Sacred Cheese of Life

Oh boy, I keep seeing people wish they could write novels but don’t know how, or where to start, or what to do, so here’s some advice about that.

You do not need to know how to do this before you start. You need a person with a problem. And you need specificity: what that person is like, their skills and weaknesses, their particular situation, plus the geographical location and things like time of year.

Then go ahead and go buck wild. Tell a story. They want to do this thing or solve the problem or find the answer or whatever it might be. Good! Take STEP ONE. Then take step two. What happens? Do it one step at a time. Listen to yourself. Is there a random mycologist in the forest? He turns out to be important later, so if he shows up, write him in!

Also, if you’re writing about a real place, like Eustis, Maine, the place in Landslide whose name I can never remember, then GO THERE. Reality is so much richer than your imagination.

Otherwise, get okay with making mistakes, being bad at things, and making a great big mess. It’s not just okay, it’s essential. You’re not writing a novel but a DRAFT. It does not need to be perfect. It can’t be perfect. You’re making the material now you will turn into a book later on.

Follow the story! Be there! Notice what things are really like! You’ve got this!

Sacred cheese of life!

This week I get into the strange linear narrative of Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path,” not in the sort of high school New Critical way of x symbolizes y, but in the sense of episodic versus serial narrative structure.

It’s a very strange story in a lot of ways because we have no idea where Phoenix Jackson is going or why she’s going there. And in fact when she arrives, she doesn’t know either. This story subverts narrative so thoroughly it’s almost like Tom Stoppard. Ooh, we should talk about R&G Are Dead at some point. And stories told from the other side in general.

I discuss what makes us get and stay interested in a story with NO PLOT and see how I can apply that to other writing. Normally we assume the plot is what makes us stick around, but it sure isn’t in this case, since we don’t know what it could even be.

Still one of my favorite stories, even if (or because) it’s so strange and in some ways baffling.

I look into Connie Willis's time travel novel Doomsday Book with suspension of disbelief toward the omniscient time travel machine that somehow knows whether there’s a contagion in the past that present people are immune to (seriously, come on) because it’s phenomenal ANYWAY. Amazing characters, a tight and complex plot, a pandemic before our real one happened, and a lot of questions about hope, despair, and whether we can change a single thing.

I also talk about my novel The Nerve that I published this week—so much fun, that book—and the great progress on the draft of Forty Days and Forty Nights, which is giving me flashback conniptions and making me really happy.

End of year chair summary! Twinkly lights! Did I get anthrax from my Federal era sofa? Unlikely!

Happy liminal spacemas, couches!

I talk about story vs plot with frequent reference to Hart Hanson’s novel The Seminarian since I read it yesterday and it’s extremely good.

Also: the book fair, the 1800s sofa that made me feel like I was in fiction and dislocated my shoulder, finishing 40/40 one day soon we hope, what stories we tell without meaning to, and more.

This week I read Meg Cabot's delightful epistolary novel The Boy Next Door (it's entirely email) and discuss what makes modern epistolary different from the pen and paper days.

I also finished that Summerlands novel draft (loud cheers) so published a collection of short stories, planned how to complete a book called 40/40, and started prepping another novel for publication. I can stop any time I want.

Come see me at the Bangor Authors’ Book Fair or whatever Saturday December 14th at the Bangor Public Library!

The show Agents of SHIELD is all about identity, to the point where once you notice it, it’s absolutely pervasive through every bit of the series.

Other topics include Thanksgiving dinner, yachts, upholstering all the things, and all the ways that identity gives and takes.

Sacred cheese of life!

This week I read Myla Goldberg’s novel The False Friend, about a woman who questions and investigates her memory of the day her best friend disappeared forever when they were eleven.

 I adore this book. I mean, it’s painful to read, but it’s amazing and a psychological puzzle. The ending of it knocked me sideways and I’ve read it multiple times before. The two girls are abusive toward another girl who wants to be their friend, so the guilt of that and the memory of being so terrible complicates the main character’s survival guilt. The ending makes your hair stand on end, though.

I’m fascinated by The False Friend because the main character, Celia, never lets herself off the hook for her abusive behavior, which I appreciated. But also her family and friends point out that she never acted that way before her friend came into her life or after her friend was gone. What makes people behave so cruelly to others? What makes people bad friends? I might use different reasons in my own work, but this book gave me excellent ideas.

Other texts mentioned: Hamlet, Howl’s Moving Castle, Pumpkinheads, Mean Girls, and the true story of abducted child Johnny Gosch, who I sincerely believe visited his mom and is alive and well to this day.

Also mentioned: my friend Sumara’s excellent voice acting website, where you can hear a piece of one of my novels read in her lovely voice. Go to sumarameers.com then click portfolio and scroll down to the audiobooks. It’s the first recording, the last entry in that audio file, about the god Apollo. AMAZING.

Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name Verity uses the epistolary form to tell a devastating story about two friends in WWII. I look at the way storytelling within the frame of the story uses lies, mistakes, and deceit to create an incredibly layered narrative. Read the book before you listen because you only get once unspoiled and it is worth it to go in unaware. MANY SPOILERS. ALL THE SPOILERS.

I talk a lot about C.J. Cherryh’s novel Hammerfall and the mind-blowing thing she does whereby her character discovers the world is so much bigger and more complex than he ever could have imagined, over and over and over.

Other texts that do a similar wonderful thing include: Laini Taylor’s Strange the Dreamer and A Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. To a certain extent, Lord of the Rings also does this, I realized, to my surprise.

There’s a lot of discussion of how this bigger world functions in literature but also in life. I see it happen a lot with students, who think they know, then discover they didn’t know, then find out they have no idea what’s the truth, then find themselves leveling up to encompass knowledge they had no scope for earlier. It’s truly glorious to witness this again and again.

There’s also an extended metaphor about this fancy desk I bought for cheap from a shed in the next county with no idea what I was getting, from a guy who didn’t know what he was selling. And Finland, which keeps showing up, doesn’t it? Let’s just move there. I like Finland. Nice pine trees. Nice lakes.

Wrapping my mind around the partitive case in Finnish this week is another example of something that I didn’t know I didn’t understand, thought I started to understand, realized I absolutely failed to understand it, then began to grasp it in ways I can’t quite articulate. Hurray!

Sacred cheese of life!

Rainbow Rowell’s novel Fangirl is one of my all time favorites. It shares some traits on paper with the book I’m wrestling with now, Summerlands, except Fangirl does so many things right that mine doesn’t…yet.