Looking Back — and Stepping Forward

The most-used words on my site, courtesy of Wordle.net.

When I began this blog, ten months ago, I had recently finished a novel that was several months from publication, Bird in Hand, and was beginning a new one (working title Orphan Train).  I envisioned this site as a place to talk about the writing life and the process of writing my new novel-in-progress.  I thought it might be a useful tool for the graduate students I teach and advise at Fordham, students embarking on creative-writing M.A. theses (mostly novels-in-progress) — a place to put in writing the ephemeral thoughts I articulate in class.

But as more people discovered the blog, its nature changed.  I began writing posts in response to readers’ queries and ideas, and found that I enjoyed talking more broadly about craft and the creative process. (The title and subtitle changed several times, reflecting my evolving shift in focus.)  After a while the site attracted published fiction and nonfiction writers eager to contribute their own tips, tricks, and advice on different aspects of the writing life.  I also started approaching authors whose work I admired. These guest posts expanded the scope of my project, delighting and surprising me with creative approaches to common problems and perceptive responses to metaphysical questions.

I’ve been learning as I go, and recently I stopped to take a critical look at where the blog is now. From its modest beginnings last June, the site now gets a still-modest-but-respectable average of 2,000 visitors a week, has 300 subscribers, and has attracted over 50,000 views.  Each new post gets 500-600 unique views.  The blog has become a place for writers to share their struggles and advice about writing with one another.   It provides a community for writers at all levels, from people who’ve never published a word to authors with dozens of books.

Thanks to feedback from readers, I’ve made some changes to the site. With the help of the marvelous Jessica Wode, I created a Resources for Writers tab with links to other sites that I’ve found especially useful. (I’ll be adding to and, I suspect, whittling this list — suggestions welcome.)  I’ve also updated and expanded the About tab to give new readers a better introduction to the site.

I cleaned up the sidebar to help you more quickly and easily find what you’re looking for. You’ll find a new section, “Tips for Getting Started,” with links to posts with specific advice about launching your next (or first!) big writing project.  And finally, you now have a one-click shop at the bottom of each post to share it on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, or several other sites.

You can also become a *fan* (though that word makes me cringe) of my brand-new Facebook page to have blog posts show up in your newsfeed.   And in about a month I’ll launch a newly designed, easy-to-navigate website — and this site will have its own domain name (dropping the “wordpress” in the URL), which will enable me to do even more with it.

I hope these changes make the site easier and more enjoyable to navigate.  I’d love to hear what you think.  And try out the new Share tools!  I don’t know how to use them myself, but I’m pretty sure my 15-year-old can teach me.

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What If: The Fear that Inspired My Novel, Bird in Hand

Writing and blogging and talking in interviews about my new novel this week, I keep encountering the same question:  What inspired it?   There are many answers to this, of course, and I’ve talked in different places about various sources for the story.  But the deepest reasons are hard to articulate.  So I decided to write about them here.

At first it looked like every mother’s worst nightmare:  Several weeks ago a 36-year-old mother of two, driving her own kids and three nieces home from a camping trip in her Ford Windstar minivan, went the wrong way on the Taconic Parkway and crashed head-on into an SUV carrying three men.  Everyone died except the woman’s five-year-old boy.  At the funeral, mourners wept when the woman’s brother, the father of her nieces, sobbed, “Love your children. Cherish your children. Kiss your children.”

It appeared to be a tragic accident.  This woman entered the highway from an exit ramp, and, apparently disoriented, drove 1.7 miles before the crash.  She’d called her brother from a rest stop an hour before, the papers said, complaining of fatigue and sounding confused.  A police officer speculated that maybe she thought she was in the slow lane on the correct side of the road; others suggested that perhaps she was on prescription drugs that impaired her judgment.  Or maybe she was exhausted from being on a camping trip with all of those children, or distracted by their bickering or crying.

But as it turns out, the woman was drunk.  Not just drunk — she was blind drunk, with twice the legal limit in her bloodstream and fresh alcohol in her stomach.  A bottle of vodka was found in the car and she tested positive for marijuana.

