Writing a Novel

Posted on 1 August 2009 by Marc Archambault

When I first began writing fiction, I wrote short stories. I never considered the possibility of a novel. I reasoned if I could learn to write a decent short story I would at least have the technical writing skills for a novel. While that reasoning was valid, it was a little naïve.

Writing a short story is like building a bookcase or a simple piece of furniture. You can build the basic framework in a weekend’s worth of work. Subsequently, what you do to finish the work can be as simple as sanding and finishing or as intricate as carving inlays, adding handmade knobs, making drawers with handcut dovetails, or applying multiple layers of color and finish.

To stay with the building analogy, writing a novel is more like building a house. Not only does it require multiple kinds of skill: masonry, framing, roofing, finish carpentry. It also requires perseverance: day after day, week after week of unending work. Years ago, I built a house and when the foundation and framing were complete, the shingles and siding were on, the doors and windows in, my wife said to me, “Oh good. It’s almost done. In reality, it was only half finished even though it looked complete from the outside. A novel can be like that. You get the basic framework in place, you know your characters. If you have single or multiple plot lines, you know how they fit together. Yet, there are scenes upon scenes of detail to be fleshed out with detail. It is, like the house, a project which can have no end.

With a house, once you start it, you know it has to be finished. Unless you have unlimited funds, there are simply too many financial considerations and consequences to leaving it unfinished. The completion of the novel for a beginning writer with no contract or deadline has no similar consequences. You can put it away for long stretches of time; move on to other projects.

I’m not quite there yet. Not quite willing to make the time commitment it takes. But I’m working on it. Somehow, I know that discipline of writing every day, of getting to the end of something big will be a stepping stone.

Loose in the World

Posted on 8 July 2009 by Marc Archambault

It’s Mother’s Day as I’m writing this. Mothers, among other things, are nurturers and caregivers – women who give life to their children, shepherd them through childhood, then send them out into the world

Our stories are a little like that. We create them, work and rework their language and content, then send them out into the world, hoping they will have an impact, that readers will find them. But when do we let them go? When is it time?

The Jan/Feb 2009 issue of Poets & Writers had a wonderful article about a writer named Beverly Jensen who wrote stories for sixteen years, working them over and over during that period but never submitting them to any publication. She contracted pancreatic cancer and died at a relatively young age. Her husband, Jay Silverman, got many of them published following her death. They were good stories.

There’s something pure about writing only for yourself. To spend years working at your craft with little or no acknowledgement. And yet, the good mother knows when it’s time, when she has done all she can do and her children have to make their own way in the world.

There have been many artists throughout history who have been unrecognized during their lifetimes. And undoubtedly many more, who were never known outside of a small circle and never celebrated for their genius. How many times have we heard a song from an unknown singer, picked up an old paperback from a stack in a used bookstore, seen a canvas in a rack at an art store and understood intuitively that here was undiscovered talent, here was creativity that should have had a wider audience.

I’m glad Beverly Jensen’s husband loved and believed in her stories enough to do what she herself could no longer do. But it makes me wonder how many stories, how many songs, how many poems are feathered away in obscurity because their mothers didn’t have quite enough confidence or push to set them loose in the world. It’s the first step, even if the journey may be short.

