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message 51:
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Brian
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Aug 15, 2016 09:22AM
It's a super neat way to do this, for sure. I, for one, am grateful that you don't all have to suffer through me stammering through my responses to your excellent questions. ;)
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I missed so much while I was at work!
Brian, not to steer the conversation away from this particular book but I am really curious, since they are each so different from one another... what types of books, or genres, do you personally prefer to read?
Hi Brian, I really enjoyed your book! To me it was Mark Twain meets Mad Max story found in the book of Revelations. Does that make sense to you and what are your thoughts?
I also felt the story was of a man wanting to get back to his son, caught between the war of man on man and a separate war of nature on man. It seems there were multiple themes going, was that the case,or am I reading (LOL) too much into just a simple work of great storytelling?
Hey Lori,I'm pretty omnivorous in my reading, or at least I like to think I am. I like a lot of nonfiction; some of my favorite books of the past 20 years have been history books (Bloodlands, The Scramble for Africa, King Leopold's Ghost), and a couple of them are more like history of science (The Song of the Dodo). I love great essays and essay collections.
In the realm of fiction, I now have a reading list three miles long that I will never quite catch up on. I like some impossibly snooty stuff a lot, and I like a lot of pulp, and I like good graphic novels a ton (Charles Burns's Black Hole is one of my favorite books, period). Octavia Butler is the last author I read who honestly and truly blew my mind, and when I read Henry Dumas's short stories more recently, I wondered what the hell took me so long to find him.
About the only thing I don't tend to get into, actually, are books that in the past I've facetiously called "four upper-middle-class people have an interesting week," though even then there are enough exceptions that I've learned not to be categorical about even that. I'm a big believer in the "right place, right time" school of thought, which holds that your favorite books are the ones that you came across at exactly the point where you needed them. So I've learned that if I don't connect with a book right away, it might just be a question of putting it down and picking it up later. Who knows?
What about all of you?
Deanna, that sounds about right to me! I have to say, it was pretty intimidating writing a river novel, given that Heart of Darkness and Huckleberry Finn already exist. Those books are amazing. I'm glad writing books isn't a contest.And yes, I certainly tried to have multiple themes going all the time. It's one of the things that makes me excited to write books, trying to juggle lots of stuff at once. Though there are certainly pros and cons to this approach, which we can talk about if y'all are into it.
This is the first book of yours that I have read. I love your descriptive writing style and while reading I felt it was lyrical. I experienced the words more than just let them drive me to the next climax in the plot. It is interesting, to me, to hear about your musical influences ( I had no idea until you talked about them here) I am wondering what other influences and inspirations you have for your books. I would also like to thank you for your honest, thoughtful conversation here. I have participated in a few author discussions before but for some reason I you are more a part of this discussion than others. I appreciate that and am finding your responses very interesting.
I agree with Diane. Your responses are detailed and interesting to read, I wish I had already read your other books so I could discuss them. Maybe we will have that chance.
I would love to delve into the pros and cons, the more I think on this book, the more I find, like the supernatural aspect of the visions, and the almost confession like way the narrator tells the stories
Thanks so much, Diane and Chris.Re: influences: I'm a musician by night, and it definitely affects the way I write. I sometimes joke that I write fiction because I'm a failed composer. I make a lot of word choices based on the sounds and rhythms of them. I almost can't help it; it's too much fun to make a sentence that has a beat—especially the beats that I hear in the ways other people speak. There are also, of course (like everyone, I suppose), dozens of books and movies that had a pretty formative effect on me when I was still figuring out just how I wanted to try to go about writing anything.
But in the end, the biggest inspiration for writing is just real life. I'm so grateful to music and now to journalism because they take me places I would otherwise never go to. I get to see and do things I might not otherwise see and do. And most important, I meet people I would otherwise never meet, and their lives are much more interesting to me than my own is. All of that stuff, the raw material of life, comes out in the books, in some form or another. In some ways, the narrator's mission of preservation is my own, though—perhaps because I myself am not living through an apocalyptic time—I don't share his desperation. The celebration, though, yes.