How could this happen?  Specifically, how could this woman ingest alcohol and drugs, knowing that she was responsible for the lives of five children — not to mention any strangers who got in her path?  Why didn’t she pull over?  Her recklessness suggests that she may have been suicidal.  But it’s one thing to take your own life, and quite another to put others at such appalling risk.

And there are other questions:  What did she actually say to her brother at the rest stop?  Did he, or her husband, know she’d been drinking or smoking pot?  Had there been an argument?  Did she have a drinking problem; had she ever done anything like this before?

These questions, prurient as they may be, matter to us because we want to make sense of the unthinkable. And I think they’re particularly resonant for mothers.  This woman’s behavior at the furthest edges of comprehension.  And yet every mother I know has feared her own capacity – through accident or neglect or worse – for doing harm to her child.

When my first child was born I joined a group of new mothers, and we joked with the blackest of humor about exactly these fears.  One woman said that late at night, lying in bed, waking nightmares would come unbidden about the things that she might do wrong: what if, what if, what if. Another read shaken-baby stories obsessively, worried about her own impatience and anger at her colicky child.  Yet another admitted that post-partum depression had once rendered her apathetic and unresponsive, more concerned with her own needs than those of her (neglected) child.  I admitted that I was terrified of getting in a car crash that was my own fault and being responsible for maiming, or killing, my child or – god forbid – someone else’s.

This quiet terror propelled me into writing my new novel, Bird in Hand. I began to tell the story of a woman, a mother, who has several drinks and gets into an accident in which a child dies.  As I started writing, though, I found that it was like staring directly into the sun; I had to squint and turn away. I put the manuscript in a drawer and only came back to it after several years, when my children were older and my own fears had subsided.  And I changed the focus of the novel: the accident became a catalyst for the larger story rather than the story itself.

Writing this book was a way of exploring my deepest fears around this subject.  I wanted to follow my character through her grief and guilt to some place on the other side. In Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone says, “Now the finish comes, and we know only in all that we have seen and done bewildering mystery.” I wasn’t looking for answers, only for a way to comprehend the mystery.

Like Greek tragedy, the terrible accident last week goes straight to the darkest places within us.  It makes manifest our deepest fears, vividly revealing what the unimaginable looks like.  What if, what if, what if.

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Quick Link: My Q&A with Novelist Lori A. May

The poet and novelist Lori A. May interviewed me for her blog — Musings, Reviews, News — this week.  In the interview Lori pushed me to reveal what Bird in Hand is really about, why I’m not a hermit, why I think achieving balance is an impossible goal, and the fluky way I got started as a writer.  You can read all about it here.

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Publication Day for Bird in Hand

Publication Day, I’ve learned over the years, is an elusive concept.  You imagine that something momentous will happen — after all, the date has been printed in catalogs and announced on amazon.com; it seems significant.  You think of other important events in your life:  college graduation, your wedding day, the birth of your first child.  Things actually happened on those days.  You were awarded an official degree in front of several thousand people, you suddenly found yourself yoked for life to another person, you loosed a new human on the earth.

So what do you expect for pub day?  Oh, not much.  Maybe just some triumphal music, mortarboards tossed in the air, a parade with marching bands, a few fireworks.

A novel appears in hardcover about a month before the pub date.  It sits in boxes in your publicist’s office before making its way, with a pitch letter tucked under its flap like a schoolboy with a note in his pocket, to reviewers and others who will, you hope, help it on its way.  So pub date is kind of irrelevant.  Except in the ways that it isn’t.  For example, glossy monthly magazines will review books in September if the pub date is after August 10th.  Amazon calls any book bought before pub date a “pre-order,” and it’s not immediately available.  Bookstores usually put it on shelves (or, if you’re lucky, on tables) on the official day.

But none of that has much to do with the author.  I’ve come to understand that pub day is a rough marker, a general concept.  And I’ve learned to view the day as a time to reflect on my own journey in publishing a book.  It may not be a warm bundle in my arms, but the weight of my book in my hand, with its smooth pages and pulpy scent, makes me swoon all the same.

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Bird Days of August

August 11th is the official release date of my new novel, Bird in Hand.  Over the several weeks I’ll be telling the inside story of how and when and why I wrote this book, and how it ended up getting published.  I’ll also post links to other blogs and websites with my guest posts and interviews.  I hope that learning about my process will inspire you with your own work!

