Guest Post by Emily St. John Mandel: The Importance of Place

Today I'm departing from the norm for Bookfoolery with a guest post by Emily St. John Mandel, author of The Lola Quartet. My thanks to Emily for writing this post about the use of place in writing.

The Importance of Place in Writing

by Emily St. John Mandel

I read an interesting speech by Zadie Smith a while back, where she laid out her theory of micro versus macro writers. I find the division between the two types imperfect—there are elements of both in the way I write—but I think it’s an interesting division nonetheless.

Her theory is that writers can be divided into Micro Managers and Macro Planners. She considers herself a Micro Manager, figuring out the story as she goes along, unable to move on to the next line until the previous one is perfect, obsessing over every detail, essentially setting the book in stone as she goes. Whereas Macro Planners, she writes, have their books completely outlined in advance, which is to say they know how the last chapter’s going to end before they start writing the first sentence. Paradoxically, she wrote, that structure gave them the freedom to make enormous changes while they were writing the book, things Smith says she wouldn’t dream of—“moving the setting of a book from London to Berlin, for example.”

When I read Smith’s work, this makes perfect sense. Her magnificent debut novel White Teeth is set in London, and it’s impossible to imagine it set anywhere else. The story is inseparable from the place. There are cases where the book is entirely dependent on place and wouldn’t exist without it, as in Karl Marlantes’ novel of the Vietnam War, Matterhorn. Or books where place is a declaration: I haven’t yet read Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, but I’ve opened it a few times and I think very often of the magnificent rhythm of its opening line. I am an American, Chicago born.

But then, on the far opposite end of the spectrum, you’ll find the books that could have been set almost anywhere. I’ve noticed that a great many books set in suburbia fall under this category, which says more about our suburbs than it does about our books.

I did a reading a couple nights back, and during the Q&A someone asked me how place had affected my most recent novel, The Lola Quartet. I think of The Lola Quartet as contemporary noir; it’s a mystery, I suppose, but as always the mystery part happened by accident, a side of effect of trying to write literary fiction with a strong plot. A disgraced man reinvents himself as an amateur private detective in order to discover the fate of a high school girlfriend who he thinks might have been pregnant when she disappeared. The book follows this man, Gavin, and the other members of his former high school jazz quartet. The action plays out mostly in South Florida. But as it happens, the book’s concerned in a tangential kind of way with something about place that’s been bothering me a little for quite a while, which is that places are beginning to look too much alike.

It’s mostly a matter of suburban sprawl, which has created a hinterland of interchangeable suburbs—the outskirts of Toronto look an awful lot like the outskirts of Boca Raton—but globalization and the spread of exotic species between continents have exacerbated the trend. In a 2009 article in The New Yorker, Burkhard Bilger wrote that invasive species “can change the way we see a place. A parrot in Miami is like a McDonald’s in Kathmandu: a sign that you are everywhere and nowhere at once.”

Everywhere and nowhere at once! That’s it exactly. I have occasional moments during book tours, in the long spaces between cities, where I gaze through the window of the bus or the train and think, “I could be anywhere.” No matter where I am I see the same handful of chain restaurants, the same stores, the same hotels shining their logos out into the dark.

“The Lola Quartet could have been set anywhere,” I said at the reading the other night, in response to the question about place. It’s true, I think, although it’s of course impossible to know how the book would have turned out if I’d decided to set it in Oklahoma or Saskatchewan. I set it in Florida in part because I wanted to write about the economic collapse and the accompanying foreclosure crisis, and Florida is a place that was particularly hard-hit by the latter. I was also interested in writing about the spread of exotic species, which is to say, that unsettling phenomenon of Burmese pythons and Nile monitors infiltrating the canals of certain Florida suburbs.

But I was going through old versions of the manuscript just now in search of the above Burkhard Bilger quote, and found an early document—two pages long—in which I’d been sketching out a version wherein the story was set in and around Vancouver. How different would the book have been? It still would have been contemporary noir. The characters would have been the same. Once I’d committed to Florida I tried to make the setting reasonably Floridian, but when I wrote about the crushing quality of the Florida summer heat I was drawing off my experiences during hot summers very far away from there, memories of staggering through heat waves in Toronto, Montreal, and New York. (I know, “heatwave in Montreal” sounds like a punch line. But I remember a day when the temperature reached 104 Fahrenheit.)

“But the protagonist’s New York apartment,” someone else at the reading said, “that was very New York.”

“It was based on an apartment I had in Toronto,” I said.

EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL was born on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. Her new novel is The Lola Quartet.Her two previous novels are Last Night in Montreal (an Indie Next pick and finalist for Foreword Magazine’s 2009 Book of the Year) and The Singer’s Gun (winner of the Indie Bookseller’s Choice Award and #1 Indie Next Pick for May 2010.) She is a staff writer for The Millions, and her short fiction will appear in the forthcoming anthology Venice Noir. She is married and lives in Brooklyn.

Photo credit: Miriam Berkley

©2012 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery and Babble or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Babbling about Postcardfoolery: A guest post by Kirk Farber, author of Postcards from a Dead Girl

Babbling about Postcardfoolery

A guest post by Kirk Farber, author of Postcards from a Dead Girl (reviewed below)

Thank you, Bookfool, for having me on as a guest today. If it's okay, I'd like to babble about postcards. In my debut novel, Postcards from a Dead Girl, the main character, Sid, receives postcards from his ex-girlfriend, Zoe. He hasn't spoken with her in over a year, but her messages arrive from beautiful places like Barcelona, Paris, and Costa Rica.