The Pros & Cons of Writing Contests, With Apologies to Stuart Smalley

Posted on 8 April 2009 by Marc Archambault

It’s tax time, time to give my accountant a list of expenses incurred in connection with my so-far-not-profitable business as a writer. One category of deductions is entry fees for writing contests, and I’ve been pondering the deep question of whether writing contests are worth the money and aggravation they entail. If I look just at the money, dollars spent entering (several) and dollars won (a few), contests probably aren’t worth it. But if I consider the money I spend entering contests to be similar to the money I might budget for a trip to Vegas or Atlantic City, it makes sense to keep entering–I know I’m going to lose the money itself, but what I’m purchasing is the hours of entertainment I’ll get from playing the slot machines and black jack tables.
Here are some of the things writing contests have done for me, besides every decade or so earning me some money. I’ve had four short stories published as a result of contests. I’ve made the finals or semi-finals in some novel contests that I could brag about in the query letter I send to agents. I’ve gotten my name in the paper, which marketing experts say is a good thing for budding writers to try to do. Perhaps most importantly, placing in a contest, even if I don’t win the grand prize, is validation that I’m producing good work, and that I shouldn’t give up–that I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.
Recently, my novel, Solace Fork, made the quarter-finals (top 500) of the Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel contest. I’ve heard people criticize this contest for being too much like American Idol and for trying to channel wannabe authors toward Amazon’s print-on-demand division, but I think it’s a good contest. For one thing, it was free to enter. Also, quarterfinalists got two “editorial reviews” of their work from people who review lots of books for Amazon, and mine were generally positive, so that was a nice perk. And whether I proceed any further, I get a review by Publisher’s Weekly, which I assume I can put on the back of my book cover if I end up self-publishing, with ellipses replacing any unflattering parts. So I’m happy. And if I do proceed to the semi-finals (top 100), it will be one more thing I can put in my agent query letter.
I’m talking to the members of the Flatiron Writers about our group sponsoring a short fiction contest, with an actual monetary prize. We have to work out the particulars, like, how many stories can we realistically read, what kind of prize can we afford to offer, what “celebrity” writer can we convince to be the final judge, and things like that, but I think it would be great. Keep watching our website for details. You may be our winner.
Copyright 2009 by Heather Newton

The Black Path by Åsa Larsson

Posted on 2 March 2009 by Marc Archambault

Translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy

A book synopsis on the back or inside cover is there to entice the reader inside, to titillate and excite. That enticement for The Black Path, Åsa Larsson’s latest murder/mystery describes the tale of a beautiful young unknown woman whose tortured body is found in an ice-house on a lake in the north of Sweden. The truth of the story and its telling is far more interesting.
Larsson does an excellent job of creating and defining her characters, both protagonists and antagonists alike, and it is the actions of those characters that lead to the events that precipitate the murder and mayhem. The characters are what make this novel literature and far more than a standard whodunit.

The novel has the feel of Thorton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey where five unrelated travelers die on a collapsed bridge and a monk who sees the disaster traces the lives of those five people and how they were destined to be on that bridge. In Larsson’s capable hands, she shows us her collection of characters: the Swedish industrialist from a deprived and loveless childhood, a semi-incestuous upper-crust brother and sister, a lawyer back to the wars after suffering a nervous breakdown, a detective, a mother of three, with a ruthless streak, and perhaps most interesting, a young artist who defines her Black Path as a run over complicated terrain made over and over, blindfolded, until it is letter perfect.

The gathering of these story threads at the confrontational ending has more of the characteristics of a thriller than a murder/mystery, yet it manages to be both surprising and consistent with the story. The untidy lives of the major characters leaves a plethora of loose ends yet the rough justice of the novel is completely satisfying.

This is a modern novel in every sense of the word: multiple story lines, multiple points of view, tense shifts. For a reader there is only a single question: does it work? The answer is a resounding Yes. This is another piece of writing that reminds us that there is a body of fine literature to be found outside of our own boundaries.

The Black Path is the third book in a series by Larsson. He first novel, Sun Storm, won Sweden’s Best First Crime Novel award and The Blood Spilt was awarded Sweden’s Best Crime Novel prize.

Sorry by Gail Jones

Posted on 24 February 2009 by Marc Archambault

Gail Jones is a professor of literature, cinema and cultural studies at the University of Western Australia and those disciplines play a prominent role in her latest novel Sorry. The novel centers around the childhood of Perdita Keene whose dysfunctional English parents have come to the Australian backcountry where she is born. Her father has a job as an anthropologist which keeps him gone for long periods of time, while her mother Stella, mentally unstable and never able to make the transition from a middle-class life in London to the Outback or from a single woman to a wife and mother, obsessively recites Shakespeare. Their life is a shack with a metal roof on the edge of a desert, its inside walls covered with newspaper clippings documenting the ongoing progress of WWII, stacks of books creating aisles of walking space, a single bed for the parents, a sleeping rug for the unwanted child.

