Space for story

14 November 2002 | 4 Comments

Dear Kelley,

No question, rather a comment. I’m very glad that I didn’t read any of the reviews or the questions posted here. I simply read the book. (Great cover, btw).

Solitaire was a delight. I congratulate you on your knowledge of facilitating techniques. You must know someone in the business because it was so accurate.

What makes a book for me a really good read? It nudges everything else just a tad aside. Like finding that little bit of elbow room at a crowded bar, it allowed me to order up a portion of Jackal, a sip of Snow, and a shot of Neill neat. That’s not any easy feat when life around me feels so complicated. I truly want to thank you for that.

As to the most recent questions/comments posted on your website, it never bothered me that you didn’t develop Steel Breeze into a major plot twist. I felt that they were superfluous from the start, a convenient excuse to convict Jackal. I read it as Jackal was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I wasn’t expecting a conspiracy intrique novel. You’re probably too young to remember the Patty Hearst scenario. Yet, had you gone down that road, I’m sure comparisons would’ve been made.

Getting back to my original point: thanks for the great read. I’m nominating you for a Lammy because I can, and because I think you deserve a thunderous round of applause.

I’m just a reader, but I say bravo, Kelley, bravo.

Best regards,

Jeanne Westby

You may certainly describe yourself as “just a reader” if you wish, but I never will. Readers are the earth and sky to me. So thanks for all these kind words, and I’m glad you liked the book.

It is a great cover. It’s gorgeous, simple, reflects the essence of the story, and makes people want to walk across the aisle and pick up the book. The artist is Bruce Jensen, who has done much good work. It was a particular pleasure to learn that he’d been assigned Solitaire because he did the cover of Nicola’s first book, Ammonite, which she and I both really liked (lovely image of a planet with a subtle cloud-cover in the shape of an ammonite — although our pleasure was diminished when the then-president of the publishing house wandered by the editor’s desk and insisted that a spaceship be put in the picture. It’s science fiction. There has to be a spaceship. I swear this is a true story.)

In my corporate life I was, among other things, a professional facilitator. I ran meetings (mine, and other people’s) for groups of 2 to 250 people many times a day for years. The last 6 years of my corporate life focused on process development and improvement, project management, team-building, managing, coaching, and facilitating. I taught workshops on communication and leading effective meetings. I mentored folks. I had an absolute blast. If I ever have to go back to corporate work, it’s what I would choose to do again. And it sounds as though you’re in the business yourself (you’re the first person who has chosen the word ‘accurate’). I’d be interested to hear more about what you do. Me, I think everyone should have some training in this area. People might actually get more done with a little less unnecessary friction (and it seems to me there’s more than enough of the necessary kind to satisfy even those who need conflict to feel that they have done something meaningful).

I like the image of elbow room at the bar. It’s certainly my experience that a good story makes a space for itself inside my head. For me, it’s as if the best stories carve out little caves where they can take up residence and echo back and forth to one another. I can’t imagine my life without books, movies, theatre, conversation (the best talking, for me, always includes story. Let me tell you what happened to me today….). I fall in love with worlds, with characters, with a particular feeling or a specific moment. I imagine myself living that life, making those choices, having a beer with those people, being a part of their world. Writing is another way to give myself that chance.

One of the best compliments I’ve had about Solitaire came from Bill Sheehan, who said in his review for Barnes & Noble.com that I had obvious affection for my characters, and that the best moments in the book had the quality of “actual, felt life.” That’s the essence of the connection that I talk so often about wanting to make with readers. And I’m coming to understand more and more how important these seemingly simple things are to me as a reader and a writer.

I just read the A.M. Homes short story collection The Safety of Objects. She’s a good writer, and I can understand why some people like her work a lot, but I don’t, and I couldn’t figure out why. Nicola and I had a conversation (over beer, naturally) about it the other night, and she went off and read a couple of the stories and said, “Oh, it’s because she doesn’t seem to like any of her characters very much. There’s very little compassion.”

I think she’s right. Homes is perceptive and can write a killer sentence, but she doesn’t tell the kind of story I want to read or write. I can’t imagine wanting those worlds, or those characters, making a space in my head. So telling me that Jackal and Snow and Neill mattered to you (which is how I read your email, and certainly hope you will correct me if I misunderstood), and that you enjoyed their company, is a gift to me. So is the Lammy nomination, which I certainly appreciate.

And I do remember Patty Hearst — I’m not so young as all that (grin). I recently went to a friend’s 30th birthday party, where I was the oldest person in the room. She observed to me privately that all her under-30 friends asked her, “How do you feel?” in tones of concern or compassion, and all her over-30 friends said, “Congratulations, life is so much cooler on this side of the fence.” And so it is.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, talk to me, virtual pint archives, writing 

Accidental

10 November 2002 | 5 Comments

It looks like I waited so long before posting my question that Albert more or less beat me to it, but with a different interpretation. I did not think Jackal had been set up by them: I understood her part of responsibility, but it puzzled me that Steel Breeze did not merit mention in the book’s conclusion, when everything else was tied up and resolved or explained to some degree. There was a tremendous shift of priorities in Jackal’s world in the last part of the book, and that made sense, yet the Steel Breeze thread was left hanging like a discarded plot device. In the greater scheme of things, with the world government coming about, and Jackal and her friends filling their roles in its chinks, suddenly the opposition fell silent, neither defeated nor continuing its terrorist campaign. I wondered where they’d gone.

I reiterate here what you knew from my journal, for the sake of your site’s visitors: I enjoyed Solitaire tremendously. Its part of trauma didn’t feel gratuitous or exploitative. You handled it well, leaving my imagination to do its job. :-)

I look forward to your next novel.

