Coming to the End

As writers, we strive to make our characters as real as possible. Authentic. True to life. We want them, in the eyes of our readers, to be people. Sometimes, this works better than others. Like an accomplished actor fully inhabiting a role, sometimes our characters inhabit us.

 This doesn’t happened by accident, and there’s nothing (well, not much) magical about it. My most recent character, Samuel Joseph, began to take form on the page after weeks and weeks of character development work, exploration, and (literally) many months of research about the world he inhabited.

 There were false starts – plenty of them. I would find myself sending him down roads that I wanted instead of letting the character develop on the page. More than once, I had to step aside and let the creative process drive the character, instead of my authorial intentions. This made the eventual book that I wrote very different from what I originally intended.

But it also made it unique in a way that only two of my other works have been for me, as the author. There came a point, after all these months of research and weeks of character development, when Samuel Joseph began to be a presence when I sat down to write, and, not long after that, Samuel Joseph inhabited me. I sat down (daily) to write at the typewriter (yes, I used an actual typewriter for the first draft of this piece) and just let go, and there he’d be, telling his story. It felt magical. It felt profoundly spiritual. But it took months of hard work to get there.

And then, there’s now. The book is done. It is in its very final edit. People read the first draft, and the things they said they needed more of were – all of them – things I’d already written in the rough drafts, but neglected to put in the first version of my manuscript. Sammy had told me a complete story – I’d just not passed on the complete story. But now, after many edits and three rounds of readers, Sammy’s story is finished. And there is a place in me that feels like I’ve lost a part of myself. It is very much like mourning.

 Only twice before has a character so fully inhabited me that I felt a real person was gone from my life at the end. The first was my first novel, Two Mothers Speak, published in the 90s, and based on true stories. The people I was writing about there were real (though heavily fictionalized) and I felt them with me as I wrote. The second was my main character, Theo, in my book Locus of Memory, just recently published, who, as I think about the time I lived with her, was like a window into the souls of two women who have been very important in my life. I’ve written other books, and I’ve liked my characters, but none of them came into my heart as deeply as Sammy. In fact neither Aggie (the main character in Two Mothers) or Theo were quite as deeply absorbing as was Samuel.

At coffee recently with a friend, she asked me what was so important about this book to me, and all I could say was, “It’s a book I was supposed to write. I was supposed to write this.” I want that feeling every time I write, but I know that it’s rare. And, Sammy, I’ll miss living with ya.

Storytelling, Stigma, and Selling Books

I’ve published books the traditional way.  Four of them.  I have two textbooks out there in the world of academia, a nonfiction handbook on peace activism, and a novel.  The novel went the traditional over-the-transom route until it found a home, and the nonfiction work was pretty much the usual write a query/get a go-ahead/write the thing/send it back route.

I haven’t done any of that in quite some time – years, actually -  but I do have three more novels out there, and another about to come out in about three months.  A while ago,  I decided to go the route of e-publishing.  I took my time at it;  I already had two manuscripts I’d been marketing, and another in development, but I 

didn’t put anything up on e-books till 2011.  I’ve been slowly building a base of readers and an online platform, and at least one of my books has been getting some pretty darned good reviews.

There is certainly a lot of debate about the place of e-publishing, especially self-publishing on platforms like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and Barnes and Noble’s PubIt. And a lot of criticism. Much of this is deserved, some of it (in the opinion of this writer) is simple resistance to change. Certainly the traditional publishing industry is going to resist a format that gives control back to the writer and takes it away from the elite editors in the publishing industry, though one has to admit that  there are a great many e-books out there that are, quite frankly, very badly written. There is also the undeniable fact that e-publishing has been a significant blow to book stores, particularly the independent ones. 

But, e-publishing has also created significant benefits.  Many people who do not have connections in the publishing industry are able to get their work out there when they otherwise might not have been able to.  Fiction is outselling non-fiction in the e-publishing market, breathing life back into the field for fiction writers.  More younger people are reading e-books (more reading is never a bad thing).  Then there is the issue of the market.  In traditional publishing, the market is guided by the literary tastes and political leanings of a small group of editors at major publishing houses, who set trends and guide the reading habits of the entire culture.  With e-publishing, in this writer’s opinion, we are much closer to a free market in fiction.   If your e-book is no good, people will post negative reviews, and it won’t sell.  If it is good, at least some will post positive reviews and your book will gain a wider audience.  It is, in other words, guided by the tastes and responses of the consumer, the reader.  And that is just fine by me.