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Exclusive Sneak Peek* of My New Novel, Bird in Hand (Part 2)

In anticipation of the release in exactly a week of Bird in Hand, I am posting the prologue.  Yesterday was Part 1; this is Part 2.  Sorry, you have to go back, but I’ll make it easy for you.

(*My publicist made me say that.  He also made me promise to point out that if this excerpt intrigues you, the book is available for pre-order at indie.org and amazon.com.)

Bird in Hand (Prologue, Part 2)

“Do we need a lawyer?” he said when it was clear she wasn’t going to answer, and she said, “I don’t know – maybe.  Probably.”

“Don’t say anything,” he said then.  She could tell he was flipping through scenarios in his mind, trying to lay things out in a methodical way.  “Just wait until I get there.”

“But I already said everything.  A boy is – a little boy is – they don’t know yet – hurt.” She said this although they’d already told her there was swelling on the brain.  The police weren’t wearing uniforms, and they didn’t handcuff her or read Alison her rights or any of the other things she might have expected.  The boy’s parents were weeping; the mother was wailing I let him sit on my lap; he was cold in the back and afraid of the dark, and the father was slumped with his hands over his face.  The walls of the lobby vibrated with their sadness.

“Jesus Christ,” Charlie breathed.  And she thought of other times he’d been exasperated with her – on their honeymoon, when, after two days of learning to ski, she suddenly froze up and couldn’t do it; she was terrified of the speed, the recklessness, of feeling out of control; she was sure she would break a limb.  So she spent the rest of the time in the lodge, a calculatedly cozy place with a gas flame in the fireplace and glossy ski magazines on the oak veneer coffee tables, while Charlie got his money’s worth from the honeymoon.  She tried to think of an experience comparable to what was happening now, some time when she had done X and he had reacted Y, but she couldn’t come up with a thing.  Eight years.  Two children.  A life she didn’t plan for, but had grown to love.  Friends and a hometown and a house, not too big but not tiny, either, with creaky stairs and water-damaged ceilings but lots of potential.

Potential was something she once had a lot of, too.  Every paper she wrote in college could have been better; every B+ could have been an A.  She could have pushed ahead in her career instead of stopping when it became easier to do so.  She hadn’t known she wanted to stop, but Charlie said, “C’mon, Alison, the kids want you at home.   It’s a home when you’re home.”  But after she quit he complained about bearing the heavy load of responsibility for them.  There was no safety net, he said; he said it made him anxious.  He wanted her at home, but he missed the money and the security and she knew he missed seeing her out in the world, though he didn’t say it.  He saw her at home in faded jeans and an old cotton sweater, he saw her at seven o’clock when the kids were clamoring for him and strung-out and cranky and he had just endured his hour-long commute from the city.

And yet – and yet she thought she was lucky, thought they were lucky, loved and appreciated their life.

But tonight she was living a nightmare.  Her friends – some of them, at least – would probably try to comfort her, provide some kind of solace, but it would be hard for them, because deep down they would think that she was to blame.  And it wasn’t that they couldn’t imagine being in her position, because every woman has imagined what it would feel like to be responsible for taking a life.

But worse, every mother has thought about what it would be like to have her child’s life taken from her.

Alison could hear Charlie asking for her, out at the front desk.  Polite and deferential and panicked and impatient – all of that.  She could read his voice the way some people read birdcalls.  She almost didn’t want him to find her.  As she looked around at the dingy lights, the dirt-sodden carpet, heard the clatter from the holding cells down the hall, she wondered what it would be like to stay here – not here, perhaps, but in prison somewhere, cut off from other people, penitent as a nun.  Or in a convent, a place with stone walls, small slices of sky visible through narrow slits, neatly made narrow beds.  A place where she could pay for this quietly, away from anyone who had ever known her.

You might expect that she’d have thought of her children, and she did – peripherally, like a blinkered horse looking sideways; when she tried to think of them straight-on her mind went blank.  Her own boy’s brown curls on the pillow, her six-year-old daughter’s twisted nightgown, her covers on the floor . . . Alison saw them sleeping, imagined them dead – just for an instant.  Imagined explaining – and stopped.  The only thing she seemed able to do was concentrate on the minute details of each moment:  the cold floor, hard seat, dispassionate officers tapping on keyboards and shuffling papers.  The tick of the wall clock.  11:53.