Deanna, sure! At least as far as I've gotten in thinking about it, the pros and cons of writing books that are more complicated, that juggle lots of elements at once, boil down to a question of risk vs. reward. I've found my books to be challenging to write, but also really interesting and often fun because of that (though I hesitate to describe writing Lost Everything as "fun"; more "satisfying"). They're more work than they would be if I kept things simple, and sometimes it doesn't pay off. I have actually gotten about 200 pages into a book only to realize that the payoff isn't worth it, even to me, and I've just thrown it all out.At the same time, kind of like with cooking, putting more things in the stew allows for flavors you can't get otherwise. There are definitely parts of each book I've finished (and managed to get published) where I think, "if I didn't have a bunch of these elements in play, I wouldn't have been able to get here." And to me, it makes it worth the work, to produce something I couldn't have produced otherwise.
That same risk-reward applies to readers, too. As a reader, I often like complicated books—but only if I feel that what I got out of the book was worth the work I put into it. Many books, of course, pass this bar with flying colors, and become among my favorite books. But some don't. I've found that to be true among the people who've read my books, too, and that's as it should be. Some people really love my books. Other people think they're BS from the word go, or that the payoff just isn't worth the work they put into it. I'd be lying if I said I didn't expect this sort of reaction, and it's one I'm comfortable with.
But if I were trying to make a living writing books, as opposed to just trying to write the best books I can that I wanted to see in the world, it would be a pretty risky strategy, to say the least.
Okay, I went to your webpage - mostly to check out your other books. I don't know how I got to it, but I am now engrossed with reading "Imagining the Next No more said on that. Back to Lost Everything.The communication loss seems to be the core complaint/problem. The characters in the book seemed to suffer most from not knowing what was coming, what happened, what should they do. I believe there would be a lot of the suicides. I think the children would handle it better then the adults. Sometimes I think that we are raising children that are so dependent on the world and not able to care for themselves in case of "change". Maybe a change would be Found Eveything. Sunny Jim, and most of the others found themselves. Some found our how weak they were, others found a reason to go on.
Also, I just saw a clip on modern architecture that said because of the heating caused by cement that there is a push to use more wood in new building. A new multi-level building is going up in , I believe, Oregon. I am not sure ridding the planet of trees will help cool it down.
Enough of my rambling.
I'm replying to Brian's message 54:I have to agree with your "right place, right time" philosophy. It literally took me 40 years to get into Moby Dick, but finally I was able to see what all the fuss was about! Having said that, Lost Everything resonated with my (our?) concerns at the moment--about the weirder-even-than-usual dichotomy in politics today and about our seeming refusal to address global warming.
Brian, As I think back on the book I know it will stick with me because of the simplicity and complexity of the story. The book can be as simple or complex as the reader wants it to be,so I hope that in part that was your intent, because I like the fact I can chew on this character or that character and find new meaning, at least for me, every time I reflect back. :)
Hey Chris,Found Everything! I like it. I like what you're saying about kids, too. Here in New Haven, we had two 100-year storms in the past decade, and it freaks out the adults a little. My 9-year-old son, however, just thinks of them as normal. You know, sometimes we get hurricanes. That's all. Most of all, he remembers the neighborhood party we had at our house after the first one, because somehow among our friends we still had power, and everyone came over with all their food that was going bad and we ate ourselves silly. I think my son is better equipped to handle an uncertain future than I am. Though I do catch myself quietly preparing him for that uncertain future. Not in a scary way (I hope). But I find that a lot of my answers to him when he asks about things in the future are "who knows?"
Rosemarie, I had the same experience with Moby Dick, a book I thought was just OK until, apparently, I was ready. Now it's one of my favorite books ever. Someday when I have the outlet to do so, I'd like to write a short essay on how Moby Dick is sort of the first Big Weird American Novel, setting the tone for a lot of weird American novels that followed it. But also, there are parts of that book that still read as pretty cutting-edge to me. Melville was on fire with that one, and he's still kind of out ahead of us.
Deanna, I've found in you a most generous and thoughtful reader (and yes, that was definitely my intent). Thank you!
Mod
I gotta tell you, I really loved the slowness of it all. The pacing, the language, the languidity of the characters just suffocated me in such an amazing way.
Hey Lori,I'm into this reading of it. I had pinned the Big One to the climate, but in the earliest draft of the book, it wasn't even a storm. It was just stuff disappearing (kind of like the Nothing in the Neverending Story), with the added complication that words themselves failed when attempting to address it, so no one could talk about it. Needless to say, this is one idea that didn't survive subsequent drafts (which I'm glad for), but I think it's all still opaque enough to leave the origins of the storm very much open to interpretation. Especially because, like Chris pointed out, communication loss is a major issue. The only news people in the book can get is local, which was a really nice constraint for me when writing it, but also has its downsides when it comes to, you know, answering questions for the reader. That was something we wrestled with a lot in editing, finding the balance between giving enough information and preserving the book's vibe, and there are certainly a lot of ways that could have gone, the existing book being just one of them.
