Stumbling Forward
When I end up in conversation with aspiring authors, an unspoken implication is often woven into the questions they ask. In essence: “You must have followed some kind of plan. How did you come up with your plan?” Time after time, the news I’m forced to report back from the frontier is that—for me, at least—there is no plan, and never has been. What there has been, is a series of instances of wanting to write something and share it with an audience, and then stumbling forward from there like a blind elephant with a trick knee. Sure, I’ve learned...
Read MoreKismet
So: Mom wrote children’s books; grief paid a visit (several, actually); and I did what came naturally—I began to write. The next visitor to show up at my door was kismet. The story I began to write was in a genre I had always shied away from before: a children’s book. With two of our three cats having recently passed, and the third diagnosed with cancer, I latched onto the idea of immortalizing these three distinct and memorable personalities in a story that our grandchildren could enjoy. I wrote a few pages, getting a handle on the setting and characters,...
Read MoreWrestling With an Ocean
“You know what I’d really like to get good at? Writing obituaries,” said no one I have ever known. It isn’t even the gloom associated with the task, the necessity of dwelling on a sad reality for a sustained period of time. It’s the weight of it, the sense of responsibility for summing up, in the space of a few paragraphs, everything that a person was, did, meant, or loved. It’s like wrestling with an ocean; you can’t win, you can only hope you don’t get knocked flat too many times. As communications director for a graduate school in the...
Read MoreStory Time
Across a far-ranging career as a writer, Sandol Stoddard wrote fiction and non-fiction, for adults and children, producing 26 published books and countless essays, articles and poems. In our house, though, she was always simply “Mom”: a dynamic presence overflowing with ideas and opinions, reassuringly predictable in some respects and thoroughly unpredictable in others. And while Mom was probably proudest of her groundbreaking 1978 non-fiction work The Hospice Movement: A Better Way of Caring for the Dying, her best-selling book—still in print today, almost 60 years after its initial publication—remains that perpetual Valentine’s Day gift I Like You. A children’s...
Read MoreEnd Matter Matters
“Liner notes junkie” is an appellation this writer wears like a badge of honor. I might not be able to tell you where I set my keys down last night, but I can definitely tell you who played bass on side two, track three of that ’70s progressive rock album. In the same vein, whether a book is a slender novella or an epic-length biography, I always, always, always read the acknowledgements. The reasons are many. For one thing, acknowledgements demolish the illusion that a book is entirely the result of a single person’s efforts. For another, they demonstrate gratitude...
Read MoreThe Book of Ruth
The minute the central story arc of Home Was a Dream came together in my mind, a fresh challenge immediately clamored for attention: how was I going to tell this particular story? The first two novels in the Tim Green series (Believe in Me and Never Break the Chain) are narrated almost entirely from Tim’s first-person perspective; you are inside his head, in the present, experiencing what he experiences. But Home Was a Dream began as a story about Tim’s father Bernie, before growing to also feature Bernie’s father, Tim’s grandfather Max. So: how do you employ your series’ established...
Read MoreHome Was a Dream
The initial seed that grew into Home Was a Dream—the third in what is now officially a series of Tim Green novels—was a reader’s comment that they wished the second book had featured “more about Bernie,” protagonist Tim Green’s music-writer father. Over the past several weeks in this space we’ve explored the roots and branches of the new novel, from that initial seed to my realization that Bernie got into rock and roll as a way of rebelling against an overbearing father, to my further realization that Bernie’s father Max (Tim’s grandfather) was a Jewish teenager during World War II,...
Read MoreCover Me Up
Covers are challenging enough without making the job harder on yourself—which I certainly did with Home Was a Dream (coming April 9), by crafting a story that follows three distinct main characters along three distinct timelines. The third Tim Green novel finds Tim digging into his father’s past, only to uncover the shocking truth that one of the factors fueling his father’s long-simmering conflict with his father, Max, was that the latter was a Holocaust survivor. The story follows Tim in the present in a series of framing segments, interspersed with chapters chronicling both Bernie’s and Max’s lives during their...
Read MoreHome
The title of the new Tim Green novel is a tale in itself. This particular tale begins with one of my favorite songwriters active today: Jason Isbell. The man is a master storyteller whose songs are populated by Faulkneresque characters full of self-doubt and dark corners, either trying to find their way toward the light, or running from it. In his most compelling compositions, these characters are either himself or distorted mirror-images. Nowhere is this truer than on his most personal album Southeastern, whose 2013 release was celebrated last year with a 10th anniversary deluxe edition. Southeastern is filled with...
Read MoreImposter Syndrome
The new Tim Green novel—title and publication date to be revealed any moment now—had two chief sources of inspiration. The first was a reader who wanted more of Bernie, Tim’s music-writer father. As discussed last time, thinking about what a Bernie story might look like led me down a logic trail to a conclusion that was both startling and daunting: Bernie’s father Max was a Holocaust survivor. Next came a pitched battle with imposter syndrome. Who was I to retell this, the central story of modern Jewish experience, a singular trauma almost unimaginable in its scope and repercussions? My father...
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