Some years ago, I had the opportunity to engage in a discussion in a roomful of writers with a very famous writer (who, shall, here at least, remain nameless).  In the course of the discussion, he asserted that you could tell how good a writer was by how much money he made.  Just out of grad school and buried in the sense of the art in my work, I objected, and a lively and somewhat adversarial discussion followed.  Looking back now, I think there was a bit of truth in what he was asserting - the market showed what writing people wanted to read.  But, what he wasn't considering was how things got on the market in the first place, which then had no resemblance at all to a free market system.  

I am a storyteller.  When I think of what I do each day when I sit down at my keyboard, I don’t think of myself as an “author” or as a “writer.”  I am telling stories.  Let me tell you about Samuel Joseph, a stand-up comic who worked in television in the 60s, or about Sarar’l Camfir, a doctor who lives on a planet that is dominated by musical rituals, or about Arvin Samuels, an ex-marine who has an extraordinary experience when he shoots a cougar that is harassing his herd of cows.  I sit down, and though it is my own fingers on the keys, I am transported into another reality where characters tell me their stories and I pass them on to readers.  If the readers like the stories, fine.  If not, also fine.  

This is not to say that I am cavalier about the quality of my work.  I have test readers read my manuscripts, often multiple times.  I have others edit them, and I edit them myself dozens of times before I put them up for publication.  I care about my stories.  And I must admit there are some out there putting up books who appear not to care about theirs.  The point is, the reader will know the difference.  And it is easy, on e-platforms, for the reader to get their money back.  The click of a button.  So, the market speaks to the writer. Or the storyteller.

In literary circles, e-publishing is looked at as “lesser.”  There is a clear stigma attached to those who self-publish.  But, as a woman with thirty years in an inter-racial relationship, and one who grew up on the wrong side of town, this stigma bothers me not one bit.  When I get fan letters (e- messages) from those who’ve read my stories and love them (or even those who didn’t), I know that I am doing what I need to be doing.  I am telling stories, and they are finding homes in peoples’ hearts.

Speaking To Your Own Soul: A Writer's Journal

When I was about thirteen, a friend asked to see my journal, and I asked:  "Which one?"  I had, at the time, probably filled about a dozen of them.  It wasn't long after that day that I destroyed all those journals, burning them in a burn barrel out behind our home.  Like most teens, I went through a stage when I was mortified at the thought that anyone - anyone in the world - might find them and read them.  So they burned.

I didn't keep journals for some years after that, but then, as a young mother, I began again - and, once again, a few years later, destroyed all of them but a few.  And, began again.  I now have a shelf of my old journals, and from time to time, think of getting rid of them - but, these days, that's more because I'm tired of moving cardboard boxes filled with them every time my gypsy-soul decides it's time to decamp and go live somewhere else.

But I don't write in them anymore.  Haven't for some years.  A few years back, I went with World Teach on a program to go teach in Africa for one academic term.  While there, I made many friends - all of them much younger than I.  They wanted me to get on Facebook, so that we could stay in touch easily.  At first, I resisted, but I loved these people (you know who you are) and wanted to keep them in my life.  So, I signed up for Facebook, and got used to the once, twice, eight times a day posts.  Then followed Twitter, Tumblr, and more.  I posted musings, observations, overheard conversations.  And my journals gathered dust on the shelf.

Then, some events in the household this week caused me to get out a journal again.  I got out my old leather-bound Moleskin and went to the deck with my favorite writing pen (I still often compose my fiction by hand).  There were  some things I just couldn't muse about online, but as my late sister used to tell me:  "Judy, you think on paper."

I sat, I jotted a few lines, I sipped tea, and jotted some more. Before long, words of a type I hadn't written in some time flowed from my pen to the soft paper.  I found my brain going to places I hadn't been for a while. Reflection, cogitation, consideration.  My voice as it writes only for me, just speaking to my own soul, was and is a very different voice than my public voice, and certainly different than my online voice.  And I found I'd missed it.

This isn't about the evils of social media.  I actually love them, and as something of an anti-Luddite, I frequently defend them - I think any opportunity for human connection is a good thing.  This isn't about that.

I didn't solve all the problems I had that day.  But I did solve a problem that I did not know that I had.  A need to, quietly and internally, just for my own eyes and no others, give voice to my soul.  One way that my soul speaks is through my fiction, but in that form of writing my soul is a conduit for stories, and they're intended, from the first scratch of the pen, to be share.  The soul also needs to speak to and for only itself to be fully engaged.  Meditation gets there sometimes, but, for a writer, I think the most direct route is that bound book, kept with your dearest possessions, which sits there, just waiting to be your voice.  Just yours.