Just got back from my Great Books bookclub. We read an article called What is an Author. Apparently prior to 1969 it was the authors responsibility to guide the reader to a forgone conclusion and afterwords it was the reader was responsible for the ending or conclusion of a writing. I guess I would say I like the newer way and sometimes I like the previous way sometimes. It seems you decided on the newer way. For this story I think that works best. Basically the future is not assured and not knowable, so any conclusion would be difficult to create. Hope I did not get to off subject. But it was interesting to me to compare this book to the short story- which was actually a speech .
Interesting, Chris! Why did the article set the date for that shift at 1969? What happened that year to change things?
Interesting to me, too, Chris and Brian. So authors offered closure vs. setting the stage for an unknown subject to readers' imagination?A book with a too-tidy ending used to be called a penny dreadful. Or Love Story. Or romance literature.
One important thing in Brian's book, I think, is that the characters survived events in ways that changed their possible future outcomes (economists would call that their "option set.") So even when every indication is that things are hopeless, they dig in their heels in ways that are very human.
I'll try to find and read What is an Author.
Mod
I also really enjoy books that start the reader in the midst of something that is already taking place. Because there's no tidy starting point, we are left also looking backwards, trying to decide for ourselves what took place before to get us, and the characters, to the now. (immediately, The Road and The Country of Ice Cream Star come to mind as books that do this well). It's like the author is telling the reader, what came before doesn't matter nearly as much as what I'm working the characters through RIGHT NOW.
And for me, the holy grail of literature is a book that can pull of both. An ambiguous beginning with an ambiguous ending and a whole lot of awesome or horrible or horribly awesome things happening in between!
The author of What Is An Author is Michel Foucailt. I got the 1969 from a group member who kindly dissected the article. It is not an easy read. Since it was actually a speech, I believe that is why it is difficult to read. But it really is interesting. Never read anything about what an author should be or thought process before. I am finding it now easier to read after the discussion. Anyway. Good luck and let me know what you think. I cannot find where the date comes out in the speech, however I did find the speech was given in 1969. Lori, I agree with you. Life very rarely ties up tidy. For me , if it is tidy, then I always feel the author just wanted to end the story. Looking back at books I liked they almost always left me thinking and wondering what would come later.
Oh! Yeah, Foucault. This is me dusting off my undergrad degree in English, so forgive my fuzzy memory, but there's a similar idea in Roland Barthes's essay "The Death of the Author," from 1967, which basically argues that authors' biographical details or opinions of their own books and what they mean are pretty much irrelevant. The title playfully suggests that the author "dies" as soon as the text is out in the world—as in, nobody needs to pay attention to what the author says, and readers are free to interpret a text however they want. Barthes wrote it to push back against the then-current mode of looking to the author's biography or commentary as a means of understanding and evaluating a book. This Wikipedia entry actually does a fine job of summarizing the thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dea...
For what it's worth, I totally agree with Barthes and Foucault on this—who cares about my opinions of my own books?—which is part of what is making this very experience of being a guest in a book club an interesting and contradictory exercise. It's like:
Me: Let me tell you—
Barthes: Shut up! You're supposed to be dead!
Me: ... okay but let me tell you—
Barthes: I said shush!
Me: Wait, aren't *you* supposed to be dead, too? And for that matter, aren't you actually dead?
Barthes: ...
Me: ...
Barthes: Whatever. Be quiet.
We read this along with a poem called To the Memory of My Beloved, the author Mr. William Shakespeare and What he Hath Left Us by Ben Johnson. Just in case you want the whole experience.
Lori, I'm with you on that Holy Grail idea—I love books where you feel like you've been thrown right in the deep end, that everything's already going on by the time you get there, and is still going on when you leave.I think of A Suitable Boy, an enormous doorstop of a book that is, on one level, about a girl trying to decide who to marry, and on another, about all of India in all its complexity not long after independence. It is soooo long, and yet, I remember it as page for page one of the most pleasurable reads I've ever had, because it is so immersive. And it has a great ending/not an ending.
