One Thing Leading to Another

Every now and then (wait: that would be more than every now and then) I get myself into literary trouble. This holiday weekend I did it again. In the early hours of each day I was at work on this wild mash of an adult novel—a scene involving, among other things, a mind in the midst of repair. In the afternoons I was reviewing the final edits for the YA novel set in Juarez, The Heart is Not a Size. At one point I was answering questions about Nothing but Ghosts, and always, always, I was fighting for the time to read Colum McCann novel, Let the Great World Spin.

I was, in other words, all kaleidoscoped with voice and place and desperate to get traction.

I don't typically seek out such collisions, but when they happen, I try to learn from them. I study the first-person present voice, for example, for fault lines (when does it fail? what happens when it gets pushed too far? what happens when a story is a was and not an is?). I weigh interior monologues against dialogue chains against the power of the omniscient narrator, and decide: what yields, what confines, what exacerbates? I ask myself how I might have approached a scene in the McCann book (McCann's book begins with the famed 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Towers, a story also richly told in a documentary I recently watched, "Man on a Wire"), and then I try to imagine what McCann might have done had he chosen to weave insanity inside his book, or a south-of-the-border squatter's village, or a garden. What would McCann do with a garden?

As writers we are never finished; we never know enough. We write each book as if it is our first and also our last, and when we are brave, we go back and look over our own shoulders and ask, What might we have done right there to make this a better book?

We are always desperate to write the better book.