenwriting, which is how I have spent most of my time in 2013, I outline.  You have to outline!  Collaboration requires a much earlier articulation of the broad strokes of a story.  I do retain some of my fiction writing process, though, and spend some pre-outline time meditating on moments and characters that possess me with an urgency I don’t yet understand.
That is my fiction writing process—to seize on some moment that seems to contain more than I know—two redheaded girls swimming in the ocean, a pink nursery with empty cribs, tomato plants weighed down with fruit ripe past bursting—and investigate, in an associative way, feeling my way along a wall in the dark.  Often I have ten or twenty pages of wanderings before I figure out what the story is in a short story.  But if I feel compelled in that mysterious way, I know I’m onto something worth writing about.
My writerly day changes with my life and my job and so many factors.  I wish I were a more consistent writer, with a uniformly productive schedule, but the truth is, often I have to spend hours doing chores, walking the dog, wandering around, staring out windows, doing other jobs, etc., before whatever was percolating in my brain presents itself, and then I’ll sit down and out it will pour, sometimes in great six-hour sessions.  It’s not waiting for the muse, since I am working during all those window-staring hours.  It has taken years of practice for me to allow that this is part of my process, and not to feel guilty for the time spent not moving my fingers on the keyboard. But I do my best work when I am flexible and kind to myself.
what’s obsessing you now and why?
I’m obsessed with animals, now and always, and how we project onto them.  (A dog dies in a war movie and we weep, even as soldiers fall left and right!)  Right now I am a bit obsessed with the idea of disappearing places—sinking islands, vanishing cultures and languages.  And I’m obsessed with the world of Hollywood, in which I am working as a screenwriter—it’s a culture that still feels very surreal, very different from what I have known before, and very fascinating.
What question didn’t I ask that I should have?
What do you know for sure WON’T be part of your next book?

An adolescent first person narrator!  As much as I love Olivia, I spent ten years with a short-sighted, frustrated, angsty teenaged mind living inside my own. It felt wonderful to write her adult perspective into the book, and now that the book is going out into the world, it feels like Olivia is growing up in yet another way. I wish her all good things in her life after the last page of the book. And I will miss her.