I’m having good writing days lately, though the NaNoWriMo word count analyst tells me at this rate I’ll finish my goal on December 20, not November 30. But the novel has become a preoccupation, and even when I’m not writing, I’m able to think about the characters and their world during the day.
There are some wonderful things in the book already.
I’ve left the story of the crime for a bit, after getting to a place, a really devastating thing said to my character, that I wasn’t sure how to go forward from. I turned instead to developing the story before the crime, where he came from and who these people are. How he fits into the life of the town and how the relationships worked before the crime.
I’ve also kept reading a very helpful and encouraging novel, Kent Haruf’s The Tie that Binds. I know I mentioned Harouf before. His novel Plainsong is a very simple novel that had a lasting effect on me. This current book is also simple and compelling. It starts with an old woman in the hospital under police guard, suspected of a murder. And it flashes back, tells the story of her life and that of the narrator, a neighbor. It covers many decades, telling the story fast and hard. It pauses on the main street, where men are talking while their wives shop, or on an afternoon when a boy helps his neighbor cut hay, or in a bar where a man long burdened by his home life steals away to find out what drinking, dancing and cards are all about. It’s a very good model for pacing and how to move and develop a first-person narrative that has a simple through line and a forceful voice. I want to know what happens, but not so much that my satisfaction in the book is riding on it. I’m happy to be in the moment of the story, learning more about life in Holt, Colorado.
I mentioned Russell Banks as a possible model, too, and Cormac McCarthy. I couldn’t get the book I wanted by McCarthy quickly, and after diving into another I decided the border voice of his work might be, well, too strong, just too alien to my purposes. Russell Banks appealed to me because of a novel of his I read more than a decade ago, The Sweet Hereafter. It might be the only book I have read after seeing the film. I love the film by Atom Egoyan. The story is about a school bus crash that kills all the town children in a northeastern town. A lawyer comes to town to try to represent the families as they cope with their grief and look for someone to blame.
I understand Egoyan’s relationship to the story. His early films, Exotica, The Adjuster, and The Sweet Hereafter, all have an element of the voyeur about them, a character whose profession shields him or her from true participation in the intimate dramas at the heart of the films. I wanted to see how Banks had told the story, what had interested him, and most of all how he had used point of view.
The Sweet Hereafter, the novel, is told from multiple points of view. The plot is easy for us to grasp and the voices of the characters, all represented very well in the film, give their own testimony, tell their own stories, clearly and truly. I remember finishing the book and thinking both: “That was great,” and “I could do that.”
It is good during this process to have books that encourage and also let you know you’re not alone in this. NaNoWriMo delivers great “pep talks” to my inbox, writers telling us to keep going, to not do anything (even read) but write, to just be sure we sit down every day and write, to break the rules of NaNoWriMo even as they’re offering five or ten more helpful hints, guidelines, and/or rules. But for me, although those are a lot of fun to read and definitely give me a push, it is my little stack of models that are most helpful and inspiring.
I wrote a novel once before, in the mid-’90s. My models then were Bastard Out of Carolina, A Thousand Acres, and Lolita. Yes, it was a dark novel, and yes, you can imagine what it was about. I carried those three books with me everywhere for years.
This time I have a different stack. Continental Divide by Banks, Harouf’s book, and Jon Hassler’s North of Hope and Grand Opening. Other than Haruf, this stack feels far from definitive, though each one intersects with something I want to do well here: storytelling, voice, setting. So far, this novel feels very “male,” and so are my models. This particular Banks book is off-putting, but it also has things to tell me about what I’m trying to do.
I’m happy as the book I’m writing is opening up, thickening, showing a complexity that interests me even as I simplify the plot. And I plan to stick with the project all winter and into the spring, long after December 22, until it’s done.
The poet Billy Collins, in a recent interview on Minnesota Public Radio, was talking about how helpful it is for poets and other writers to read. He said his creative writing students tell him they don’t want to read anything because they want to write something original and think the other voices will interfere with their originality. It’s something I used to hear a lot and probably even believed myself, although as an undergrad and grad student I was absolutely starving for recommendations of poets to read– I read everything. Billy Collins said it’s important to realize that there is no true originality, and that’s actually the point. We’re in a conversation here, in a community of people who are telling stories and learning how to use language to get to the heart of the human condition. We’re lucky to have this tradition and all these other “greats” to read and learn from.
That, at its best, is what NaNoWriMo is: a recognition that we are in conversation here, all telling stories and learning as we go how to tell stories.