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Exclusive Sneak Peek* at My New Novel, Bird in Hand

Over the next two days, in anticipation of the release in exactly a week of Bird in Hand, I am posting the prologue in two parts.

(*My publicist made me say that. He also made me promise to point out that if this excerpt intrigues you, the book is available for pre-order at indie.org and amazon.com.)

Bird in Hand

For Alison, these things will always be connected: the moment that cleaved her life into two sections and the dawning realization that even before the accident her life was not what it seemed. In the instant it took the accident to happen, and in the slow-motion moments afterward, she still believed that there was order in the universe – that she’d be able to put things right. But with one random error, built on dozens of tiny mistakes of judgment, she stepped into a different story that seemed, for a long time, to have nothing to do with her. She watched, as if behind one-way glass, as the only life she recognized slipped from her grasp.

This is what happened: She killed a child. It was not her own child. He – he was not her own child, her own boy, her own three-year-old son. She was on her way home from a party where she’d had a few drinks. She pulled out into an intersection, the other car went through a stop sign, and she didn’t move out of the way. It was as simple as that, and as complicated.

Something happens to you in the moments after a car crash. Your brain needs time to catch up; you don’t want to believe what your senses are telling you. Your heart is beating so loudly that it seems to be its own living being, separate from you. Everything feels too close.

As she saw the car coming toward her she sat rigid against the seat. Shutting her eyes, she heard the splintering glass and felt the wrenching slam of metal into metal. Then there was silence. She smelled gasoline and opened her eyes. The other car was crumpled and steaming and quiet, and the windshield was shattered; Alison couldn’t see inside. The driver’s door opened, and a man stumbled out.

“My boy – my boy, he’s hurt,” he shouted in a panicky voice.

“I have a phone. I’ll call 911,” Alison said.

“Oh God hurry,” he said.

She punched the numbers with unsteady fingers. She was shaking all over; even her teeth were chattering.

“There’s been an accident,” she told the operator. “Send help. A boy is hurt.”

The operator asked where Alison was, and she didn’t know what to say. She’d taken a wrong turn a while back, gone north instead of west, and found herself on an unfamiliar road. She knew she was lost right away; it wasn’t like she didn’t know, but there had been nowhere to turn, so she’d kept going. The road led to other, smaller roads, badly lit and hard to see in the foggy darkness, and then she came upon a four-way stop. Alison had pulled out into the intersection before she’d realized that the other car was driving straight through without stopping – the car was to her right and had the right of way, but it hadn’t been there a moment ago when she had moved forward. It had seemed, quite literally, to have come out of nowhere.

Alison knew better than to explain all this to the operator, but in truth she had no idea where she was. Craning her neck to look out the windshield, she saw a street sign – Saw Hill Road – and reported this.

“Hold on,” the operator said. “Okay, you’re in Sherman. I’ll send an ambulance right away.”

“Please tell them to hurry,” Alison said.

She called her husband from the hospital and told him about the accident, about the car being totaled and her injured wrist, but she didn’t tell him that all around her doctors and nurses were barking orders and the swinging doors were banging open and shut, and a small boy was at the center of it, a small boy with a broken skull and a blood-spattered t-shirt. But Charlie knew soon enough. She had to call him back to tell him not to come to the hospital; she was now at the police station, and there was silence for a moment and then he said, “Oh – God,” and whatever numbness she’d had was stripped away. She flinched – told him, “Don’t come” – and he said, “What did you do?”

It wasn’t the response she’d expected – not that she had thought ahead enough to expect anything in particular; she didn’t know what to expect; she didn’t have a response in mind. But her sudden realization that Charlie was not with her, not reflexively on her side, was so profoundly shocking that she braced for what was next.

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A Not-Writing Lesson

Thursday, 11:15 a.m.  The phone rings.  I look up from my writing and squint at Caller ID:  PUBLIC SCHOOLS.  And just like that, my work day is over.

