Had a wiggly-wobbly November and December and fell off my game.
When I’m drafting, I like to put in 1000 polished words a day, a very doable number for me. It’s how I got through my first two books.
But, like any endurance sport, I need to build up to it. So last week, I put in 250 words daily. This week, I’m shooting for 500 daily. Next week, hopefully 750. Then the jump to 1000, which I’m hoping to sustain to the bloody end.
Wish me luck.
SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t read What Happened in Granite Creek, do not proceed any further! You’ve been warned!
I want to talk about an event that happens in the book, because it’s based on a real one.
Koty disappears on the eve of an ice storm. This ice storm was a real event, one that affected New England in December of 2008.
I live in Framingham, Massachusetts, which is about 20 miles west of Boston. My town was spared the brunt of this storm: we didn’t lose power, and it wasn’t ice (it was mostly rain, I think…maybe a little snow). But to the west and north of me, oh man! It was a different story, a different world even: everything was encased in ice. Power was out in some places for over a week. Roads were impassable. Trees were down. It was a MESS, it made national headlines, and it dominated the news in this area for quite some time.
Somewhere along the way, this ice storm got stuck in my head. It seemed like a perfect time for something devious to happen: someone goes missing, but because of all the confusion that results from lost power, cut phone lines, and isolated residents, precious time and clues are lost. I knew even then that I’d somehow use the storm at some point in some story. It became clear when I sat down to work on the draft of What Happened in Granite Creek a year and a half later that I had a ready-made, realistic event from which to draw.
Obviously, I’m not the first writer to do this…so many books and films are inspired by real events or use real events as a backdrop or as an inciting incident. The Grapes of Wrath (the Dust Bowl), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Hurricane Katrina), and The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III (9/11) all come to mind.
I’m sure you can think of others: share in the comments.
Koty disappears on the eve of an ice storm…this ice storm was a real event, one that affected New England in December of 2008. I live in Framingham, Massachusetts, which is about 20 miles west of Boston. My town was spared the brunt of this storm: we didn’t lose power, and it wasn’t ice (I’m trying to remember…it was rain, I think…maybe a little snow). But to the west and north of me, man. It was a different story, a different world even: everything was encased in ice. Power was out in some places for over a week. Roads were impassable. Tree limbs were down. It was a MESS, and it dominated the news in the area for weeks.
Somewhere along the way, this ice storm got stuck in my head. It seemed like a perfect time for something devious to happen: someone goes missing, but in all the chaos, precious time and clues are lost. I knew even then that I’d somehow use the storm at some point in a story. It became clear when I sat down to work on the draft of What Happened in Granite Creek that I had a ready-made, realistic event from which to draw.
NOTE: This post is part of my ongoing series called “What Really Happened While I Was Writing What Happened in Granite Creek.” Occasionally, some of these posts will contain spoilers. I’d rate this one “medium” level, so advance at your own risk. (The perfect solution, of course, would be to read What Happened in Granite Creek and then come back to this post. See what I did there? 😉 )
When I wrote the short story, “Support Our Troops,” I had no idea that the full-blown novel — What Happened in Granite Creek — would evolve into a book filled with suspense/mystery. That’s the fun thing about writing: those times when the story takes over and leads your imagination down the road not taken.
This new road, however, required me to stop and research certain things, like guns and dead bodies and police procedure.
Have you ever read a book where you were awed by the amount of research that went into it? Share in the comments.
And if you share this post on Twitter, remember to use the hashtag #WHIGC.
I put a lot of thought into my characters’ names, as I imagine most writers do.
I’m particularly interested in a name’s meaning, both subtle meanings — like a name’s origins — and more obvious meanings. To wit: in one of my short stories, “Orange Pineapple,” one of the main characters has low self-esteem and is down on his luck; I named him “Les.” The Lolita-like character in the same story is named “Candy.”
But back to What Happened in Granite Creek. In the original version of the short story, “Support Our Troops,” (upon which the novel is based), the quadruple amputee who lost his limbs while serving in Iraq was named Jamie Wigglesworth.
Why Wigglesworth? A few years ago, I met a 100-year-old woman in a nursing home whose last name was Wigglesworth, and I always liked it. It was memorable, and it seemed like a good old-fashioned Yankee name. Oh, but my beta readers hated it.
HATED.
IT.
But why?
