(Image by Dương Trí, via Unsplash)
It’s been six months since I’ve been here. And it’s not you, it’s me.
Gosh, what have I been up to? Well, I’ve rejoined our town’s Selectboard, this time as its chair. So that means I’ve written two grant proposals, fielded endless complaints about spring road conditions, have begun coordinating the physical move into our new town office this fall, instituted a couple of new task forces, and started to collect job descriptions from other communities in preparation for rebuilding our highway crew after a soon-to-come retirement.
I’ve led my nearly-annual short fiction coaching course in February through April, in which thirteen local writers went from blank page to admirable short story in the space of eight weeks. Along with the coaching, I wrote a story of my own, designed the book’s cover and page layout, had it all printed, and organized a celebratory event with excerpts from each story performed by members of our local Theater in the Woods company.
And, as of about nine o’clock last night, I safely landed a new novel.
My new copy of Poets & Writers magazine arrived in the mail yesterday. It has sections on writer profiles, new and notable books, industry gossip, issues of craft, and advice on the business. One of the business articles was on writing pitch paragraphs, which of course open the door to someone reading the full 94,275 words later on. So let’s try it with the new one.
For Angie Torvala, the only woman road foreman in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, some things never change. Snow. Broken equipment. Road complaints. But in the midst of that stability, some things do change. Her daughter Esther about to leave for college, a world that Angie never knew. Her summer boyfriend Grant—maybe around no longer, maybe becoming something more. And the innumerable, quiet tragedies that an isolated winter can bring.
Another couple of weeks of language-level tuning, some design work, and off to the printer it’ll go.
This was a rough one. I’ve had books that have just fallen like rain, books that I was barely able to keep up with. My novel Leopard, roughly the same length as Foreman, took me only 90 days. This one took me 204. I’ve been distractible, easily jarred off track.
And yet, here it is.
One of the other elements of the pitch article had to do with “comp titles.” As in real estate, the book business often relies on comparable properties to set value and market interest. That can lead to cliches like “The Sopranos if it was mixed with Bridget Jones’ Diary,” or “Dances with Wolves, but set in contemporary New Orleans.” The work of devising an appropriate set of comparables, like the work of building any category, depends entirely on the quality of the connections we make.
The most immediate, and most unlikely, comparable I’ve read in the past year is Sayaka Murata’s novel Convenience Store Woman (2016, English translation 2018). Like Foreman, this book is about an everyday, unseen life, and the marvels that it contains. A book about a way of life and a way of thinking that most of us never consider.
But maybe the most important reason why it’s comparable is that it ends almost exactly where it starts. This is entirely unlike most Western fiction, in which the crisis leads to an entirely different state of being at the end of the story. Fiction teacher Matthew Salesses tells us something about that in his analysis of Asian stories:
The plot structure follows kishotenketsu, which does not require conflict and is a four-act structure rather than a three-act (or five-act) structure. Instead of beginning, middle, and ending (a beginning in which conflict is introduced, a middle in which conflict is faced, an ending in which conflict is resolved), ki is introduction, sho is development, ten is twist, and ketsu is reconciliation. Conflict is not necessary.
Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World (2022), pp. 107-8
The idea of a world established, disturbed, and ultimately restored is a quieter form of storytelling than our superhero era has taught us to appreciate. It’s more like sitting on a dock watching a glassy pond, tossing a stone in to see the spreading ripples, and then appreciating the smooth water once again.
How is that not boring? We’ll talk about that tomorrow.
Herb Childress 