Amy Greene Guest Post: Turning My Manuscript Into a Book

It’s been a year since I turned in a final edit of Bloodroot and the work of writing my first novel was over. That’s when the process of turning my manuscript into a book began, and it has been a long one. Each step toward publication has been exciting, but if I hadn’t found something to occupy my mind, I’m sure the wait would have been torture. At some point, I decided to do what I’ve always done to pass the time. I began to write again.

I had been thinking about my second novel ever since I noticed the tops of silos and the beginnings of old roads leading to a town buried deep under the lake near my house. Its waters cover the original site of a place called Bean Station, one of the earliest settlements in Tennessee, flooded by a dam built in 1940 by the Tennessee Valley Authority. I envisioned the people who had lived in the town of Bean Station, imagined the sacrifices they must have made when it was flooded. Land that had been in families for a hundred years was lost underwater; the bones of loved ones were disinterred and moved; historical landmarks were destroyed. I knew I wanted to explore whether or not progress is always a force for good. All that was left was coming up with a story I loved.


With Bloodroot, I wrote mostly about characters my own age and the mountains as I know them. As my second novel evolved, I decided to go back in time to the land of my grandparents, and even farther back, to the land of the Cherokees who lived here first. Progress drove them from their homes many decades before dams displaced East Tennessee families in the 1930s. Most of us living in this part of Appalachia have blood ties to its native people. My husband’s great-great grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee, and in my father’s family of eight brothers and sisters, half were born with red hair and pale skin and the other half with black hair and dark skin. I’ve always been interested in the link between Native American heritage and my own. With that link in mind, I dreamed up Annie Clyde Dodson, a strong young woman with Cherokee blood.

Once I had a picture of Annie Clyde in my head, the story came to life. That’s how it always starts for me. The image that began Bloodroot was of a woman called Myra Lamb and her twin children Johnny and Laura living in isolation in the mountain woods, hiding from some kind of danger. With Annie, I saw a deep sadness about her and a fierce determination at the same time. I imagined that her little girl had gone missing in the months before her hometown was to be flooded by a TVA dam, and the plot of my second novel fell into place. While everyone else, even Annie Clyde’s husband, believes her child is dead, she keeps on searching alone. For months I’ve been immersed in Annie Clyde’s world, in her race to find her daughter before the dam gates close and the reservoir begins to rise.

But now it’s time to return to Bloodroot. In the coming weeks of my book tour, I’ll be reading out loud to audiences from the story I wrote what feels like ages ago. I look forward to revisiting it, getting to know the characters all over again. As much as I’ve enjoyed being lost in my second novel these past few months, Bloodroot will always be special. No matter how many novels there are to come, and I hope there are a lifetime of them, there will never be another first one.

Amy Greene Guest Post: Writing Bloodroot

On the twelfth of this month, my debut novel, Bloodroot, will be published by Knopf. I imagine it will feel like a dream, seeing my own book on shelves among all those I’ve read and loved. In these weeks leading up to Bloodroot’s release, I’ve been thinking a lot about my favorite books, the ones that have inspired me most. Toni Morrison’s Beloved always comes to mind first. I discovered Beloved when I was in my early twenties and new motherhood had left me with little energy for writing. It was reading Beloved that got my creative juices flowing again. I was in awe of Morrison’s lyrical prose and the novel’s magic realism spoke to me as a native of Appalachia, where there’s a rich culture of mysticism and folklore. Since discovering her novels over a decade ago, I’ve read every one that she’s written. They’re all beautiful, but Beloved remains my favorite.

I also think of All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy as an inspiration. I read it first in 1999, during the same summer when my aunt, whom I was very close to, died of breast cancer as I sat at her bedside. I wanted to write about her, but I didn’t know how to start. Reading McCarthy at that time was stunning to me, the way he used language, the way he wrote dialogue that was so real and true, especially since his characters were from similar places as me and spoke in voices that sounded like the people I had known my whole life. All the Pretty Horses introduced me to a new way of thinking about writing. I began a semi-autobiographical novel without holding anything back. Looking at the old notebooks I used, it’s hard to read the handwriting, words strung together without punctuation, sentences a paragraph long. It was liberating, learning simply to get the story down on paper, and not worrying about applying craft to it until later. I still write the same way. My semi-autobiographical novel is now in a box, never to see the light of day, but I consider it a turning point in my writing life, and reading All the Pretty Horses was the catalyst for it.

