How I Write Novels: Choosing The Foundation Song
One of the weird things about learning to write is that habits just crop up organically. Your power’s out, so you write something by longhand, and determine that you’re the writer who works best writing in pen. A few years later, you have discovered that your best works come out of a Moleskine notebook, with a blue fountain pen, in the atrium of the library.
It seems vaguely silly, and perhaps a bit pretentious at times, but you don’t question when the stories start flowing. So you bow to the muse and hope you do not eventually break underneath an accreted layer of accumulated quirks.
For me, I need a song to write a novel.
I discovered this when I was writing my (as yet unpublished) novel The Upterlife. I don’t usually have music on when I’m writing; as a musician, I find myself drawn to the beat of the drums, and then I’m paying attention to “What drum fills would I have used here?” than my story. But when I was driving and plotting, Rise Against’s Re-Education (Through Labor) came on:
And when I heard that raw rage pouring out of my speakers, it seemed to summarize the dystopic future I was envisioning: rusted, built upon the backs of kids who didn’t have a choice, passionate in all the ways that the establishment wasn’t. I put it on repeat.
Later on in the drive, when I got stuck on “What would my hero Amichai do?” I put on that song again. And somehow, Rise Against put me into his head, and those plot problems unknotted themselves spontaneously. It was like the soundtrack to my personal movie, except only that one song worked.
Then, later on, when I was writing my (upcoming) novel Flex, I had similar problems on a cross-country drive. The novel opens with the apartment of a middle-aged Dad catching fire, so the Talking Heads’ “Burning Down The House” caught my attention. And sure enough, when I listened to David Byrne’s plaintive voice, I got into Paul’s confusion and bewilderment that his life was now crashing down around his shoulders because he’d become a magician:
You’d think it was just the title that inspired me, but I listened to all my other songs about fire and middle-aged disaster: nothing. Only this song and this one song would recenter me whenever I got lost in my discovery draft.
The mechanics of it don’t make sense to me. When I wrote the sequel, I was all like, “Okay, the original was a 1980s song, the next song will be some other 1980s hit.” But no. The next novel in the series is all about the chaos and destruction caused by the events in the first novel and how that falls out among the family, so what song caught my ear when I was driving and plotting?
The lyrics to that don’t even make sense. But it summarized desperation in a way that I couldn’t engage with otherwise. When I wrote the battle sequences, with ‘mancers taking down cops in gouts of fire, this is what I listened to about 200 times.
So this time, I gave in. Tomorrow I’ll be starting my next novel in a delayed attempt to hop on the NaNoWriMo bandwagon, and I realized this weekend that I hadn’t found the song that was a sort of bastardized theme song for it. And this novel is going to be about the quest for fine cuisine in a space opera setting, based on all my deep love of cooking shows and Michelin restaurants and Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and I needed a song that expressed some inchoate version of beauty – an ethereal hopefulness that among the hardscrabble death and destruction, there was still something worth fighting for.
I drove, auditioning songs on my iPod, flicking through the 1300 songs one by one, discarding each in turn. I came close a couple of times – weirdly enough, Dar Williams’ “As Cool As I Am” summarized a lot of the romance – but eventually I found that swelling idea of everything I needed to write this:
And as I drove, that plucking of a banjo reminding me a little of Firefly, I envisioned driven chefs and rich madmen carving a trail through the void, and the plot unspooled into my head as though it were being beamed in from some distant star.
It’s beauty. It’s inexplicable.
It’s process, and you don’t question it.
Just Happy Moments I Wish To Record
I had quite a few people yesterday telling me, “Well, I haven’t read your novel Flex yet, but…” To which I responded, “That’s good, because it’s not due out until 2015.” Angry Robot has yet to even reveal the cover yet, though I’m told that awesomeness is coming soon.
But I did slip a copy to a good friend of mine, because he asked. And because frankly, Jeremiah has been having a tremendously shitty year, as he’s recovering from multiple brain surgeries, and had a pretty traumatic experience in at least one of them. So I sent him a copy of Flex – not even a cool ePub version, just the raw Word document I edited it in – figuring that I’d hear back from him in a few weeks.
Or not. I mean, when I was recovering from my open-heart surgery, it took me months to read again between the painkillers and the bodily trauma. I figured brain surgery was worse. It was only my ribs and my heart that got cut up, not my essential sweetmeats.
Then, three hours after I sent him the document, I got this email:
“Over the course of the last month or two I haven’t been able to read anything longer than 5 pages in one sitting. My brain just fluttered away from anything I was supposed to be concentrating on.
“I’m on page 107 of Flex. I will probably finish the book before tonight.”
And at 8:00 that evening, I got a text from him telling me that he had, in fact, read the entire damn book in one sitting.
That makes me deeply happy.
Not because he thinks the book is good, though obviously he does. But because I remember my own frustration in the months after the triple-bypass, trying so hard to read, feeling my gaze just drift away from the page, knowing that one of my old delights had been stolen from me. And then, one night, I sat down to read Robert Jackson Bennett’s American Elsewhere, which remains one of my favorite books – partially because it’s a kick-ass book, but partially because that was the post-surgery book that took me by the hand and showed me yes, you’ll still find joys in reading.
