The Next Big Thing
I’ve been invited to participate in an online literary-blog feature called MY NEXT BIG THING, thanks to my friend and fellow member of Beyond the Margins and Fiction Co-op Juliette Fay (THE SHORTEST WAY HOME, DEEP DOWN TRUE, SHELTER ME).
This rolling feature is a set of the same 10 questions about a writer’s work-in-progress, giving readers a glimpse into the working life of a writer, and hopefully, books eventually making their way to bookstores. Part of the fun is tagging someone else. It is with great delight that I’m tagging Megan Mayhew Begman, Julia Fierro and Joe Wallace at the end of this post.
And here it is:
What is the working title of your book?
THROW A ROCK IN MOSCOW
Where did the idea come from for the book?
Back in 1989 I traveled to Russia with the Soviet organization Intourist, and saw what an arbitrary, dangerous thing group tourism can be in an unstable nation. I wanted to combine that setting with an idea that’s intrigued me for a long time: whether a mother would recognize her own child if it had been taken from her in infancy.
What genre does your book fall under?
General-literary-commercial-women’s fiction, or whatever mashup this category will be called in the near future.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
I have absolutely no idea. I was asked this about my first novel, and I never was able to answer.
For this book, my way of envisioning the characters has entirely different, very visual. When I was deciding who they’d be and what traits they’d have, I wanted to physically see them. So I Googled search terms under images — say, “Russian cab driver,” “Armenian woman,” or, “half-Vietnamese man” (which turned up some disturbing photos of people missing half their bodies). On the scrolling thumbnails of images that came up, some faces that matched the way I imagined my characters jumped out at me with shocking clarity. I made a collage of them, and I use as a screensaver.
What is a one-sentence synopsis of your book?
THROW A ROCK IN MOSCOW is about a maternal hunch that drives a persistent and perhaps delusional mother to the dangerous terrain of 1980s Russia, on a tour group that goes horribly wrong.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Well, it took 18 months to finish a draft of THE UNFINISHED WORK OF ELIZABETH D. And then about a million years of revision. I’d like to think this one is going faster because I’m letting myself write more freely, and not trying to make each sentence perfect as I go. But maybe that will mean two million years of revision.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
In terms of theme, structure and mood, probably AWAY by Amy Bloom, and THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS by Vanessa Diffenbaugh. Both of these great novels stuck with me, and influenced my approach.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I had wanted to write a book that took place in a transporting setting, and my background is in travel magazines. But because I have five young children I don’t really have the luxury of travel right now. One night about eight months ago I woke sweating from a nightmare about that trip I took to Russia, and how it could have gone much worse. I realized that I might not be free for globetrotting right now, but I’ve already had some rich experiences to tap into. And I kept pretty detailed travel journals and photo albums.
What else about your book might pique a reader’s interest?
If they like books about:
* The persistence of the human spirit, the determination to find what’s been loved and lost
* What it’s like to visit a tourism destination in a corrupt nation on the verge of collapse
* Whether it’s possible for humans to intuitively recognize their children, even if they’ve been missing since birth
* Stories revealed in snapshots from several points of view, sometimes out of chronological order.
When and how will it be published?
If I knew this I’d set my sights on horseraces and lottery numbers.
It is my honor to introduce you to the three writers to whom I’m passing the baton:
Megan Mayhew Bergman lives on a small farm in rural Vermont with her veterinarian husband and two daughters. Scribner published her collection of stories, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, and will publish her novel, Shepherd, Wolf. She is a Justice of the Peace and occasionally teaches literature at Bennington College.
Julia Fierro’s debut novel, CUTTING TEETH, about the complicated and often comical experience of modern parenting, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in the spring of 2014. An excerpt from the novel was recently published in Guernica Magazine.
Julia is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. She teaches the Post-MFA Writing Workshops at The Sackett Writers’ Workshop, which she founded in 2002. What started as eight writers meeting in Julia’s kitchen has grown into a creative home for over 1700 short-story writers, novelists, memoirists and essayists. Her blog can be found at http://juliafierro.com.
Joseph Wallace is the author of magazine articles on nature, science, and health; nonfiction books on baseball, dinosaurs, and Thomas Edison; a handful of noir short stories (including one, “Custom Sets,” that was included in Best American Short Stories 2010); and Diamond Ruby, a historical novel set in Brooklyn. Later this year, his itinerant writing career will continue with the arrival of Invasive Species (Berkley Books), a globe-hopping end-of-the-world thriller. Joe lives in New York, but it’s easier to find him on Twitter, Facebook, his website, or his writing group’s blog.