While Beloved and All the Pretty Horses might be the books that have most influenced my writing in general, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights has most influenced Bloodroot. I read Wuthering Heights for the first time in high school and was swept away, captured by the darkly romantic moors and the twisted love of Heathcliff and Catherine. I didn’t think about Wuthering Heights as I worked on Bloodroot, but the mark it left on me as a writer is visible in my characters. John Odom’s obsessive passion for Myra Lamb, and his tortured soul, bring Heathcliff to mind. Myra’s freedom on the mountain and her later confinement in an abusive marriage mirrors Catherine’s freedom on the moors as a child and her later confinement at Wuthering Heights. Both novels raise some of the same questions as well, such as whether characters like Heathcliff and John are cruel by nature or products of their harsh upbringings. There’s also the major role setting plays in each, the Appalachian mountains in Bloodroot and the Yorkshire moors in Wuthering Heights.

Reading and writing have been intertwined for me since I was a little girl, and I still keep a good book on hand while I’m writing, as a source of creative fuel. Right now, as I work on my second novel, I’m reading Jill Ciment’s The Tattoo Artist. I’m sure that each book I’ve read, going all the way back to my childhood favorite Charlotte’s Web, has influenced my writing in ways I don’t even realize. Now that my first novel is being published, I have hopes that my own stories might serve as inspiration in the same way.

Guest Post By Jeanne Althouse: Writing Jasmine Man--One Writer’s Process

I know from my writer friends that the process of writing fiction is very individual. Some writers get ideas from the news, others from family stories, but I am often inspired by my dreams and use them to write short-short stories. Here is what happened one morning early:

That night I dream about an old man. His face is marked with liver spots and folds of wrinkled skin. His neck has disappeared into rolls of fat. Suddenly he grows backwards, to a time when he is young and fresh, with slender hips and smooth skin. I feel the excitement of spring, of romance. I want to touch him. When I reach down between his legs, I grasp a package of flowers. My hand folds around the petals; the perfume is released.


When I wake up, I smell jasmine. It is the vine on my deck, its fragrance coming through the open window. Or is it? The window is closed. I roll out of bed, reach for my robe, walk downstairs, make a cup of Earl Gray, and sit with my writing journal. Bits of the night dream are still clearing out of my mind, like wisps of clouds passing. I start:

6:35 a.m. 3-18-09 Old man. Vine.

I write down the time because I make a deal with myself that I have to keep writing for at least 30 minutes. The date and subject help me find my notes, if I ever need to. An old man, a vine: As I try to put together these two unrelated images in my head, I know writing about them will stretch my brain, force me to find new connections, exercise my action verbs, even if I don’t find a story. I start writing.

The jasmine man…

I like those words together. A musical sound. I say it out loud: jasmine man… I wonder: is he half man, half vine? What does he look like? I look down at the page. Keep writing.

The vine grew up his leg, wrapped around his middle and glued its fierce tendrils into his belly button…

Glued? Don’t like that word. Doesn’t feel right. I suck the end of the pen. I think about how dew covered leaves feel against my face, like the wetness of a man’s tongue in a deep, long kiss. That is definitely more interesting than how a vine grows. I put the pen back on the paper: never cross out, just keep writing.

In spring the ladies buried their noses in his white petals, soft as cloud, and some, intoxicated, kissed his leafy lips.

Now this sentence I like better—the sss sound echoes from petals to soft to kissed and I like how leafy lips rolls off my tongue, feels kind of like kissing. I say it again leafy lips. Okay stop reading out loud. Figure out what happens. Keep writing.

As summer progressed, the roots thickened around his feet, and their endings secreted themselves into the sole of his foot, crawling up his veins and arteries, searching…

I don’t like progressed. Sounds like a science essay. Fix it later. But the rest is interesting; the vine crawling up his veins and arteries…will his vine strangle him from inside his body? Or is vine man just getting old? Don’t stop to think. Keep writing.

By July his leafy girth had grown wide, giving him an obese look, a man of wide tee shirts, baggy pants, disappearing neck, and a waddle walk…

How will the ladies feel now about kissing an old man’s tongue? Ugh. Even his papery thin cheek with its folds of winkles? My pen hovers above the page. I force it down on the paper. Keep writing.