I seem to be reading a lot of dystopian novels as of late, and am finding it a little odd that it is becoming so much a part of the zeitgeist that people actually know the term dystopian these days. I wonder if it is a result of our politics and the rising awareness of existential threats that is manifesting itself in our literature. I read a lot about water wars and cultures destroyed by terrorist groups before we started to actually have those scenarios play out on the nightly news. I am very much enjoying the geography, seeing well known places through the lens of a post-apocalyptic future. Whenever I ride the train that runs from Philly to Pittsburgh and back again I see Three Mile Island and think about how easily and swiftly the world can change. The cooling towers as giant planters burgeoning with new and unforeseen life is an image that sticks with me, life in a place where we often fear death. My husband's relatives live on a farm near the nuclear power plant in Painesville, OH, and we sit in the evenings looking out over the farm, the duck pond, the crops, some trees and flowers, and the cooling towers. It is just so diametrically opposed it makes my brain hurt sometimes, watching my daughter chase after the ducks with the power plant looming over it all.
I like the way you have told the story, it seems to fit with the story itself.
Hi Brian - Thanks very much for joining us to discuss your beautifully crafted novel! I am a bit late to the party so I am very sorry if this is a redundant question, I am very curious what your process was to actually write the novel after all of your trips and research. How long did it take to finish and where do you like to write? Thanks again!
Hi Kim and Kelly! Thanks so much for the kind words. Kim, I definitely have the same kinds of thoughts. What often hit me, especially in doing my tour of the Susquehanna itself, is how little I had to change. I took some liberties, and changed some things, for sure. But often I found I could almost just report what I saw; so often I found that juxtaposition of one form of life taking over and another one receding, and it very much made its way into the DNA of the book.Kelly, as to when I actually did the writing—I've never been a full-time writer; I've always had a job. When I started Lost Everything, I was also the primary caregiver for my kid, who was then just a baby. My wife was working full-time and I was juggling freelance work and parenting. So this entire book was written first in longhand, always between the hours of midnight and about three in the morning. I had taken all these pictures and notes while I was there, but in the end I realized I remembered what I wanted to use without having to look at them very much. I didn't have an outline, either; just a map of the Susquehanna and surrounding areas with the names of the towns, and all I did was follow it up. I did always sort of know that Sunny Jim would reach the house, and that Merry and Aaron would still be there. And I knew a lot of the Sunny Jim-Merry backstory. But that was all I knew; I didn't know how Jim would get there, or if anyone would get there with him, or what would happen to the soldiers following him, or what would happen to anyone on the Carthage—something that was actually kind of invented on the spot when I reached that part of the book. It was all just a step-by-step process of moving north until I got to the end, doing what seemed right by the "logic" of the book.
Between the time of day and the fact that I was getting very, very little sleep generally, my recollection of actually writing the book is a big haze. My clearest memory is of finishing it when I happened to be visiting my parents, and suddenly realizing that the ending had sneaked up on me; not only could I not believe I was done, but I couldn't remember having written the final third of the book. I flipped back through the notebook, and hey, there it all was.
Granted, the downside of writing with no outline is that the first draft needed a lot of editing, and it went through several drafts after I passed it around to a couple friends, my agent, and my editor. Every draft was an improvement; every draft sort of dragged it a little further into the light. But I also saw something in the way it was written, a weirdness in the tone, that I wanted to preserve, and the tone set the pace for everything that followed.
That whole process took a couple years, but it wasn't steady work. Life often intervened in one way or another. Probably if I'd had no other obligations, it'd be done in several months. But on the other hand, I think it would have been a different book.
As for the place I like to write—it's actually pretty much anywhere. I don't have an office; I just write wherever's fairly comfortable, on the porch in the summer and at a table somewhere in the house in the winter. Sometimes I write in bed. Most of my first book was written on public transportation because that was when I had enforced downtime to do pretty much nothing else. It doesn't even need to be all that quiet. The only real condition is that I have to be alone, or among a bunch of strangers. For some reason writing with someone else I know in the room is weird and I don't do it. But who knows? Maybe that will change.
Just wanted to say thank you for the detailed answers. One of my favorite discussions! Now get back to writing. I want more!
Mod
What's left unsaid? What else would you like to know?
While we wait for those to come in, Brian, I wanted to extend a big ole thank you! You were an awesome guest this week and I can't tell you how thrilled I am that both you and your publisher found us worthy of a little love.
It was really cool for me to see your responses to some of the questions! I am so appreciative of your time!
Lori, it was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on the Next Best Book Blog, and thanks to all of you for reading so thoughtfully and generously. This was a lot of fun.
Thank you Brian - I truly enjoyed the discussion here with you.