Perdita discovers friendships with Billy, the deaf-mute son of a neighboring rancher and Mary, an aborigine girl who comes to live with them and care for her increasingly depressed mother. Though Perdita can’t escape the fractured learning from Stella’s half-mad recitations, it is Mary who pulls Deeta into the sensory real world—of the desert, and the wandering heritage of the aborigines.

The murder of her father, seen through the gauzy filter of Perdita’s memory—the four of them there: Perdita, Mary, Billy and Stella—destroys the balance of her life in the backcountry. Mary confesses to the murder, is taken off to a juvenile detention facility; and Perdita and Stella move to the town of Broome.

But these are only the external outlines. This is the story of a childhood, told from many interspersed points of view: the first person adult Perdita, the child Perdita, and a third person narrator. As a reader, the book has the feeling of a series of movie scenes, of constantly shifting camera angles and focus. Those changes happen in front of your eyes, yet your consciousness remains firmly fixed on the story surrounding Perdita’s childhood.

If that weren’t interesting enough, following her father’s murder, Perdita develops a speech impediment, where she is unable to express herself in language. The story moves into a kind of one-sided dialog and into the realm of an almost silent movie. But it continues without losing a beat, going underground into Perdita’s internal observation of her condition.

In her masterful poetic language Jones translates the universal experience of the Australian Sorry Day, the government’s apology to the indigenous peoples of their country for past mistreatments and relocations, into Perdita’s final wrenching experience of her childhood—the single unsaid word that is the book’s title.
This is literature worthy of any must-reads list.

The Serial Killer’s Daughter, by Pat Riviere-Seel

Posted on 20 February 2009 by Marc Archambault

In 1978, Velma Barfield, of Robeson County, N.C., was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death for murdering Stuart Taylor, a man with whom she had a romantic relationship. She also confessed to the murder of her mother and two elderly people she worked for as a live-in nursing assistant. She did not admit to the murder of her first husband—the father of her two children—or of her second husband, but both bodies, when exhumed, were found to contain traces of arsenic. Velma Barfield was executed on November 2, 1984. She was fifty-three years old and the first female murderer executed in the United States since 1976. Surviving her were a daughter, a son, and three grandchildren.

This is not a sensational story about a discontented loner who goes off the rails and kills people. Nor does its protagonist have the perverse fascination of serial killers like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. Velma Barfield was an ordinary, fiftyish live-in nursing assistant—an ordinary, working-class woman of no discernible distinction, unless you knew her secrets. These secrets included an addiction to prescription drugs, for which she needed money, and the habit of leaving behind dead patients, including her mother, which is how she got the money. Surely, a woman like Velma is not the stuff of which poetry is made—yet that is exactly what Pat Riviere-Seel, a journalist-turned-poet, has done. She takes the common clay of Velma’s life and, using her reporter’s skills and poet’s sensibilities, explores the tragic fate of a daughter who has a serial killer for a mother.

The facts in the poems, Riviere-Seel tells us, are real, but the thoughts and voices expressed arise out of the artistry and, in this case, the bravery of the poet. And it is a brave poet who puts herself into the mind of Velma to find her voice, and into the heart of the daughter to find her anguish.

The story of Velma and her daughter, who is never named, is told in a series of twenty-seven short poems narrated by the poet, the daughter, Velma, and, in one poem, Velma’s fiancé (Stuart Taylor, of whose murder she was convicted) as he is dying of rat poisoning. Riviere-Seel first introduces us to the present life of the daughter as seen through the poet’s eye: “The serial killer’s daughter wears tight curls made of cypress roots/ and washes them in buttermilk from the moon.” In the next poem, the poet switches to her reporter’s eye to describe the rural North Carolina background, with its poverty and despair, that is the setting of the story. From there, she moves easily into the daughter’s voice with its revealing glimpses of her parents’ marriage and the prophetic words of her father: “That woman’s gonna kill me.” The poet then segues into Velma’s voice, dark and ominous: “…my life/ muddy, uncharted—swallows/ everything without warning.” We next hear the daughter after she has put together the pieces of the various deaths that follow her mother and says, despairingly: “…I know, Mama/ someone has to stop you.” The daughter’s voice is poignant when she remembers the mother who baked yeast rolls and sugar cookies and blackberry pies, and who watched her play basketball “fifth row behind the home bench.”

