The Evening Reader

One of my favorite series on the music and book blog Largehearted Boy is Book Notes, where authors create music playlists that somehow relate to their books. I find a lot of inspiration from music, especially when I am thinking about specific characters. I’ve been pursuing the story in one form or another that’s becoming my NaNoWriMo draft for about four or five years. Over the last few weeks the story has changed drastically, taking twists and turns I had never imagined when writing earlier incarnations.

I actually created a playlist for my original idea about a year and a half ago, when I finally decided that my story would be set in a very specific place and time: Odessa, Texas, in 1981. It just so happens that I lived in Odessa in 1981 (you might know Odessa from the movie or book Friday Night Lights, about the Permian Panthers high school football team), and like one of my main characters I was starting the seventh grade, but that’s mostly where the autobiographical material ends, with one exception: the music. I pulled together this soundtrack from what I remember as being popular around that time (1981 or earlier), what I heard on the radio (it was still AM then, with everything all mixed together), what I heard on the jukebox in the cafeteria at school, and what I heard in the cars of my friends’ older siblings as they drove us to football games.

My book is about two sisters, Melissa and Laurie Jenkins, who are both in junior high in 1981, when Melissa is abducted. Although she is returned unharmed, this event, followed by the brutal murder of a priest from a nearby town, sends a wave of change through the family, and will determine events that follow in their lives. That’s where it stands right now, anyway, and I am trying not to question it too much. It’s all a bit delicate, but I hope to have some excerpts to share by the weekend.

I was lucky I didn’t have to spend much time on this, because I am sure I could have avoided writing for many hours if I hadn’t already pulled most of this together. I have tweaked it a bit for certain characters, just by adding a few songs. Unfortunately, this isn’t the full list, either, but I think it’s a good representation. So, without further ado, my soundtrack for What Hope Looks Like to Other People:

AC/DC, “Back in Black.” Back in Black was released in the summer of 1980, and that fall the Permian Panthers won the Texas State Championship. This song became a sort of anthem for the team through the early 80s (I can’t say about later), and it would play over and over on the jukebox during lunch. The biggest thing for Laurie, who is in the ninth grade, is the fact that she will be going to Permian the following year. When the story begins, high school is like an end to her–the big finish, if you will. College is something vague and hazy, but to go to Permian–for those kids, it was like touching history. That’s how it is for Laurie.

Juice Newton, “Angel of the Morning.” This song works for the story on several levels. For Laurie, it’s a simple romantic song. For Melissa, it means being somebody special to someone, even if not in a romantic sense. For Pauline (their cousin, who has a somewhat major part to play), it represents a sort of desperate hope.

Bruce Springsteen, “Hungry Heart.” This is Melissa’s song for her father, who left three years before and lives in Houston, working for an oil company. She and Laurie visit him during the course of the story. He lives alone in a small apartment, so would not seem to fit the picture of philandering guy in the song, but he’s also a lonely romantic.

Cheap Trick, “Surrender.” This teen anthem works here mainly because Laurie wants so badly to surrender, while Melissa simply cannot. As she enters junior high, she watches her world and her friends change, and she has no idea where her place might be.

Rush, “Limelight.” This is one of those songs you might roll your eyes at now, but the album was released in March of 1981, and it was everywhere. The most popular song was “Tom Sawyer,” but I chose this one because I think again it speaks loudly to the struggles that not only the Jenkins sisters face growing up, but their family members and perhaps even the whole town. Midland/Odessa was experiencing a boom then, and they seemed primed to be the Dallas/Ft. Worth of West Texas, until the bottom fell out. The main question is, how does one go on?

ABBA, “Thank You for the Music.” I have a scene I am not sure will make it into the final draft, but I hope it does: Melissa and her best friend Darlene, in the fifth and sixth grade, would go to Darlene’s house after school every day and listen to The Album, making up performances for each other. When they enter junior high, their friendship shifts, and this is the song, which is a sort of farewell, that makes Melissa the most nostalgic for those days and their friendship.

Foreigner, “Blue Morning, Blue Day.” This song is for Melissa and Laurie’s cousin Pauline. Her character is not as well-drawn as the sisters at this point, but I know she is in her mid-20s, is divorced and has a child who has died.

Eddie Rabbit, “I Love a Rainy Night.” I sort of chose this song for the overall irony of the lyrics (“Showers wash all my cares away/I wake up to a sunny day”), but also for Laurie, who loves this song and who very much sees the world this way.

Roseanne Cash, “Seven Year Ache.” This is another song for Pauline, who meets and starts dating Eddie, a person who will have significant impact on their lives. This one also works on an ironic level…but I can’t say too much about it!

The Go Go’s, “Our Lips Are Sealed.” This is another song for Laurie, but I also chose it because it was one of the first sort of new wave song to hit the radio that year, and it signals a shift from the 70s into the 80s.

Genesis, “No Reply at All.” This song, off Abacab, drives a lot of the book. Basically, it’s a song about the inability to connect with someone, about feeling as though one is not seen or heard. It’s Melissa’s song, and she’s at the center of the story, even if the whole story is not hers. I think, in the end, she will control everything in the narrative.