I remember sliding through the first hundred pages of that, enthralled by how easy it was, and enthralled by my enthrallment, thinking Oh my God, I’m back. Normality was now in sight again. And when you’re recuperating from full-body trauma, having an experience that reminds you of what normal is can be so fucking powerful.
And for me to be able to pass that on to someone else feels good.
I don’t know if Flex will sell well. I don’t know if it’ll be reviewed well. I don’t know if any of you will actually like it on any level, once it’s out.
But this is a moment that I’ll cherish, even if everything else collapses. I was That Book for someone. And that feels good.
(Incidentally, still sorting through crit requests on the road, on a pretty spotty connection. You’ll hear from me before next week, and thank you if you offered.)
Would You Like To Critique The Sequel To My Novel?
So I’ve finished the sequel to my upcoming novel Flex, and now is the time that I send it to my usual group of beta readers.
The problem: I need four or five beta readers who haven’t read the first book. Because inevitably, someone who hasn’t read the first book will pick up this one, and I want to know whether it’ll make any sense to them.
So! If you’re willing to read for me, contact me at theferrett@theferrett.com. (Don’t expect to hear back immediately; I’m driving to New Jersey to present at a conference, but I’ll get to ya.) Priority will be given to published writers and/or people who’ve critiqued my stories before. (And if you have read Flex already, either because you blurbed it or reviewed it or whatever, you automatically can beta-read for me if you want. I just didn’t wanna bug you.)
What I am not looking for is an proofreader. When a story’s in this early a draft, entire scenes will be dropped, characters may be re-motivated, whole plotlines may be shifted like writhing anacondas – and so I couldn’t care less whether there’s a misspelled word in a chapter that I’m going to rewrite from scratch. What beta readers give are usually not line-edits, but overall impressions – does this person act like such an idiot that you stop rooting for them? Did the Big Plot Twist feel cheesy? Do these relentless references to Fight Club (hint: there are relentless references to Fight Club) make any sense if you haven’t seen the film?
Turnaround time is 6-8 weeks; I’d like to start redrafting come Christmas. And thanks for thinking of me.
Whatever Happened To Salvatore?
I dreamed about Salvatore last night.
Salvatore was one of those freakish kids who’d achieved his full height in seventh grade – a muscular, bodybuilder’s height, complete with shaved head and wifebeater T-shirt. He got away with bullying because he intimidated the teachers.
Salvatore was not a particularly subtle bully. His favorite technique was to watch the way you held your books. If you did not clasp them to your chest – you know, like a girl was supposed to do – then he would bellow “OPEN CHEST!” and punch you, as hard as he could, in your stomach. Pretty soon all the smaller guys in school were clasping their books to their chest, at which point Salvatore would make fun of you for holding your books like a giiirrrrul.
Though he was definitely a mixed-media bully. Sometimes he’d rough you up in the locker room, just for a change-up.
I wasn’t one of Salvatore’s favorite targets, thankfully, but he was widespread enough that I caught a couple of suffocating hits to the gut. I remember creeping around the hallways of middle school, forever on the lookout, paranoid for the next blow. And last night, I dreamed I was locking the windows of my house against Salvatore, defending against his eventual incursion, only to discover that he was already in the house.
There’s probably a good solid Freudian interpretation of that dream, of course, given all the death we’ve suffered as of late.
But what I wondered was, What was Salvatore doing now?
For in my dream, Salvatore had grown, a colossal and angry and still-muscled man, still a bully, still relishing his physical power. He was frozen in the moment I knew him, almost thirty years ago. Which is unreasonable . Past a certain point, a man who yells “OPEN CHEST!” and punches random strangers on the bus ceases to be a bully and becomes a convict. And he’d be pushing forty-five now, the age when men of physical strength start to feel it ebb, and that certainly would cause him to warp and change in different ways. A bully like Salvatore wouldn’t have been able to be king of the middle school, he’d have to have gotten a job working for someone else, and certainly working as a hired hand would have taken the edge of his kingly violent demeanor.
That’s assuming, of course, that what he lived for was the thrill of the open chest. He showed great glee whenever he punched me, of course, but that was my sole interaction with him. It wasn’t like we hung out reading the newspapers and watching movies and discussing our dreams at the malt shop after the show, and then he buried his knuckles in my abdomen. No, I didn’t know Salvatore in any way beyond thinking of him as a lurking menace.
Who the fuck was Salvatore?
Would Salvatore even remember me? I doubt it. Would he remember those days as his good old days, or – somehow worse – would he have forgotten who he was, having become a loving father and family man? Were there grandchildren who loved their Grampops, never knowing there were men who had nightmares about him thirty years later? It could be. The past has a way of falling like snow over the worst of crimes, and by the time a man is old and feeble, a lot of complexity has been eroded. Salvatore didn’t strike me as being the brightest bulb in the pack. But some of my other bullies went on to become millionaire entrepreneurs (I know this because they apologized to me later for what they’d done in a truly bizarre high school reunion), and if I look back at my own past and go, “God, what an asshole I was back then,” then I have to think of Salvatore and allow for the possibility – not the certainty, but the possibility – that maybe he was going through his own stupid phase, egged on by other dumb kids to play a role that didn’t particularly suit him.
