Reading from my book at Yale

I’m going to be reading from my novel at the Town Meets Gown Read In at 6 p.m., Tuesday, October 13 at the McDougal Center for Graduate Student Life, 320 York Street in New Haven. It’s organized by The New Haven Review. Learn more about the event here.

Film adaptations of short stories and novels

I have another short piece up on The New Haven Review website, this one about how short stories may be a better source for cinematic adaption than novels.

Tough comparisons

As part of getting the book in front of other people, part of my job is to be ready to compare it with other known quantities. What is it similar to?

I’m going to be giving this a lot more thought, but right now I would say that it should appeal to fans of This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff since it concerns a boy in similar kinds of trouble as my main character. It also covers a span of a few years and has an episodic structure to it. The main differences are that my character is a little younger, which makes a lot of difference in the action, and that my book is in third person.

One reason I hesitate (aside from the fear of sounding arrogant) to claim the similarities is that TBL is a memoir, but I don’t think that’s too much of a problem. Every memoir claims to read like a novel, but that one truly does. I bet there are a lot of readers who always just assumed it was an autobiographical novel.

Now, this answer is based on looking at the more tangible characteristics of  plot and theme. If I had more time, I would say the real similarities are with books whose intangible characteristics of tone and pace, the mechanisms of contemplation that a book deploys, have inspired me. It’s the fans of those books that I’m really hoping to impress. The Echo Maker by Richard Powers was on my mind a lot as I wrote this. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout came to me late in this process, but I recognized it as a great example of the kind of thing I was trying to achieve in the creation of a consciousness.

But those are very different stories, so I think the comparison used in a short-hand way would confuse readers of those books. You need more time to spell out those kinds of connections.

Point-of-view

I knew when I started this book that I wanted it to be in the third person for several reasons. One, it was going to be a coming-of-age story about a child in trouble, and I didn’t want to invite comparisons to the greats — Huck Finn, Scout Finch, Holden Caulfield. Part of what makes them great is their voices. All those books are in the first person with precocious one-of-a-kind narrators, and I felt like any book that started out in first person in a child’s voice naturally gets compared to those other books. I figured having mine in the third person would give me a little room to breath.

Another reason was a practical consideration. It seemed to me that I would have to develop a voice for my character before I could write the first line. Think of the fabulous first lines of Finn and Catcher. How do you write any other line in the book without having that clear already? But I was still discovering my character’s voice and I was eager to get started. I needed his voice to emerge as I worked on the book. He would still be one-of-a-kind, but it wouldn’t necessarily show in the force of his own narrative style. He was going to emerge more quietly for me and for the reader.

When I started, I looked around for other models — books for grownups about children that are told in third person — and it’s actually kind of hard to find any. The closest I found was Jim The Boy by Tony Earley. I also spent a lot of time studying The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, which is primarily told in first-person but has places where the POV shifts. I was particularly interested in how it tells about Cholly using free indirect style. Cholly is an adult, but the scenes following him–background and present action–are terribly important to story of Pecola, the child at the center of the story. Morrison’s style there ended up being a big influence.

Two-and-half years later, I still have my eyes peeled, and I don’t see a lot of examples. A coming-of-age story, written for grownups, with a child at its center, told from the third person. First person seems to be the default setting for books like this. If you can think of any, please let me know.

Out of the shadows

I’ve decided to “de-anononymize” workingonanovel, a blog that I’ve been keeping for over two years. It’s basically the kind of journal that I assume most novelists keep alongside their manuscript where they record what’s going on with them related to getting the book written, except that I kept it online and just never told anyone it was there. It’s really about process and really personal in the most mundane sense of the word. It’s mostly an obsessive record of what I did every day.

But there are little flashes of interest — seeds of mini-essays about craft and process as I figured things out, close readings of other books, explorations about how the advice and example of other great writers can be put into practice in my book. That kind of stuff wasn’t the point of the blog — I just let it come when it could come — so it’s buried in with all the boring stuff.

I think I will reserve that blog for work on the book (or the next one) itself, therefore it probably won’t be very active for the time being. And this blog will be more about what’s going on with the journey to publication. In reality, the line between the blogs can’t be too bright, since finding a publisher will undoubtedly spur more  work on the novel itself. Let’s hope I get to have the problem.

Essay on The New Haven Review

I have an essay up on The New Haven Review blog today about the strange reaction writers have to the question of whether their work is autobiographical.