On Monday, I opened my draft and read through the 5,000+ words I had written in the past week for NaNoWriMo. Let’s forget for a moment that I should probably be somewhere in the 15,000-word range by now. I am still not worried about reaching my goal, and here’s why: after I read through my current draft, I realized that all I had, save for about three pages, was back story, back story, and more back story–you know, all that information one needs to know about a character that isn’t necessarily relevant to the action. At that moment, I realized I needed help.

Like a lot of bookish people, when I need help or inspiration, I turn to books. For many years, like a lot of people out there who are interested in writing, I’ve turned to Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. When I need straight-out, get-off-your-butt-and-write-you-can-do-this inspiration, nothing works better than this book. Plus, she’s funny. Take a look:

I know some very great writers, writers who you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can be sure that you have created God in your own image when God hates all the same people you do.)

I need to bring up radio station KFKD, or K-Fucked, here…If you are not careful, station KFKD will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo. Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one’s specialness, of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is. Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists of all the things one doesn’t do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything one touches turns to shit, that one doesn’t do relationships well, that one is in every way a fraud, incapable of selfless love, that one has no talent or insight, and on and on and on. You might as well have heavy-metal music piped in through headphones while you are trying to get your work done. You have to get things quiet so you can hear your characters and let them guide your story.

On Monday, though, I didn’t need inspiration to hear my characters, or to get moving. I needed what I’ll call technical inspiration, or in other words: how do I get off the endless wheel of back story and character description? For that, I turn to a book I recently discovered: Story, by Robert McKee. Technically, this is a book for screenwriters, but it is the best book about the mechanics (if I may be so crass) of writing a story that I have ever read. I’ve taken several workshops, read all kinds of books, have several writer friends, but one thing I’ve never really experienced, outside of this book, is a terrific technical discussion of how stories work. Writers like to talk about ideas, about prompts, about writing exercises, and especially, about other writers. But they don’t always like to break it down, to talk about the technical aspects. I think, in their defense, that this is because they fear people will believe that story can be reduced to a formula. In a sense, it can. But as McKee points out in is books, it is all the specifics one brings to character and story that make it unique. The process need not be mysterious–the characters bring us the mystery of what it is to be people in specific circumstances and reacting to those circumstances in unique ways.

So I spent some time with Mr. McKee (well, with his book), and now I have an idea of how to proceed, of what I need to get on the page. My characters suddenly have someplace to go. It was exactly what I needed to get the story moving again. (And no, I am not starting over. I’ll worry about editing those first 5,000+ words when all is said and done.) I would highly recommend this book to anyone wondering what to do next in a scene or a story, or particularly if you decide your 50,000 words might be better for the screen than for the page.

On that note, the Wall Street Journal had an article this past week entitled “How to Write a Great Novel,” where many well-known published writers discuss their writing process. A few of my favorites:

Orhan Pamuk: Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk often rewrites the first line of his novels 50 or 100 times. “The hardest thing is always the first sentence—that is painful,” says Mr. Pamuk…Mr. Pamuk writes by hand, in graph-paper notebooks, filling a page with prose and leaving the adjacent page blank for revisions, which he inserts with dialogue-like balloons. He sends his notebooks to a speed typist who returns them as typed manuscripts; then he marks the pages up and sends them back to be retyped. The cycle continues three or four times.

Kazuo Ishiguro: He collects his notes in binders and writes a first draft by hand. He edits with a pencil, then types the revised version into a computer, where he further refines it, sometimes deleting chunks as large as 100 pages.

Dan Chaon: His most recent novel, “Await Your Reply,” which has three interlocking narratives about identity theft, started out as scattered pictures of a lighthouse on a prairie, a car driving into the arctic tundra under a midnight sun and a boy and his father driving to the hospital at night with the boy’s severed hand, resting on ice. He described each scene on a card, then began fleshing out the plotlines, alternating among blue, pink and green cards when he moved between narratives.

Margaret Atwood: Ms. Atwood, who has written 13 novels, as well as poetry, short stories and nonfiction works, rarely gets writer’s block. When ideas hit her, she scribbles phrases and notes on napkins, restaurant menus, in the margins of newspapers. She starts with a rough notion of how the story will develop, “which usually turns out to be wrong,” she says. She moves back and forth between writing longhand and on the computer. When a narrative arc starts to take shape, she prints out chapters and arranges them in piles on the floor, and plays with the order by moving piles around.

Amitav Gosh: Amitav Ghosh’s first novel ended in failure. He was in his mid 20s, doing research on agricultural development at a think tank in Kerala, India. He worked on the first draft for a year. “It was terrible and I had to throw it all away,” he says…”It never gets easier; it’s always hard, it’s always a test,” says Mr. Ghosh, who splits his time between Goa, India, and Brooklyn, N.Y. “I’ve reached a point in my life where if a sentence seems easy, I distrust it.”