The Next Big Thing Blog Share

The writer, editor, and community builder Peg Alford Pursell (see her blog here), tagged me in a game call The Next Big Thing Blog share.

In this game of writers' tag, one writer answers 10 questions about her work in progress and tags other authors she admires to do the same.  I know Peg because she was the editor at Identity Theory, where I submitted stories about ten years ago, and she was an editor kind enough to write me back with substantial edits, teaching me through what she cut.  She runs the Why There are Words reading series.  Peg blogged about her work in progress, Blow the House Down, her sharp story told through chapters of flash fiction.

I'll be tagging Annapurna Potluri (website here), author of the brilliant The Grammarian (Counterpoint, Feb 2013).  Annapurna writes sentences that use the most surprising words to deliver sharp visual scenes.  

So here goes.  My baby in progress.

What is your working title of your book?

Is Clara Burns a Narcissist?  It changes as the themes shift.  I don’t know yet.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

The book has been my psychotherapy, so the ideas come from me.  I’m a psychologist who doesn’t like being in therapy but trusts that my disciplined routine of fiction writing taps and organizes my unconscious.  “Unconscious” is an overused word.  I mean writing makes me see myself in unexpected ways and helps me organize the material around some aesthetic and freeing principle.  My personality doesn’t change much—I don’t think personality does—and it keeps delivering me to the same literary themes, about achievement, egotism, and gender.  Writing fiction helps me to own those themes and do something fun with them.

Here’s another word about why fiction writing feels better for me than psychotherapy: When writing, I face the themes of my personality in a way that doesn’t feel predictable or moralizing.  (Not all therapy is, but conversation with others runs that risk.)  When writing about a character, I can deal with my own “competitiveness,” say, but not in a way that’s literal or direct.  Organizing my inner life through the drama of a scene is like when a painter paints a leaf but refuses to say “I’m painting a leaf”; instead, she reproduces color as an isolated shape of color until the painting looks like life.  Saying “I’m painting a leaf” can lead to predictable choices in shape and color, but reproducing the light and shadow with just the aesthetic eye—as shapes of their own—usually delivers something fresh. (It’s not “I’m working through my competitiveness”; but I’m writing, and the scene ends up showing me things.)

On a practical level, I’ve had to rewrite each scene hundreds of times, because I have some general idea of the plot—a girl is taken into the underground and forced to do a creative project of her own design—but the scenes that can effectively develop that story aren’t clear to me until I try a thousand false roads.  In a scene where my protagonist Clara needs to meet her underground caretaker, I’ve had them meet over tea, over an elephant ride, over a slideshow of past campers in the compound—over so many little mundane objects or environments—before landing on a physical scene that can develop the themes in a way that works.  As I write, I toggle back and forth between a feeling I want to capture and the visual set-up that can capture it.  For me, it means rewriting each scene literally fifty times or more.  It takes me a few months to write a few pages, not because I write slowly but because I throw out so, so much.

I started the novel on a trip to Kyoto, Japan, in the summer of 2006, where I lived alone and drank a lot of plum wine stalking Haruki Murakami. 

What genre does your book fall under?

Contemporary lit fiction with pictures drawn in it.  I love the current trend toward combining visual with literary art.  Two current heroes of mine are Bianca Stone and Manolo Moreno.  Both of them manage to condense emotions into images that are fiery with illogic and stir the gut.  

Manolo's latest work is a series of cartoons describing comic's stories, here: 
http://www.manolosomething.com/index.php?/collection/-animation-for-film-and-video/.

Bianca does illustrated poetry books.  Here's her website and one of her images:

http://whoisthatsupposedtobe.blogspot.com/

She also writes music.  Listen here: https://soundcloud.com/bianca-stone/send-help#play

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A 12-year-old girl is kidnapped into the underworld and charged with the task of making something creative—it can be any thing, she’s told; it doesn’t need to be any good—before she can go home.

Other themes: The way competitiveness plays out differently between men and women.  Little Clara is awed by older men in power in the compound.  But as she and her mother dream of complete harmony with each other, they’re probably trying to ignore their competitive impulses toward one another.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? 

Been working on it since 2006.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I’ve never read Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, but I think I’m working with similar themes.  My story is about a girl who feels alienated from creative freedom because of pressure to produce.

My hero is Haruki Murakami, for his dreamy sequences that deliver the unconscious—a space where you have a sense of meaning without clearly knowing why. 

The book also riffs off Tom Sawyer.  For her final art piece in the underground compound, Clara transforms herself into a sensitive female Tom Sawyer; through her performance piece, she’s dealing with her intimidation from the classics.

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

I have lots of pictures in it.  Here are some excerpts from my book:

Clara thought of George Washington—who her history textbook had said was kind.

Her history class had stressed Washington as a wise American leader.  One night, for instance, he had the chance to run into battle over a frozen river, but some people in his army were sick.  He visited his sick soldiers in their tents and delayed the attack for later in the week, so that they could rest and get better.  This was the adult she would be.

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When someone looks at a photo of someone else, they will almost always get the wrong idea.  Think of the photo of Tom Sawyer on the cover of her novel, which showed Tom relaxing in the grass. 

You would think he is waiting to say hello.  But the fact is that Tom is not waiting for you.  He is resting, but he is ready to run onto his own adventures—fishing, hunting for people in graveyards, or boating on the Mississippi River.  As a girl you might walk over to him, sit down, and get ready to talk—but he’ll soon get up.