Averil Dean's Blog, page 13

Seven Questions

What’s the most physically dangerous thing you have ever done?
What are some of the nicknames people have for you?
Where did you most often play as a child?
What was your favorite toy?
Who among your friends and family knows most of your secrets?
Who would play you in a movie?
Where would you go if you could travel for a month with no companion?

Boulders

Yesterday our friend Tetman posted a comment in which he referred to Denis Donoghue’s three levels of writing: self-expression, communication, then exploring the form of the language itself. I’m not sure this is a linear path, but I do think there are times in writing when you meet an obstacle that can only be overcome by a great heaving effort, after which you find yourself suddenly with a better view of the landscape. Blackbird was one of those obstacles for me. It taught me about structure...

Tone

This really struck me as familiar and true, especially what he says about tone. I have always framed this in terms of finding a ‘voice’ for the work, but I like his word much better. It’s about how you want to feel when you read the paragraphs back to yourself, about the mood you want to settle into as you write and read the story, and whether you are writing for the head or the heart or the body. (And I do think a book is usually written for one of the three over the others.) That’s the tone...

Skin/Trade

The wheels of the big machine are starting to move. Blackbird is coming out in a little more than five months and I’ve got a ton of work to do on its behalf. Right now I’m sweating out a blurb-request letter, and after that I’ll be making the rounds with my ARCs, trying to convince some hapless bookstore owners to let me crash their party. (I’ve got wine and cupcakes…anyone?) Of course this is not my favorite part of the writing gig, but I have to say it’s a lot easier when the book you’re pu...

Olive

Why don’t I believe it when people tell me a book is great? Does anyone else have this problem?

Unlovely

I’ve been thinking about beauty. Physical beauty, that is. The kind that other beholders bestow upon us or that we claim for ourselves, and what it means to be a woman in our culture when physical beauty is altogether absent. The protagonist I’m writing is alone and unlovely, lost in a world of images the way Vivian Maier must have been in her attic bedroom after a day of caring for another woman’s children. I wouldn’t have been able to write about this character twenty or even ten years ago—...

Doorstep

I guess it’s time to start writing this thing. I could probably do some research, add to my playlist, and get more detailed with my outline, but all of that is just procrastination and nerves. I always imagine the first page as the moment when you arrive alone at a party and pause outside the door, smoothing your skirt, twisting the strap of your purse or bra or fidgeting with the back of your shoe because what you really want is to turn around and run back home to where your slippers are wai...

Something Good

(comments off)

Ventriloquism

Eleven peevish peeves:

People who ask a question so they can answer it themselves.
And interrupt you to do so.
And, hearing that they’ve interrupted, carry on talking louder and louder so that your (admittedly cartoonish) voice gets trampled underfoot.
And don’t provide a lull.
Or apologize.
But instead expect you to follow the conversation in this new direction, even though you had something (which suddenly seems crucially important) to say back at number one.
And this goes on for a while, and your...

Dot

Do you ever wake up in the morning thinking, I wish? And the wish is an unformed thing: a screw in the throat, a wash of static in the head, straightjacketed inertia as though the stillness itself is what’s keeping you still. You badly want to complete the sentence: I wish, I wish… What? What precise little check mark can you add to the list of things that are you? And why would it matter? If time is a flat circle, spherical only when we’re living inside it, then so is the self. That rounded...