Ide Cyan

I’m sorry this has taken so long, but getting your question right on top of Albert’s really put my brain in a twist. It would be easy to say, well, no book is perfect or yes, a world-building error or some equally shuffling first-novelist patter. And I tried . But the question of Breeze and their role in the story won’t go away so easily.

I think of the elevator incident as the white squall that appears from a clear sky and sinks Jackal’s life: a stew of small choices and random factors that bring a great storm into being, like the proverbial flap of the butterfly’s wing a half a world away. Steel Breeze is one of those factors. One can infer from casual references throughout the last section of the book that they are indeed still active, still fighting the bad fight, but they certainly aren’t high on Jackal’s radar screen. Although this has never bothered me, it’s clearly bothering some readers. Fair enough, but I would much rather be criticized for an active choice than for an error of ignorance or a failure of imagination, so let me be clear: it was a conscious decision to have Jackal’s interaction with Steel Breeze be almost literally a hit and run, and for Breeze to become no more important in Jackal’s re-created world than her parents or her loss of Hope, or any of the thousand other hits she took after her world fell away (which is to say, important but not differentiated. It’s all one big scar.)

So why don’t readers get this? Why does this need to be addressed in ways that other things don’t (meaning, for example, how come no one’s grumpy that she doesn’t ever think once about trying to reach out to her father? Or that we don’t find out until page 211 that there were 98 children on those elevators? Or maybe everyone is grumpy about it and no one’s told me yet.). Whenever I tried to think about how to a better job with this, I kept getting caught on why do I have to do it at all?

That reaction interested me intensely. It’s what made me rewrite this answer about a million times, trying to get to the core of it. I don’t mind being involved in a learning process — I love to learn. I am willing to describe my own mistakes when I recognize them. But I wasn’t able to do that satisfactorily in this case. So I was doing laundry yesterday, still trying to parse my way through it, and my inner voice remarked to me, Well, if they didn’t like this accident, they’re really gonna hate the next book!

An epiphany, with wet bath towels. I finally understand that Solitaire is more about the white squall or the butterfly’s wing than I ever consciously realized. Everyone at Ko, including Jackal, tries so hard to keep it all under control, and look what happens — the bottom falls out anyway. This may seem incredibly obvious to everyone else, but it never occurred to me that I was making my metaphors that literal. When I was writing it, it seemed important that Jackal’s tragedy happen when a piece of random violence collides with one of her own great fears, so that she could more easily make a fatal mistake; and I gave her the fear of falling from a great height because it’s one of mine. It seemed that simple at the time.

I love the writing brain: it does like to play.

So now I know that the elevator incident is not a simply plot device to get Jackal out of one life into another. It’s also a manifestation of accident, and accident wants my writing attention right now. The next book also involves the accidental, whose consequences propel people in unexpected directions and present them with unimagined choices. Which is, of course, where the real story is for me: not about the horrors or delights of randomness in the world, but in the ways we choose to respond when the chaos wagon rolls down our street. And so I will be thinking, as I approach the new book, of how the characters react not just to the specific accident, but to the existence of the accidental. And then I will have to find ways to integrate that into the story in better ways than I was able to in Solitaire.

I will have to pay particular attention to the ending of the new book. I am certainly not interested in the ‘complete package’ resolution. I have to admit I’ve been puzzled that many (most?) readers find Solitaire so neatly wrapped up. I think the world is rarely tidy, and I tried to shape the ending of Solitaire so that it would feel like the moment between exhaling and inhaling again, a literal breathing space while everyone gathers their energy for the next arc of the story, the next round of life. I wanted to end it in a space where hope could exist. To me that’s not an end, but a beginning. Clearly I haven’t done that in the way I envisioned. So another new question for me as a writer is, how to resolve the experience of the next book, create a resonant and compelling ending, without tidying away all that messiness that accident and choice create in our lives?

Which brings me to my current answer to your question, that I will have to be satisfied with for now: Steel Breeze went to the place where other accidents go, spinning off around a corner like a car hubcap come loose and never seen again. I didn’t forget about them: I sent them away unresolved because life is full of things that we never get to grips with. It’ll happen again: because of this conversation, I have discovered another layer that needs to be in the new book. Hopefully, it will be more skillfully done.

I’m extremely grateful for the chance to think about all this.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, talk to me, virtual pint archives, writing 

Early thoughts about translations

10 November 2002 | 5 Comments

I am from Germany and I heard here from you today the first time. I am very interested in your story about Salome (”And Salome Danced”). I’m going to write a short text about her and her story in fact of the bible-text because I’m studying literature. Now I found the comment that your story is out of print here in Germany. I loaded it down now in English from your homepage. Do you or your publisher know where I can get it in German?
So I will read next time and hope I can talk to you about it and about the thoughts behind it.

Love, Steph

I’ve sent you a scan of the German text by email. I have no idea whether the German translation captures the nuances of the story (and I don’t know if we’d be able to figure it out between us, but it would be fun to talk about it). I read enough French to know that the French translation made some language and metaphor choices that I found really interesting — not wrong, just interesting. Some things just don’t translate directly — cultural references, slang, and the more subtle differences in worldview that a native language creates as we absorb it. These issues interest me in particular since I’m studying to be an interpreter of American Sign Language. If there are so many subtle (and not so subtle) worldview and assumption differences between spoken languages, imagine the difference that might arise between a spoken language and a signed language. And how do translators and interpreters make decisions about expressing meaning in light of those differences? Oof, there goes my brain.

I do hope you’ll let me know what you think of the German text.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, talk to me, virtual pint archives, writing