The Crying Tree

[Naseem]

Let's talk about the story here--your questions, your reactions, your thoughts.

[Lori]

If I had to rank in order what is most important to me in a story, how I feel about and connect with the characters would be number one. I felt invested in the lives of your characters in The Crying Tree from the beginning. Could you share a bit about how you created them and how they evolved?

[Naseem]

Thank you Lori for your comment about feeling "invested in the lives" of the characters in The Crying Tree. You can not know how much that means to me. I too love character driven novels - but novels must also have a solid plot. For me, that means creating characters that fall into the plot in surprising yet plausible ways.

My process for creating characters is kind of like the process of painting. It takes layering. At first I have a vague idea. In The Crying Tree I wanted a rural family. I wanted them to be attached to place, to land and community. I wanted the mother, Irene Stanley, to be shattered by the loss of her son. That is all I knew when I started writing. But as I wrote, and re-wrote, the the sketch began to fill in: the food she would make for her family, the type of church she attended and how often, what her house looked like, her garden, her clothes, her eyes. Gradually, color began to fall into the story. I began to see fragments of backstory, the nuances of character that make them real to a reader.

The surprising character, for me, was Tab Mason, the Superintendent of the Oregon State Penitentiary. I did not plan his appearance in my story, yet he became absolutely integral to the entire book. His emergence came about 6 months into the writing process. I had developed a different point of contact for the prison - a Selma Orleans - who was the PR person for the Penitentiary. One day, while writing, Selma walked into her boss's office. It was an immaculate room, lit by the gray light of a window, and one incandescent lamp which sat on a beautiful mahogany desk. On the desk was a container of twelve perfectly sharpened pencils. Behind this desk and its needle sharp pencils sat a handsome african american man (think Denzel Washington) with a "cleanly shaved skull," and one "strangely almost grotesquely white hand."

I had no plans for this man. I had already written many chapters with Selma. But soon as I sat down and read what I had written, I knew - this was the character that would give me an executioner's point of view.

I guess what this says about my process is that planning does not necessarily lead me to characters. Only the act of writing leads me to characters. And that sometimes it takes one character to introduce me to another, even more important character.

[Lori]

Thank you for your thoughtful answer, Naseem. I found the explanation about Tab's development very interesting.

[[deleted user]]

I absolutely love the cover and its connection with the book. How did you narrow your choice to that perfect moment? Eileen

[Naseem]

I didn't. The truth about my cover is that I had very little say so. The cover you like - the boy with the trumpet, was actually a second choice by Broadway Books. They had preferred a different cover, but the marketing people had problems with it. Thus, trumpet boy was born. I was surprised by it, given the title of the book, I had always thought there would be a tree on the cover. But I was basically told by my agent that unless I had HUGE issues with the cover my publishing team chose, then it was not worth fighting about.

The title also was something that was changed by my publisher. My original title was Resting Place. Which they thought (quite rightly) was too quiet. They wanted an enigmatic image from the book, so I suggested The Crying Tree - an image that comes up quite early in the story.

The cover and title together were created by my publisher to do one thing - trip people's curiosity. They wanted people to wonder what a little boy with a trumpet had to do with a crying tree.

These are things I had never considered - which is why I am not in marketing. Basically the lesson is, hope you have a good team working for you and then trust that they know what they are doing....

[[deleted user]]

Thanks for the information. I am glad to see that the publishing team made good decisions. I would never have guessed that you hadn't selected the title from the beginning! It's perfect!