The main reason was the fact the character is a quad amputee, with four missing limbs. Since the word “wiggles” was part of the last name, some of my beta readers thought it was in poor taste, like a bad joke. Others thought it was distracting. Still other just thought the name was too weird. I could see their point.
So off I went, researching Yankee surnames, since Jamie’s family has deep roots in the small fictional New Hampshire town of Granite Creek. The name I settled on was “Briggs” — the origins of the name relates to the characters, particularly Barbara Briggs (I’m not going to give it away here, but if you’ve read the book and want to know the origin of the name, look here). I love placing these hidden Easter eggs in my books; I hope it makes for a richer reading experience. At the same time, this particular little egg won’t hurt the readers who don’t have any knowledge of the name’s origins.
As for first names, Koty’s name was always Koty, short for Dakota, which reflects where she was born. When I did some research into that name, I thought it was cool that the name means “friend,” since Koty is in desperate need of a friend, especially in the beginning. Wayne was always Wayne…it just came across as a strong name (it actually means wagon maker).
As for Jamie, I wanted a male name that isn’t too common, but also a name that could be either gender, since Jamie’s mother had a hard time having a baby, and I could see her wanting a name that could work either way. (I went back and forth on the spelling; there’s a character named Jamie in the movie Love, Actually, and writers spelled it J-A-M-I-E, which was good enough for me. Yep, it’s the English spelling.)
Koty’s daughters are all named after flowers, something I could see a young idealistic Koty opting for as a way to make a tough situation a little easier. (The original short story also had a “Lily” who didn’t make it into the full blown novel, poor kid.)
As a reader, how much do you pay attention to characters’ names? Do you have any favorites? Any least favorites (or names that you encountered that affected your reading of the story). Share in the comments.
What Happened in Granite Creek (WHIGC) plays with time. Part one alternates between “present day” (the fall of 2008) and the past, which starts in March 1995 and goes through November 2007. Part two takes place six years into the future (from the “present day”), so 2014.
I was inspired by The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. I found it to be an incredible story, but as a writer, I was awed by the craft aspect. I can’t even imagine what Niffenegger went through to keep that timeline straight. Now, I realize Niffenegger’s book is about time travel. So the going-back-in-time-in-certain-chapters structure actually makes sense, but still.
Anyhow, while I was reading her book, I’d just started to seriously draft WHIGC. My novel felt right in first person, present tense, but I also knew I needed to weave in a lot of back story since two of my main characters — Koty and Wayne — had been married for twelve years and the landscape of this marriage — all its hills and valleys and craters — were important to the story and to the characters. I didn’t want to get mired in flashbacks. Unsure of what to do, I just decided to write the scene when Koty and Wayne first meet. I wrote it in first person, present tense and realized it worked. Well, why not keep it? I thought. I can play with time. As long as I make it clear to my readers, it should work. (Jodi Picoult, one of my faves, also uses this structure in some of her books — My Sister’s Keeper comes to mind).
One of my beta readers asked if I thought this “looping timeline” would become a signature of my work. I don’t think so. My first novel, Forgotten April, went in chronological order (although there were plenty of flashbacks). My third novel, which I’m working on now, is moving forward (so far).
But I did have fun playing with time in WHIGC.
What books have you read that play with time? Do you like it, or does it feel like cheating to you (I won’t take offense — I know not everyone will like the style)? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Remember, if you tweet this post, use the hashtag #WHIGC.
What Happened in Granite Creek evolved from my short story “Support Our Troops,” which I wrote in November 2007. I always knew the short story wanted to be a novel and even scribbled a climactic scene when I was drafting the short story, holding it in my “Extras” folder, knowing I’d come back to it eventually.
The people in my writers’ group, the Nobscot Niblets, were the first folks to read the short story. Reaction was mixed: people either loved it or hated it. The lovers made me feel good, but the haters were some of the members whose opinions I respected most, and I took their comments to heart.
One member felt the story was a bit cliché, and he was right since I’d originally set it in the south with every stereotypical thing you could attach to a southern family. Another member hated—and I mean HATED—the story, mainly because she couldn’t understand why Koty would stay in such a miserable situation. This same member also hated (rightfully so) Koty’s husband, because he was hateful…a total flat character. A person is never all good or all bad, but you wouldn’t know it by the way I’d written Wayne four years ago.
