Becca and her Bookstack, Beth and her Fiction

Two years ago now I started a novel for adults, a book that I thought I'd finished last March, until I started it all over again.  Almost every single thing about this book has changed, but my protagonist's first name has not.  She is and she always will be Becca, a name I love, a name I feel particularly close to, thanks to my friendship with Becca of the hugely wise and always calming book blog known as Bookstack.  Becca reads fine books and she tells us what she thinks—honestly, without rancor.  Many, many of my own book purchases have been made in the wake of a Bookstack review.

Today I am blessed to be featured on Becca's Bookstack, with a truly generous review of You Are My Only.  The odd thing about this is that I had planned to write about Becca here today.  Planned to release this small excerpt from the novel that bears her name.  I am but 26,000 words into this utterly redesigned book.  I am writing slow,  letting the story find me.  But here is Becca, a snatch of fiction, surely, but written with the sense of an angel close behind me as I write.

In Siena she drank the Chianti Vin ordered.  She walked beside him, down the crowded streets, in the shuffle between shops and bicycles and flower vendors, rounds of cheese, painted porcelain, trays of marbled paper.  She walked among the bright silk flags that marked out each contrade—Unicorn, Snail, Caterpillar, Goose, Tortoise, Dragon, Eagle, Ram, Owl, Shell, Porcupine, Giraffe, Wave, Wolf, Panther, Forest, Tower—each with its own emblem and history of pride.  The colored silks hung from poles and windows.  They were draped across the shoulders of women and wrapped around the heads of men, and in every contrade, Vin bought Becca a scarf and knotted it around her waist until she wore a skirt of all Siena, and when the wind blew the colors flew up into her frames. 

She photographed second hands and steeples.

She photographed herds of butterflies.

She photographed Vin asleep, Vin in the window, framed by the quivering moon.

 

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Rain Smear, First Drafts, and the National Council of Teachers of English

You should see the view through my office window, I wrote to John V., one of my earliest dance teachers, and still a dear, even if he's moved to Germany. Take a picture, he wrote back, and I did—the panes smeary with rain, the sky beyond somehow broken. It was the end of a day in which a long-loved novel found its final line, in which I stopped holding my breath, and exhaled. Anna sent a box of royal riviera pears from California—five of them, green golden. They arrived on my stoop the very instant I typed the book's final words. I don't know how she does this, how she is always here when the big things happen, but, in fact, she does and is.

In any case, in any case: A first draft. I will wait, let time do its thing. I will then work it through all over again. And then again. And more.

In the meantime, I'll be attending the National Council of Teachers of English conference at the Philadelphia Convention Center on November 22nd. I'll be traveling this way and that, among the booths, then attending, thanks to Laura Lutz, the HarperCollins-sponsored ALAN cocktail event before heading off for what should be a pretty spectacular dinner. I wonder if any of you plan to be there. If you do, I hope you'll let me know. I would love to meet you.

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Novel in Progress/An Excerpt

It’s been a few years since they let the patients go—herded the inmates away in buses; slipped the loonies down the loop in cars; did not see the only escapee who shuffled straight to the river, crab walked the bogged banks, and paddled deep into the channel. So that she wasn’t found until three days later—a turtle egg in the nest of her hair, a chewed strip of rubber on her wrist. A child made the discovery. He’d been playing. He had thought at first that she was Galatea, the milk-white one in his book of myths. No one would believe him when he came shouting, spinning home—mud to his elbows, shoes undone.

“You leave your imagination out of this,” his mother said.

“I’m swearing,” he told his mother, crossing his heart.

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On Writing a Novel for Adults

There are few things more gratifying than successful literary novelists. I myself can't get enough of their stories, their confessions.

It is a lovely thing, therefore, to watch Jeffrey Eugenides in conversation with Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times—to hear what this multi-platinum author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex has to say about the work that he has done over the years and the city, Detroit, that has fueled his imagination.

I was intrigued, especially, by the way Eugenides has determinedly evolved his own work—moving, as he says, from a "preoccupation with language" (The Virgin Suicides) toward a focus on plotting (Middlesex) toward what he describes as an emphasis on deeper characterization and psychological portraiture—the "deepening realism" that marks his current work. I loved his overt commitment not just to changing form, but to raising the stakes.

At the moment I am deeply engaged in the early research and writing of a novel for adults. It's not as if I have not tried to write novels for adults in the past; I have written many that have failed. I wasn't ready. I needed to take the cross-wise steps that years spent writing memoir, poetry, history, fable, criticism, and young adult novels ultimately yielded. To learn to trust language, in memoir. To learn to break it apart, in poetry. To pursue the almost impossible detail through historical research. To tell a story through YA novels. To bend a story, through fable. To sustain a certain vulnerability through the blog. Having never taken a writing course (as an adult, I attended three summer workshops), I have had to teach myself to write, and the road that I've traveled has often stumped out, looped back, and confused.

But it has also brought me here. It has given me both foundation and framework. Tools with which to work against an idea I can't quite yet contain.

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