If you’ve not nominated it yet, your last chance is Sunday, October 1st. Visit the campaign page and vote before it’s too late! At the campaign page you’ll have a chance to learn more about the book, download an excerpt, and read about its background.
And if Amazon selects the book for publication, you’ll receive a free digital copy.
New cover
If you nominated Hagar’s Mother earlier this month, you probably noticed the cover changed. The decision was mine and is purely cosmetic. Two weeks ago I decided to shake things up and offer readers a better idea of the book’s focus and subject matter.
Will I stick with the new cover in the final book? I’m not sure yet. I like the old one. It has a distant, almost whimsical feel to it, but am concerned that’s not the right message to convey.
At this moment, I’m simply eager to cross the finish line and hear back from Amazon their decision. Either way, I’m looking forward to getting the book into reader’s hands.
I’m pleased to announce that Hagar’s Mother, the sequel to Bridge Daughter, is now seeking nominations on Kindle Scout!
Amazon’s Kindle Scout program allows for readers like you to preview and evaluate unpublished books. Your nomination acts as a vote for Kindle Press editors to select the books you like.
If Hagar’s Mother receives enough nominations over the next 30 days, Amazon will publish and promote it across their site.
What’s more, if you vote for Hagar’s Mother and it’s published, you’ll receive a free digital copy! It costs nothing to vote and takes no more than a minute of your time.
Many people have been asking me about the follow-up to Bridge Daughter…I’ve been pretty tight-lipped about the project, but did want to share that I finished the final draft tonight.
Hagar’s Mother clocks in around 90,000 words. It’s a not-quite-direct sequel, in the sense that the events of the book take place a generation later than Bridge Daughter. The history of bridge daughters is explored further as well as the story of Hanna’s family.
Quite exhausted at the moment. I have high hopes for this book. Wish me luck! More news coming soon.
Margalit Fox wrote an eye-opening Times essay in 2014 on the art and craft of writing obituaries, so I’m familiar with her name and work. The recent NPR interview coincided with the release of a documentary on Fox and Weber, Obit: Life on Deadline, which I certainly look forward to seeing.
My own interest in all of this comes from a short story I published years back in the North American Review called “The Obituarist”. Researching and writing that story led to my own interest in this underappreciated field of journalism.
Like Ann Wroe’s thoughts on the profession, Fox and Weber share fascinating insights on this odd but rewarding career path. There’s a goldmine of wisdom in the interview, but it’s this observation that stood out for me:
And I think the other great attraction is we are the most purely narrative genre in any daily paper. If you think about how an obit is structured, we are taxed with taking our subjects from cradle to grave, and that gives obits a built-in narrative arc, the arc of how someone lived his or her life. And who doesn’t want to start the day reading a really good story?
I look through the obituaries of the New York Times and the Telegraph. I’ll spot someone who looks really interesting and I’ll hear a bell going off in my head. I do it for the story, and not whether the person is famous. I love it when someone’s had a quirky career that we wouldn’t be dealing with in any other part of the paper, such as a woodcarver or a whale hunter or a firefighter.
On the career itself:
It’s odd because people think it’s a rather gloomy job, but it’s very seldom a sad job. Usually, the people you’re dealing with have lived for ages and have done really interesting things. … An obit is really a celebration of a life. It’s really a joyful thing most of the time. That’s why I love the job.
I believe a great exercise for any student of writing would be to select someone currently alive, famous or not, and write their life story in under 1,000 words. Do that five, ten, twenty times, each time a different person. The exercise will change how you approaching writing stories, from microfiction to saga-length novels.
Last time I wrote about keeping a writing notebook. Let’s say you started one, or have been keeping a notebook for some time. What do you do with it? Once you’ve filled a notebook with all these ideas, how do you transfer that inspiration to a short story or novel?
On occasion I revisit my writing notebooks for inspiration…Many of my stories evolve from my own (sometimes misplaced) attempts to wire two or three bits of disparate inspiration together and see if sparks fly.