A little more than half of the poems deal with the arrest, confession, conviction, and execution of Velma. Following the conviction, the media spotlight moves in to follow the daughter all the way through the last appeal. For the poem, “In the Hours Before the Execution,” Riviere-Seel quotes Velma as she approaches her death: “When I go into that chamber at 2 a.m., it’s my gateway to heaven” and goes on to place herself in Velma’s cell. There the poet listens to the sounds of the cellblock as and waits with Velma for the final call.

The last poem comes full circle back to the daughter and allows her to conclude her own story. And although she has forged a new life, an anonymous life in an anonymous place, she will never leave the past behind.

The Serial Killer’s Daughter is highly recommended for its masterful story-telling and a powerful poetic achievement.

The book is available from the publisher (www.mainstreetrag.com/store). And be sure to check out Pat’s website: www.patriviereseel.com.
Copyright © 2009 Genève Bacon

Finding, No, Making Time to Write

Posted on 14 February 2009 by Marc Archambault

My mother (Suzanne Newton) is a writer, author of nine novels for young adults published by Westminster Press and Viking. Her first book came out in 1970 when I was six. My mother was thirty-four and had four children under the age of eleven, yet somehow she succeeded in doing something I still haven’t mastered. She knew how to claim her writing time.
My mom wrote in my parents’ bedroom, the only room with a window-unit air conditioner. She went in there every morning and stayed until lunch time, banging out prose on a manual Hermes typewriter that kept her fingers strong for piano-playing and opening pickle jars. From her room she could hear us playing outside, and come out if necessary, say, to wash our mouths out with soap for saying bad words like “pee pee head.” She rarely came out. This was the 1970s, before hover-craft parenting was the norm, and mothers could get away with raising children by means of benign neglect. My siblings and I pretty much ran wild. While we were roaming as far as we could pedal on our bikes, eating all the candy our allowance would purchase at the local mini-mart, bathing every other night and only occasionally washing our hair, my mom was writing.
I have been far less successful than my mom at claiming my writing time. I try to carve out Fridays from 8:30 to 2 to write, but far too often it doesn’t happen. For me, the issue isn’t “time thieves” like television, video games, Facebook (or writing blog pieces for the Flatiron writers!). If these were the problems I could drop them cold turkey. The three things that most often shove writing off my agenda are 1) my child, 2) my law practice, and 3) church work. These are all good things that are important and that sometimes legitimately demand that I give them priority. Sometimes, though, I let them claim more of me than I should.
I love my kid to distraction, and perhaps because my parents were so hands-off, I’ve made a conscious decision to parent differently, to show up at every game and performance, to notice what she’s up to, to make sure she bathes and brushes her hair! But my child wouldn’t suffer if I chauffeured her fewer places or supervised fewer play dates. Heck, she might like me to leave her alone a bit more.
And then there’s work. When I was young I had my palm read twice. One psychic told me I was going to be a lawyer, the other said I would be a cosmetologist. (They both told me I would have five children, but that’s another story). I sometimes think it would have been better if I had gone to beauty school. Cosmetology is a career that you can leave at the salon when you go home. Clients come in to get their hair cut and then leave–their cases don’t drag on for months and years, with crises on Fridays. In many ways my legal career has been very rewarding, but someone told me recently you have to devote 10,000 hours to something to become really good at it. The career I’ve chosen has definitely stood in the way of my accruing 10,000 hours as a writer.
Finally, church work. It’s one thing to say “no” to my child or to work obligations. It’s another to say “no” to God! I’m involved in my church because I love it, but in the last few years church work has become almost another part time job. I don’t mind the meetings (I’m Baptist, we do everything by committee and you would not believe the number of meetings) because they happen at night when I wouldn’t be writing anyway. What bumps my writing time is preparing to teach adult Sunday School every week. I can never seem to get it done before Friday, so on Fridays when I’m supposed to be writing fiction, quite often instead I’m preparing Sunday’s lesson. Right now I’m finishing up an eight-week teaching commitment, and I think I’m just going to have to say “no” to any more teaching for the rest of this year so I can make some headway on the short stories I’m supposed to be writing. Sorry, God!
I don’t blame anyone but myself when a week (or more) passes with no time spent writing. I believe fundamentally that people make time for the things they really care about. In addition to writing during the day while her urchin children roamed the neighborhood, I remember my mother standing over her ironing board late at night after she had put us to bed, with an iron in one hand and her pen and writing notebook in the other. Real writers don’t moan about lack of writing time. Real writers write.
Copyright 2009 Heather Newton

Literary Fiction – What is it?

