Shauna Seliy, and the Structure of the Novel

I had a wonderful opportunity this week--my old friend Shauna Seliy came to town to give a reading, and we got caught up on the Writers At Cornell podcast. We mostly talked about her new novel, her first, When We Get There, which I believe I plumped for last year here on the blog (and which I enthusiastically blurbed on the back cover). I don't think it's just my affection for Shauna that makes me think this book is wonderful, but I was surprised to hear how it had been written.

The book had originally consisted, Shauna told me (and told the audience at Cornell Thursday afternoon), of a series of linked stories. But she decided that they ought to be a novel, ripped them apart, and put them back together again, with a new narrative line (a missing mother) that ran through the whole. The process of writing and editing had taken ten years.

The surprising part is that the result appears seamless to me--I assumed Shauna had been writing unrelated stories all this time, and then wrote the novel whole-cloth in the recent past. A theme of our conversations this week was just how different novels are from one another--even within the conventions of the genre, you can do almost anything.

Those of you who are writers, how do you structure your stuff? Is the structure dictated by the material, or do you envision a structure into which the material can be poured, like wax into a mold? I've let the former happen (Mailman), and I've imposed the latter on my work (my first two books), and while both methods can do the trick, I think the former is where most of the potential is.

It's hard, though, to have the confidence to let the material take over the process--to allow the chips to fall where they may. And sometimes the instinct to do so is, in fact, wrong, and the book must be taken apart and put back together again, as Shauna's was. Her book goes to show, however, that the artificiality of that process needn't create a work that feels artificial--indeed, When We Get There unfolds very naturally, as if it had always been intended that way.

All of narrative is illusion--the creation of coherence from abstraction, compulsion, and arbitrary whim. Sometimes I think I ought to be thinking about this process more. At other times I think I shouldn't think about it at all.

Shauna's Playlist

Hey, look: it's W6 chum Shauna Seliy, posting over on Largehearted Boy. We posted about Shauna last month when her terrific book When We Get There came out, and now she's offering up a short essay about the music she listened to while writing the book, complete with playlist. A sample:

In movies, there’s often a single defining moment when a character seems to be asked, “Are you going to give up?” Maybe in a hard driving rain on an obstacle course, late at night, and the character lets loose a kind of primal shout at the dark sky. No! we understand, no he won’t give up! If the thing you are trying to do is write a book, and if you’re accompanied by the kind of bloodthirsty self-doubt that beset me throughout that process, the question presents itself more on the order of every few minutes. And you are more likely sitting in a crowded coffee shop wondering if your computer will get stolen while you’re in the bathroom. Or thinking, taking a look at a nearby homeless man writing messages on napkins, that the only thing that separates you from him is your laptop. Or maybe the question will present itself to you in the form of roiling night sweats caused by the deep tissue knowledge of your credit card balance that your body seems to have acquired. Or it’s possible that you read a little Alice Munro the night before, maybe a few lines of Chekhov. In the clear light of day, you know you’re screwed. They’ve done it all, and done it better than you ever could even if you were to stay at the coffee shop 24 hours a day for the rest of your life.

Read the post, listen to the music, buy the novel.

Plugs For New Books

Back when I was complaining about book covers a couple weeks back, I said something in the comments about my friend Shauna Seliy's new novel. (I was snarking about the cover, in fact.) Well, let me give it a plug here, because I just got my copy in the mail, and it's a marvelous piece of work.

The book's called When We Get There, and is a family drama set in a coal-mining town near Pittsburgh in the seventies. Shauna was my best pal in college, and a fellow wannabe writer--there were lots of people I could discuss books and writing with at the time, and who would nod politely and smile and wish me luck. But Shauna was the only one who actually took the whole thing seriously, as though it were something we were actually gonna do. Well, she has really done it. This novel has been a long time coming, and it's just fantastic--I can't recommend it highly enough. It's beautifully written, and not in the way you think I mean. It is simultaneously exuberant and restrained, dark and wry, much like Shauna herself. Plus it's packed with crazy Eastern Europeans! What more could you want!

I also want to toss in a plug for a new anthology of short-short stories I'm in, called The Flash. We have an unofficial non-self-promotion policy on this blog, but the editor of this book, Peter Wild, is a cool guy, the book has a completely insane and hilarious cover, and proceeds from its sale go to Amnesty International. Peter is also editing the forthcoming Sonic Youth literary anthology I mentioned in a recent post.