The inspiration for the story they published (“The Obituarist”) came from three lines scribbled into my notebook years ago:
“The Obituarist – Dying, old age, writes obits for living ppl. Also writes fiction—short stories?—and has come to realize that man is reliant on conflict, tension, etc. because all our stories rely on them, and they are not stories otherwise. Speaking to a young person writing his obit. (Or he writes book reviews.)”
That was it. I had a title alright, and some idea of a character and his situation, but nothing further. As I explained for NAR, about a year after writing this in my notebook I began working on the story itself, which is now collected in A Concordance of One’s Life.
This is the true value of a free-form writing notebook. For some people, a writing notebook is to prevent forgetting something. For others, a notebook is a journal, a way to talk to one’s self, a method of getting down pent-up emotions, ideas, or even a fleeting notion that may or may not be useful later.
I keep a writing notebook to externalize my thoughts. Externalizing inspiration, no matter how crazy or random the inspiration may seem, is itself an act of creation. Writing an idea in a notebook is as important as sitting down before the computer and formally typing the story. Those erratic sentences I scribbled about the obituarist were not subsidiary or tangential to writing the story. Those words were the genesis. The story started with me scratching those erratic lines into my notebook, not a year later when I typed the opening sentence in my word processor.
By committing some scattered notions to the page, I’m getting them out of my skull—where they’re fluid, malleable, and insubstantial—and forcing them into the physical world, where they take shape and harden into form. It’s important to judge my ideas objectively in the bald daylight to determine if they’re worth expanding upon.
Plenty of my inspirations go no further than the notebook. That’s not a bad thing. Most do not age well. When I return to my notebook, I often blanch upon reading these old inspirations. I will hurry to turn the page—a sure indication I made the best decision not to pursue them.
Wiring sources of inspiration together
In my NAR essay, I wrote that “The Obituarist” grew from a single idea. More often I find success in combining ideas, “to wire two or three bits of disparate inspiration together and see if sparks fly.”
I hold a pet theory that true inspiration is rarely, if ever, a single atomic idea. Inspiration is more often multiple ideas coalescing into one. These balls of inspiration accrete mass over time until a tipping point is reached, and the creator feels the urgent need to get the accumulation down on the page in the form of a story. (Or on the canvas, or modeled in clay, and so on.)
For an example of wiring disparate bits of inspiration together, I point to another story in the collection, “A Concordance of One’s Life.” The elements from my notebook contributing to the story include:
Man writes a concordance of his own memoirs (but why?)
Adult feels cheated about something that happened when he was young
Small town becomes a literary tourist attraction (a la Hemingway’s house in Key West)
A man with a name no one can pronounce
When I began writing “Concordance”, the early drafts only involved points 1 and 2. I thought pairing them answered that first question (“but why?”). I was wrong; the early drafts of the story went nowhere. I’d noted the second two bits of inspiration in my notebook before starting the first draft but failed to make a connection. I thought they were for a separate story, if I used them at all.
In a later draft, I added the third inspiration and sparks began to fire. The quiet mountain town as a tourist attraction added a quirky backdrop to my drafts, odd scenes of faceless people going from location to location with their well-worn concordances in hand. Still, the story was shiftless and moody and failed to progress.
The final bit of inspiration came from waking one Saturday morning and, hazy-headed, realizing the cheated man was not the concordance’s author. Rather, the narrator was a friend or an acquaintance who went unmentioned in the concordance (even though everyone else in town is described within it).
I’d given up on the story several times over a span of nearly two years. Patience and focus on the story’s needs led to plenty of sparks that Saturday morning. The draft I wrote became more-or-less what was published by Watchword later that year.
(Somewhere in this is a moral about not giving up on stories, but I must confess it’s sometimes good to cut anchor and move on. Some stories simply cannot be salvaged.)
The fourth point on inspiration—”man with a name no one can pronounce”—found its way into the story during the Saturday morning writing session. It was a last-minute addition. I’d been thinking about the man with the unpronounceable name as the basis for another story, but it had no feet. At the computer Saturday morning, I included it as a gag, a side bit of detail. As the story came to fruition, I realized it was one of the most salient aspects of “A Concordance of One’s Life.”