Posted on 5 February 2009 by Marc Archambault

Last week I was having coffee with a friend and the subject of literary fiction came up. What exactly is it? And what makes it different from mainstream fiction? We verbally explored the possibility that it might be related to the quality of the writing or that the stories were character-driven rather than plot oriented. But nothing we could come up with firmly established the genre if that’s what it is.

One of the definitions for literature is “writing of value.” Another, “writing that lasts.” Time tested in other words. But who is it that defines “value?” Charles Dickens and Jane Austen were the popular novelists of their day. Are we supposed to wait 50 or 100 years to see which of the best selling writers of today are still being read?

What if we ask a different question. Why are mainstream novels widely read (substitute best sellers) and literary novels regulated to the intelligentsia, so to speak? I think to some extent, the answer lies in story. The most popular writers, the ones who show up over and over on the best seller lists, are great storytellers. And readers love stories.

The craft of writing, for me, breaks down into three major areas of focus (and there is plenty of room for debate here). The first is just basic English, the stuff you learned in high school: nouns, verbs, punctuation, syntax etc… Every writer has to know these language forms and there are a zillion textbooks that teach it. When I was programming, there was a simple adage we used sometimes: form frees, which basically meant that you could break the rules if you knew the form because that implicit form was still there. Frank Lloyd Wright could never have designed Fallingwater without knowing the rules of cantilevered structures. Cormac McCarthy writes without a lot of punctuation. But he’s consistent with his misuse. Read a few chapters, and you’re on board.

The second area of writing I consider is imagination. To me this includes whatever it is in written expression and thought that make a writer unique. It’s something that can’t be taught though every writer has influences that push them in a certain direction. When I read someone like Ursula K. LeGuin, I’m struck (like a lightning bolt) by the ideas and imagination behind the writing. The world looks different though her eyes. I think you can still be a fine writer if you lack this quality. Writers are, above all else, observers and someone who can define a character with detail can go a long way. Outside of fiction and advertising, this is what most writing is about. Just getting it down.

The third is what I think of as “tricks of the trade.” These include techniques like ending chapters with an unanswered question or an unresolved situation. I would define these techniques as anything that creates tension in the reader. Put a gun on the mantle in the first chapter and the reader waits and waits for it to be used. Again, plenty of books documenting these techniques though I find reading the best way to discover them. I recently read Echoes from the Dead by the Swedish author Johan Theorin. In the prolog a small boy slips over the stone wall surrounding his cottage and out into the Swedish moor where, in the fog, he encounters a man who we discover is a serial killer. The boy disappears. Theorin writes the story in two threads: in one the boy’s mother and grandfather search for answers surrounding the disappearance, and in the other, Theorin shows us the life of the serial killer. As a reader you spend the entire novel waiting for these two threads to connect. A marvelous device.

So let’s get back to literary fiction. My supposition is that mainstream writers concentrate their efforts on basic writing and tricks of the trade to tell their stories, while literary writers focus on imagination and language. As a reader I ask myself, what is it I’d rather read (if I’m forced to choose): a good story or fine writing? I can’t tell you how many books I’ve put down after reading the first chapter because the writing just isn’t good enough to continue. On the other hand, I’m tremendously disappointed when I read a piece of fine writing where the author has made no effort to consider story structure or keep the reader guessing, depending solely on the quality of the prose to hold the reader. If some of these literary writers paid more attention to the techniques that raise storytelling to another level, I think they would find far more of their work on the best seller lists.

Echoes from the Dead by Johan Theorin

Posted on 4 February 2009 by Marc Archambault

Johan Theorin
Translated by Marlaine Delargy

Echoes From the Dead is as unexpected as it is wonderful. The novel revolves around the disappearance of five-year-old Jens Davidsson from an island home twenty years before. Now, his grandfather Gerlof who lives in a retirement home has received a package in the mail which contains one of Jens’ sandals. Gerlof calls his estranged daughter Julia, Jens’ mother, a nurse whose life has degenerated into depression and alcohol abuse, and the two of them slowly begin their revitalized search for the boy’s fate.