I revised and revised, believing in the story in a way I’d never believed before. Life got in the way for a while. In May 2008, I was moving and finishing up my grad school thesis – I included “Support Our Troops” in it, having worked on it under the gaze of my wonderful faculty advisor, the writer Leah Hager Cohen.
After that, I sent the story out to some literary journals and received some rejections and a few encouraging notes. I shared the story with a friend, Stacy, who sat me down and reminded me that the story was not done, that I had to finish it. She was right, and I knew it, but I didn’t have a clue how to go about completing it. This was the summer of 2008.
Finally, in the spring of 2009, the story was accepted by the editors at FictionWeekly.com. The editors wanted to know if I’d be willing to do some trimming – they felt the story began around page 6, and they wondered if I could condense some of the details and weave them in elsewhere. They were absolutely correct, to the point where I felt many of the details weren’t even necessary. I literally lopped off six pages and started the story without doing too much backtracking or re-weaving.
The short story was published in June 2009. The reaction I got from readers reminded me—once again—that the story needed to go longer. People wanted to know what happened with Koty and Jamie. So that summer, I sat down and tackled it, having a hazy idea of where the story was going, but not the first clue how to get there.
When you meet two of the main characters in the short story and novel – Koty and her husband, Wayne – they’ve been married for 12 years. It’s an unhappy marriage, but that characterization is unfair, I think, since what marriage is ever entirely happy or entirely sad? It’s usually a combination of both, and I knew it was important to show the full landscape, not simply one close-up shot. Wayne and Koty had a history, and not all of it was bad—parts of it were happy, normal even, and I wanted to show this without getting weighed down in clunky flashbacks.
At the same time I was figuring this out, I was reading The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, which is a book I love because of the story, but also because of the crafting behind it, specifically how the author handles time. Her book inspired me to play with time in the draft of the novel. This was extremely liberating — it gave me the freedom to show scenes from the past by alternating my timeline between chapters: one thread runs in chronological order from September 2008 to December 2008 (in Part I) while the second thread runs in chronological order from 1995 to 2007 (again in Part 1). Part II then jumps ahead six years and takes the reader from March 2014 to May 2014.
Once I figured out the structure, the writing went smoothly — easily, actually. I 
finished the first draft in the spring of 2010. I did a little work here and there through July 2010. Then, I didn’t touch it again until March 2011, which was when I revised and took a hard look at everything. It went off to my beta readers in June 2011. With their feedback, I revised the final draft in July and August 2011 and fit in some last-minute research that came about in an unexpected manner (more on this in another post). And here we are today with the final version: from “Support Our Troops” to What Happened in Granite Creek.
My hope is the story and characters are real in each reader’s mind. No cardboard characters, no clichés, plenty of surprises, but all grounded in a nitty-gritty reality. That’s my hope, anyway, but, of course, I leave the final assessment up to you, the reader.
Read on!
Twitter hashtag: #WHIGC
I received my MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., and I’ll never forget something the director of the program once said, because it puzzled me, at first.
I don’t remember what semester it was — my second or third, most likely. We were finishing up a class with Steven, the director, and somehow he started talking about the writing program’s process for accepting students. When someone applied to the program, he or she submitted a writing sample. The writing sample was shared with two faculty members who were in charge of reviewing it (independently) and giving it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Two thumbs up? All good; prospective student accepted. Two thumbs down? Rejection.
Here’s where it got interesting. Steven was saying how his most recent batch of applications had more split votes than ever before, meaning he was dealing with writing samples where one faculty member gave it a thumbs up and another gave it a thumbs down.
Steven then smiled and said, “This means the writing samples are getting better.”
Huh? How could a split vote indicate the writing samples were stronger? Wouldn’t two thumbs up always trump a split vote?
I eventually realized Steven was correct. The beauty is in the polarity of the split vote. A work that’s polarizing — meaning there are those who love it and those who don’t — is often a work that stands out, gets talked about and debated over, and makes a difference (in a good or bad way, depending on your viewpoint).
Yes, receiving two thumbs up is not a BAD thing, and it often does trump split votes. But there is something special, I think, about receiving that split vote. It indicates (though not always) that there’s something irksome there…something itchy…perhaps something uncomfortable…something worth talking and even arguing about.
For me, as a writer, that’s what I’d like my stories to be: treasures to some and irksome and irritating to others.
Why?
