Anatomy of a Novel #1
A new subsection of "The Curious Kat"
This is a section of the newsletter The Curious Kat. Follow along as I write novel #4. Opting out of these updates (and sticking with the newsletter) is easy: go to the footer of this post, select "Unsubscribe" (next to “Anatomy of a Novel”) and click "Turn off emails."
If you join me here, you’ll be taking a weekly deep dive in the psychology of drafting long form fiction. Who knows, the process may surprise you! What comes easily and what is hard? What kinds of choices am I making and why? In the Light of the Ghost Moon is set in the early 20th century and loosely based on a true story. It’s about a mysterious Japanese palace in the Catskills that’s about to be torn down - until a dead body is found in its derelict halls.
The Tyranny of Word Counts
Heading into the summer, I knew things would be hectic. For these 3 - 4 months when I’m moving about a lot, I have to work hard to trick myself into prioritizing writing.
Why does this matter? I’m not really on a timetable. But with my Ibiza novel, Madame B., on submission right now, the best thing I can do is work on the next novel. Not only will it take my mind off the long submission process, it means I’ll have something to show if/ when editors ask what my next project is.
Again and again I’ve tried to motivate myself by using word count goals. I recently figured out that if I write ~ 3,000 words a week I’ll have a rough first draft completed by Christmas. Having a timeline goal usually helps keep me on track.
I love Jami Attenberg’s approach to writing: she’s a work horse with empathy and a literary bent. She runs #1000wordsofsummer, which is all about creating and maintaining momentum, and getting that shitty first draft down. Three times now I’ve tried to join in, but…
I need to really KNOW my characters first
Getting as many words as I can onto the page doesn’t work for me. I end up writing drivel that I have to edit, and this makes me worry about the quality of what I’m producing.
What works is diving into my characters. I must know who they are before I can know what they’ll do. So even if I have a general sense of the plot - or even a specific sense - I don’t know how that scene should evolve until I understand who my characters really are.
This is way more than knowing hair color and personality type or their backgrounds. I have to understand who they are to their core. What motivates them? How do they speak? What are their weaknesses? What secret fears do they have? What do they choose to eat for breakfast? Under what circumstances do they react in surprising or predictable ways? What makes them angry? In what ways might they lie, and when? Who will they protect and who do they admire? What 2 - 3 outside events impacted their world view? Who or what do they despise and why? What makes them feel humiliated?
What kind of impact did the culture of their home environment have on them? The broader culture? How does where they were born vs. where they grew up influence them?
These are big questions, and also small ones. I can’t come up with answers out of thin air. I have to do research.
Beatrice Pfennig & Jokichi Takamine
In a later post, I’ll dare to share a synopsis of this novel, which is more detailed than any of the novels I’ve worked on previously. While it feels good to know where I’m headed, that isn’t solving all my problems.
I’m at the point now where my main character, Beatrice Pfennig (15, daughter of German immigrants), is forced by her father to leave school and work at Sho Fu Den, the gilded Japanese palace tucked inside the woods near her home.
This section is all about Bea’s mind being BLOWN by what she learns about class, culture, power and belonging. Interacting with the Takamines, and their twin sons, changes her forever.
In coming up with scenes for this section, I want to go beyond the cliché of an outsider awed by wealth. Bea’s a quirky character and the Takamines are, by definition, extraordinary. The real-life Jokichi left Japan to make a career in the US during a time of intense anti-immigrant sentiment. His sons had everything they could want but remained outcasts. His wife was a southern girl from New Orleans. This family must have been so strange and interesting!
How do they talk to each other? How do Bea’s speech patterns differ from the twins’?
How do I choose, and then deftly slip in, critical elements of Japanese culture to show how different these characters are and how/ whether they find a way to connect?
The Peasant Soul of Japan (see above) is proving to be super helpful. I wish I could summarize what I’m learning but I haven’t fully absorbed it yet. It explains why the Japanese admire virtues such as sincerity, effort, and sacrifice, and try their best never to provoke envy.
The Japanese constitution includes the directive: “Regard harmony as of the foremost value.” Competition and individual ability are not highly valued in that culture - “success” means something very different than it does in the West.
This goes some way toward explaining why Takamine left his homeland; he lived almost his entire adult life in the US and became a multi-millionaire. He must have been intensely ambitious and smart, hampered by a society that wanted him to fit in. That also explains, to a certain extent, why he’s not more revered in Japan, despite having discovering adrenaline and donating the famous cherry trees to Washington DC.
Changing my mind about a character, but slowly
Recently I went to visit Connie Nelson, who just turned 100 years old. Takamine’s grandson, Jokichi III, was Connie’s first love. She showed me the above letter which lists all the people in the family who died of alcoholism, including (see the first sentence):
“…grandfather (died in 1922 cirrhosis), my father died 1930 - age 40 - drunk in the streets of NY.”
Nowhere in anything I’ve read about Takamine does it say he died of cirrhosis of the liver (it mentions a mysterious liver ailment he got while traveling by boat to the US in the 1890s). Connie also told me that Takamine Sr. got a young Japanese servant girl pregnant and his wife, Caroline, stumbled upon them and sent the girl back to Japan.
This information came as a shock to me. It wasn’t at all how I’d imagined him.
I’d seen him as a gentle person, thoughtful and meditative. I assumed he was madly in love with his wife. Why? Somehow this picture made me think of him as a softie.
And I felt strangely committed to the way he’d originally been living in my imagination — seeing him as a “good guy.” BUT… my Takamine is mostly a made-up character. I’m not documenting his life, I’m exploring it. I’ll probably end up changing his name, so I can make him into anyone I want him to be.
The question is: WHO DO I WANT HIM TO BE??
An old book took me by surprise
At this point in my writing, I try to read a lot because I get ideas everywhere I turn. Initially when I picked up an old copy of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan I was turned off. It’s about a young couple from 1962 on their wedding night, and they’re uptight and naive, and don’t know how to communicate.
For the first few pages I was left cold: I thought, who cares about these two idiots?
But then, I got caught up in their psyches. I became more and more invested in them as I began to see why they were behaving this way, and as dread built up inside me about how they could possibly reconcile the terrible misunderstanding that was growing by the second.
The character development was astonishing and, as a consequence, a sense of anticipation and tension was steadily building. So deft! I want to achieve this!
In alternate parts of the book, McEwan changes tone and gives a kind of summary of the home lives of these two young people and how they met, and even though it’s almost 100% telling and not showing*, it’s fascinating. The specifics of their backgrounds are so weird and illuminating. It adds a lot to our understanding of why they are who they are, and why they behave as they do. The psychological portrait is just phenomenal.
I picked up exactly the right book at exactly the right time.
*Bestselling author Steve Almond writes about the importance of telling here. Definitely worth a read.
What next?
Now that I’ve done all this background reading, I do want to start banging out some scenes. I’m going to finish the Peasant book and get back to reading Lafcadio Hearn, an American who lived in Japan in the late 1800s and wrote a lot about its culture.
My last Summer Sprints class is coming up tomorrow. I can’t believe it’s already been eight weeks since I got back from my research trip to Japan. Below is a picture I took at the “The Great People of Kanazawa” Museum, in which Takamine is dining in NYC with two US presidents: Taft and Roosevelt!
Love reading about your writing practice and journey!
So exciting to go along for the ride