Also on the island is a wealthy family whose son, Nils Kant, committed a series of murders, then fled – many years before Jens’ disappearance. Theorin does a masterful job connecting the two cases with seemingly unrelated facts and the chance meeting of the boy and man in the prolog. He reinforces that connection by writing the story in two threads: the first, the search by Julia and Gerlof written in the present time; and the second, the life of Nils Kant, written in the past.

The novel is set in the stark landscape of Oland, an island off the coast of Sweden. Even though the story is framed as a mystery, it is the depth of character – of Julia, of Nils Kant, and most of all, of Gerlof, a retired sea captain beset with physical infirmaries, that drives the novel. This is Gerlof’s story more than the others, and in the end, his bittersweet triumph.

We expect to discover the connection between Nils Kant and Jens’ disappearance in the end but Theorin easily exceeds our expectations with an outcome both amazing in its convoluted logic, and in retrospect, almost inevitable. Finally, it is the evolution of the relationship between Gerlof and Julia, father and daughter, that make this an extremely satisfying work.

The novel was translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy who also does the Asa Larsson mysteries. With many foreign works, the reader is sometimes jarred by inappropriate idiom or language. There is none of that here. The novel’s excellence in English is a testament to the partnership between writer and translator.

Highly recommended.

Abigail De Witt: On Writing

Posted on 20 January 2009 by Marc Archambault

Abigail De Witt studied at Harvard and the Iowa Writers Workshop, an has taught creative writing at Applachian State University, University of North Carolina-Asheville, Harvard Summer School, and the Duke Writers Workshop. She is the author of two novels, Lili and Dogs, and works privately with writers out of her home in Burnsville, NC.

Genève Bacon: Abigail, I have worked with you for eight years and have had the benefit of your unflagging encouragement and astute criticism. Speaking for myself, you have helped and inspired me to grow as a writer. What inspires you?

Abigail De Witt: I draw inspiration and have learned most of what I know about writing from reading good books and teaching passionate students. The truth is, an eager but unskilled student can teach me as much as a brilliant one. Helping someone who doesn’t have a facility with language, who doesn’t know how to get inside his or her characters, or who can’t develop a conflict, gives me a deeper understanding of language, character, and conflict—but a gifted student is easier to learn from.

GB: What do you think is the most important element is writing?

ADW: The use of sensory detail. Besides drawing the reader in—how can we inhabit a character’s world if we do not know how it smells, tastes, sounds, and looks?—a single sensory detail is often the genesis of an entire novel. A writer can take one sensory detail—a woman’s bloodstained hands, for example—and, simply by asking why?, come up with a plot and a cast of characters.
Sensory detail keeps us honest. It’s easy to fudge the truth with abstractions—she was sad, he was angry, they were upset; what do those phrases really mean?—but when the narrator of “What I Did for Love,” having had an abortion, is sickened by a plate of runny eggs, I know how deeply un-nourished she is, how uncared-for. To be abandoned is to feel a kind of nausea—to be homesick—and when I see those runny eggs I feel lonely with the character. To use another example, in one of the stories in “Coping With Purgatory,” when Toby Heaton’s narrator describes hitting “a small girl in pigtails” with his car—“I hear the ‘whumpff’ of her slight impact as she hits the side of the car, feel the tremor through the steering wheel”—I feel that tremor shudder through my body. And when Heather Newton (“Water Stories”) describes the log-home salesman trudging up the road to a customer’s house and “water seeps through the soles of his worn Gucci shoes,” that image sums up the character’s failed life.
Having worked with you, Genève, I know your stories best, but in Irons in the Fire, all of you have created worlds that are vivid, honest, and compelling, and I am grateful to have been introduced to the stories of Toby Heaton and Heather Newton. I know I will be re-reading them and learning from this wonderful collection for years to come.

GB: Thank you, Abigail. Your generous words about our book are much appreciated.