In the office of the school nurse at Hillside Elementary School, Eli sits slumped in a chair, his face pale, pupils dilated.  His forehead is hot.  “He’s 102.  This fever is going around,” the nurse says.  “Could be a virus.  Or …”  She doesn’t finish the sentence, but we both know what she’s thinking.  A child at another elementary school in our town has Swine Flu.  “You’ll need to get him to a doctor right away.  And even if it’s only a virus, he can’t come back to school for a week.”

I make an appointment for 2:15 p.m.  By 3:45 Eli and I have spent an hour in the pediatrician’s waiting room surrounded by other pale-faced, feverish kids, and half an hour alone in a sterile examining room.   Finally the doctor arrives to take Eli’s temperature (still 102), administer a flu test (negative), and send us home with a prescription for plenty of liquids and sleep.  Yep, it’s “only” a virus.

I relate this story because it is a small illustration of how my best-laid plans can evaporate in a moment.  Four single-spaced, handwritten pages — my daily goal — may not sound like much, but some days it’s impossible.  On Wednesday, before Eli got sick, I’d started writing about a new character; my hand flew across the pages.  Thursday was a different story: the two pages I managed to eke out before the school called were painstaking and hard-won.  Friday, with Eli home and miserable, I didn’t write at all.

Sometimes it’s the life of the mind.  Sometimes it’s just life.  And knowing when to give up, to let go of my expectations for myself and simply exist in the moment, watching “Mythbusters” with Eli, is a lesson I’m still learning.

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If You Don't Put it In …

I’m curious about how literary writers whose work is also commercial balance two often conflicting objectives:  telling a good story and exploring setting, theme, and character. One day this week I was privileged to spend time with two terrific novelists, Alison Larkin and Marina Budhos, who had very different and equally useful takes on this question.

Alison told me that she reads the thriller writer Harlan Coben for plot. Coben is a master of building and maintaining suspense, she said; you can’t help turning the pages. Paying attention to how he withholds and reveals information has been instructive for her. Marina said that, for her, “a first draft is all about exploration, but at a certain point that exploration has to stop.” She talked about the challenges of revision: taking a first draft and pulling the threads of plot and character all the way through, while at the same time ruthlessly cutting and repositioning the prose so the story has immediacy and urgency. In a first draft, then, the writer should feel free to experiment and digress – and I would argue that the literary writer must do so, to remain open to the unanticipated byways of the creative process – but in a second draft the writer has to remember that the prose exists solely in service to the story.  As the writer Honor Moore says, “If you don’t put it in, you can’t take it out.”

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Settling In

Our dog, Lucy, does it every morning.  She roams around trying to get a feel for whether anyone will be at home, and in which rooms.  She tries out one spot – splayed on the hall landing, a watchful eye toward the front door – but soon abandons it for another.  She jumps on an unmade bed and turns around three times, sinks down, curls into a ball.  After a while she stretches out long, her belly as rounded and freckled as a cow’s.

I have my own version of this routine:  a mug of hot coffee, a comfortable wingback chair – no, perhaps the old chaise in the sunroom window – a college-ruled notepad (faint blue lines on white paper, a firm pink margin), an old-fashioned micro-point Uniball pen.  Circle three times, curl in a ball, settle in deep.

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Memorial Day

When you’re working on a novel, not writing is part of the writing process.  At least that’s what I told myself today.  It was a gorgeously mild and sunny day — Memorial Day; the park across the street from our house was filled with people biking, strolling, and listening to a military band that played for hours.  (The music wafted across the pond: muted patriotism.)  The kids were home from school, milling aimlessly around the house, and eventually I abandoned all thought of work and took them to a lake for the afternoon, where I sat in an Adirondack chair and read Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy’s exacting descriptions — his careful parsing of behaviors and attitudes, woven gracefully into the narrative — made me think of my own character, a 90-year-old woman with complicated responses to and relationships with everyone around her.  From Tolstoy I am learning (re-learning; I read this novel once before, in my early twenties) how to give an omniscient narrator immediacy and warmth.  And I wonder about the perspective I’m employing in my own novel-in-progress, alternating first-person and third-person limited chapters.  Perhaps the third-person perspective should be broader?  That would allow me to bring in other points of view — one in particular that I haven’t been sure how to convey.  I’ll be thinking hard about this question of perspective in the coming weeks.

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