Because it would show my writing isn’t residing in the Land of Vanilla. There’s nothing wrong with that place: I can appreciate stories that are squarely set there, and I can appreciate the fact some readers are happiest reading those types of stories. But I know if I stayed there, I wouldn’t be true to the stories in my heart.
As I once said to a friend, I like lifting up the rocks and writing about the world of the creepy crawly things underneath. I like grit. I like dark. That doesn’t mean I don’t like a healthy dose of happy, but, for me, there are many shades of happily ever after — not all versions include rainbows and unicorns and the protag getting her man.
Forgotten April, my first book, is, for the most part, from the Land of Vanilla, and that’s not to say everyone will like it; rather, it’s not so polarizing that it’s going to have as many thumbs down as it has thumbs up (the story isn’t irksome enough).
What Happened in Granite Creek, which is coming out in a few days, will likely be more polarizing for a variety of reasons (it was with my beta readers).
As scary as the thought is of getting some of those thumbs down votes, I think I’m okay with that.
How ’bout you: when you read something where you react strongly — either positively or negatively — what do you do: will you post a review? Recommend or warn people? Get a refund on the book? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Considering how insane I am with my cat/muse, I think it’s best we let my ovaries be.
Anyhow. Yeah. I’d love for you to meet my muse and not-so-little kitty, Dorian Gray (named after that dastardly and dashing character in the Oscar Wilde novel of the same name).
Handsome Boy.
Avid Reader.
Exercise Maven.
Domestic Darling.
Cunning and Sly.
Who — or what — inspires you? Share in the comments.
…it’s an art contest. — Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
I had this quote taped to various walls and mirrors in my apartment until I no longer needed the reminders.
Toiling away for years on something doesn’t necessarily make the something better. There are no awards for “novel that took the longest to write” (replace the word “novel” with whatever your passion is).
It took me some time to accept this, to feel it in my bones, you know? But I do now, and it’s been so freeing and transformational.
Go create some art today (replace “art” with whatever it is that matters to you).
Agree or disagree?
Okay, so this isn’t an original concept. Many smart writers like Zoe Winters and Dean Wesley Smith came to this conclusion before I did.
But it’s true: writing is easy.
For many of you writers out there (and even you readers), you’re probably thinking I’m nuts, since it goes against everything we’ve been told. That’s the thing: we — well, I, at least — never questioned the statement “writing is hard,” a statement that I encountered sometime when I was a kid and bolstered in high school, college, and most certainly by many scribes and graduate school programs.
I started to question the statement when, over the last year or so, I began feeling that writing had gotten a whole lot easier. And then I started listening to some of the whisperings of some successful writers who were willing to come clean and reveal, “Yeah, writing isn’t hard.”
If you love doing it and you have any sort of talent for it, well, it will feel pretty easy and straight forward 90 percent of the time. The other 10 percent goes like this: 5 percent is fear (usually unfounded) that you bring to the table. The other 5 percent involves actual legitimate challenges — a story that isn’t working, some research issue that’s turned into a pain in the ass, things like that.
I’m not saying there aren’t hard moments — there are — but I do believe that writing is easy. Even revising. Especially once you’ve gotten through a whole book and seen it to the very end. I’ll admit you might have a little extra dose of “hard stuff” during that first book, but I’d be willing to bet — simply because I’ve been there — that much of it you bring on yourself because you’re thinking “Gee, this is supposed to be hard.” So you make it hard. Forgotten April shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did, but I got caught up in the myth.
Think about many of the classic “greats.” Many — William Carlos Williams comes to mind for some reason — worked day jobs. The writing they did was in stolen moments here and there, yet they were able to create brilliant work. Brilliance doesn’t need weeks and months and years to occur. Sometimes our most brilliant ideas happen in the most unlikely places, like the shower (Einstein thought so). The brilliance happens easily, and it’s available to all of us.
I’m not saying writing doesn’t take work. Of course it does. Putting together a 100,000-word novel doesn’t happen overnight. It takes commitment and diligence. Now, those things may be hard, at first (although if you tell yourself commitment to a deadline is easy, I bet it will be). But the writing part isn’t hard. (If writers are being honest with themselves, they’d probably agree…once you sit down and you’re “in it,” it comes easily because that’s what you love to do.)
I know plenty of writers out there will read this and dismiss my theory right away. All I can say is this: before you do so, consider it. What if I’m right? What if writing is easy and we’d been told a lie all this time?