It’s possible Salvatore wakes up, dreaming of punching harmless boys in the chest, and wonders with a sort of existential terror, What was I doing?
People say Once a bully, always a bully, and of course there’s some truth to that. But people also do tremendously stupid things as a teenager that they later regret tremendously, as they’re trying on all sorts of faces to see who they might be when they grow up – certainly I ran a lot of dumb pranks in my time, fuelled by the sort of relentlessly grim Howard Stern-inspired masculinity (which later mutated into 4-chan) that tells people that the only way to be strong is to dish out the strongest insults, and to endure them in exchange. There were certainly people who saw me when I was 19 who thought that I was a bully, albeit a verbally abusive one, but…
…I’m not that guy any more.
Maybe Salvatore isn’t, either.
And maybe he is. Some people never grow out of middle school. But I always allow for the possibility of enlightenment, even if I wouldn’t necessarily invite Salvatore to a convention.
It’s one of the things we don’t like thinking about as humans, but it’s true regardless: Salvatore could have made some dumb mistakes that scarred people for life. And those mistakes were made because Salvatore was like every kid at that age, relentlessly experimenting with personalities and traits, and he did irreparable damage even though who Salvatore eventually came to be was not a bully, but perhaps a kind and clever man.
But in my dreams, he still is. And can never be anything but.
And probably, he pays absolutely no price for this. Like I said, it’s unlikely that he remembers me at all. He may not even remember his “OPEN CHEST!” beatings, having shrugged them off as just a thing he did once and now has no recollection of, a phase he had that amused him for a brief time and then was set aside, like the time I tried playing violin and discovered it hurt my fingers.
The past recedes in the rear-view mirror. Only some people get to remember, and usually the ones who got hurt.
The others drive on, oblivious to that thumping beneath the wheels, not seeing the crumpled body left behind them.
We Say Stupid Things In The Freakout Tree
So my mother-in-law died last night.
The death was, as we are wont to say around here, “Unwelcome but not unexpected.” She’d gone off dialysis because she was in incredible pain, and her husband had died earlier in the year, and she was done with life. Still, the doctors had told us Tuesday or Wednesday, and strangely enough we believed them when they said we had that much time.
So I spent much of last night holding my wife as she sobbed in only the way someone who’s lost their mother can, stroking her hair, muttering all the nonsense things you do when someone’s passed on.
And in the middle of all this, she stopped and said, “This must be hard for you. Knowing there’s nothing you can say to comfort me.”
That was a pretty stupid thing to say, really. She was, as we are also wont to say around here, up in the tree.
We here at La Casa McJuddMetz hew closely to the “tree theory” of relationships, which is to say that any couple lives on a small island with one tree. When things get bad, one person – and only one person – climbs into the tree to have their freakout, while it’s the other person’s job to stay on the ground and talk them down.
Very Bad Things arise when both people need to be in the freakout tree at once. So we have a strict tree protocol in that we may alternate positions in the tree *very rapidly*, but we never both shimmy up that trunk simultaneously.
And so when Gini said, “This must be hard for you,” that was stupid because if there’s any time when someone gets reserved VIP privileges in the tree for the rest of the week, it’s after their goddamned mother’s just died.
But it was sweet, her checking in on me.
And I think of my friend Kat, the mother of my now-deceased goddaughter Rebecca, when we went over to their house to help hand out Halloween candy for the first time since Rebecca had passed. That was an alternately happy and painful event – there would be all the normal joys of handing out candy and seeing the kids in their costumes and handing out warmed spiked cider to the grownups as “grownup candy” –
– and then we’d remember that Rebecca wasn’t here, and wonder what costume she would have worn, and thought of all the candy that kid would have devoured, and then we’d each slip off alone to sneak a private bit of mourning.
And Kat came up to me and said, “I know your introvert batteries are drained. I know all you wanted was to to curl up at home tonight.”
Stupid. Of course I wouldn’t stay at home. Of course I wouldn’t make it more apparent that things had changed this Halloween. Of course I wouldn’t leave another absence for them to notice.
Sweet.
And I think one of the reasons that we function so well, my friends and my family and I, is because we make it pretty damn easy to do the things required of us. It would be easy for us to use our deepest sorrow to climb high into the tree, so high we can’t even see the ground any more, so high we forget the rest of the world exists –
– and yet we take care of our caretakers. We acknowledge the difficulty in being there for someone when there’s not much to say. We thank each other for helping, even when we’d have a damned fine excuse to forget their existence.
We love each other. We mark each other’s sacrifice. And even in the middle of such overlapping sorrows that some days we feel like we will be borne away by cascading waves of tears, we appreciate those who try to hold us tight to shore.
There’s more sorrow coming. More grief. And there’s nothing I can do, and I am so very tired of condolences, and I am so very tired of holding people while they cry and muttering all the usual stupid things one says in the face of death.
But for one moment, in an hour so dark it struck us all blind, Gini reached a hand down from the freakout tree and asked if I needed to come up.
I didn’t. But it lent me strength to know that I could.