The jasmine man, no longer in bloom, with a pot belly of tangles drooping over his thin, bony stems…his leaves wilted and browning, he yearns…

***
It was an especially good writing day; I finished the whole story in one sitting that morning, although there was lots of editing later, including helpful suggestions from Aggie, my writing group and the editor Whitney Steen, at Pindeldyboz. If you want you can read the finished “Jasmine Man” at http://www.pindeldyboz.com/jajasmine.htm

For these short-short stories my idol is the writer Lydia Davis. My favorite writing book is—not surprisingly—From Where You Dream, by Robert Olen Butler. I’m constantly grateful to my once-a-month writing group and to Aggie and the writers at Kepler’s who help me decide which of my stories are keepers.

No matter where the ideas come from, the most valuable thing I’ve learned about the first draft process is the most simple: keep writing. Anywhere, anytime, anyplace. Every writer says the same. Keep writing. Something good will happen. Just keep writing.

Happy New Year!

Robin Black Guest Post: Shaking Up The Workshop

Many thanks to Aggie for inviting me to post! It's a real honor. First, I want to introduce myself. I'm a fiction writer and my first collection, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, is coming out from Random House in March. There are ten stories in the book and it took me eight years to write. I always tell people that because, early on, if anyone had told me it would take that long to finish a collection I would have thought either a) that they were crazy or b) that I must be crazy to be doing it. But it turns out that eight years isn't even a weirdly long time for a book - and I think that's important for writers to know from the start. If it's taking a lot longer than you had imagined or hoped to write even an individual story, it may be because you're doing something right.

On my mind today is the subject of the feedback writers get along the way. I think I'm focused on that because next month I'm returning to classroom teaching - undergraduates - after two years of taking private students and teaching one-on-one. This means that I have to face the dreaded workshop again. I say 'dreaded' because though I see a lot of advantages to the workshop format, I also think it has a pretty impressive capacity to do more harm than good. Here's how I see it: As a teacher, at the heart of my commitment to every student is the goal that after our work together, she will be even more excited about writing than she was before she met me. There's a lot more to teaching than that - I'm a total craft nerd - but without that increase in enthusiasm and commitment, I haven't done my job. And workshops, with their emphasis on on perfecting individual stories, their potential for competition and their drive toward consensus can all too easily have the opposite effect. So I have been thinking about ways to shake the format up - and I'm hoping that some of these thoughts will interest those of you who are in workshops now.

One big change I'm introducing is that for the first few classes we're going to workshop early drafts of stories by people who aren't there - friends of mine. I want to give my students practice critiquing and teach them skills for doing that, without risking the feelings of anyone in the room. I want the freedom to discuss a problematic piece frankly and consider strategies for the best, most helpful ways to present those concerns to the author - without the author there. The process of translating a private response to a story into a useful comment is a complex one. Knowing how to do that isn't something we're born with - but I'm hoping it's a skill that can be taught.

I also want my students to see that the main benefit of a workshop is not having your own work critiqued, but learning from reading other people's. That had better be the main benefit - if you have ten people in a workshop, each will spend 90% of their time critiquing and only 10% being critiqued. And I think that's fine, because there's a huge value to reading work in early drafts. Don't get me wrong, I also think that studying how gifted writers accomplish what they accomplish is a crucially important thing to do. But looking at significantly under-realized work can be at least as instructive. I have many bad writing habits that I never saw until I encountered them in other people's work, if only because I was too close to my own to have much perspective at all.

I mentioned that another tendency of workshops is to drift toward consensus. In my view, that's a particularly insidious danger because one of the most important lessons for any writer to learn - and for some of us it takes a long, long time - is that there will always people who don't like our work. There are people who don't like Hemingway, Woolf, Austen, Faulkner and on and and on. Having detractors is inevitable. Yet when we're in a workshop, we want the approval of the group - sometimes even more than we want advice. So, along with using my anonymous drafts to illustrate that inevitably participants respond more and less positively to particular works, I'm going to ask that each student be honest with herself each time about whether she feels connected to the author's basic intent, and if not, to consider playing a smaller role in the discussion. Years of experience have taught me that people who respond positively to a piece are almost always more helpful to an author than people who don't - which makes a certain amount of sense, though too often in workshops it's the most negative who speak loudest.

I hope some of that gives you all some food for thought. Again, thanks so much to Aggie for inviting me to visit this blog! Oh, and the picture above is just a reminder that every writer needs someone in their life who will never critique their work. . .