I’ve been visiting bookstores this past month, reading these scenes aloud to people. And now I can’t stop thinking about how fun it would be to send postcards from exotic locales. In the book, Sid travels to a few foreign locations in search of his lost love. I’m not Sid, but if I were, I might add these places to my list . . .

IRELAND – Rumor has it my red-headed relatives are from the west coast, near Galway Bay. I’ve heard the people are ridiculously friendly, and the Guinness tastes like Heaven.

NEW ZEALAND – Mostly because I want to learn to surf. I boogie-boarded in Virginia Beach once, and refused to leave the ocean, causing myself bodily exhaustion and over-consumption of sea water. I'm thinking continuous wipe-outs are easier in sub tropical water.

ICELAND –To climb glaciers and dodge lava flows! Or at least take zoom photos of dangerous geological phenomena from a safe and reasonable distance. Also: cool spas.

BALI – I recently read that the citizens of Bali were considered to be among the Happiest People on Earth. Sid probably could have used their help early on.

TOKYO, JAPAN – High-tech super-urban metropolis. Low-tech car washes.

NORWAY – Fjords!!!

If you could send a postcard from anywhere in the world, where would it be, and why?

Guest Post - Keith Williams, on the Holy Mosaic Bible

I have the honor of hosting the general editor of the Mosaic Bible, Keith Williams of Tyndale House, today. I asked Keith to talk about the idea behind the Mosaic Bible.

Guest Post by Keith Williams:

What's in a name? For Holy Bible: Mosaic, there is a lot of meaning embedded in the title we chose. But before I talk about why we chose this title for this particular edition, I'll give you a little bit of trivia and insight into the process that went into arriving at this title.

When the idea for this Bible was first introduced, we had some discussions about the title and came up with what I thought was a great one, and it was the working title for some time. That title was Meditations: Via Christus. "Meditations" refers to the format of the Bible, with weekly "meditations" keyed to the church year and Via Christus is a Latin term that has long been used in the Church as a way of referring to a way of life following the pattern of Christ. It roughly translates from Latin to English as "the way of Christ." I liked this title, but it didn't really click with everyone internally here at Tyndale, and early this year a decision was made to drop it.

But now we had to come up with another title for this unique Bible. I had a difficult time letting go of the old title, and I came up with a number of suggestions--none of which were really any good. We had brainstorming meetings that came up with more ideas that didn't really communicate very well about what the Bible was all about, and I was feeling a bit discouraged. But then Kevin O'Brien suggested the title Mosaic. Immediately, I knew we had a winner.

Mosaic captures the "big idea" of what this Bible is about very well. As the body of Christ, every Christian is one piece of a unified whole--just like a mosaic is a unified picture made up of myriad individual pieces. Each piece contributes to the whole, but the whole is way more important than the individual parts. And the differences in the little pieces of stone, tile and glass are important. Different shapes, sizes, and colors are all needed to make the picture complete. And Holy Bible: Mosaic does a great job of highlighting many of the different shapes, sizes and colors that make up the body of Christ by providing quotes and art from every continent and every century of Christian history.

In the end, I think Holy Bible: Mosaic is the perfect title for this Bible. What do you think?

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Thank you, Keith, for that lovely explanation of how Tyndale came up with the title for this Bible! I agree that the title works. It seemed a little odd, at first, until I understood the meaning, but that front section . . . the meditations . . . really make this Bible unique and special.

Linky-dinky do - a few links for those want more:

The Mosaic Bible website
Keith Williams' Facebook Page
Amazon page
Keith at Twitter

Remember, I'm giving away a certificate for one free copy of the Mosaic Bible. Sign up for the drawing, here.

Guest Post by Karen White, author of The Lost Hours

I'm excited to welcome Karen White, author of The Lost Hours, for a guest post! I finished the book recently and you can read my review of The Lost Hours, here, if you missed it.

You can also visit Karen White's website at http://www.karen-white.com/.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
Now a near fatal riding accident has shattered Piper’s dreams of Olympic glory. After her grandfather’s death, she inherits the house and all its secrets, including a key to a room that doesn’t exist—or does it? And after her grandmother is sent away to a nursing home, she remembers the box buried in the backyard. In it are torn pages from a scrapbook, a charm necklace—and a newspaper article from 1929 about the body of an infant found floating in the Savannah River. The necklace’s charms tell the story of three friends during the 1920s— each charm added during the three months each friend had the necklace and recorded her life in the scrapbook. Piper always dismissed her grandmother as not having had a story to tell. And now, too late, Piper finds she might have been wrong.

Without further ado, welcome to Karen White!

A Day in the Life of a Mother/Writer by Karen White

People are surprised when I tell them that my life isn’t glamorous. Sure, my tenth novel is about to hit bookstores, and my publisher is sending me on a three week media/booksigning tour in five states, and I just bought the cutest, most impractical yet expensive shoes just to wear on TV interviews. But at the moment, I’m dressed like a homeless woman because I’m in ‘writing mode’, I’ve been yelled at twice by each resident teenager (not including the one ‘I hate you’ from the 17-year-old female child), I’m sitting on a bed covered with three loads of unfolded laundry, and I’m thinking I need to take the dog to the vet tomorrow because he’s chewing on his leg which means he has another skin infection.

See what I mean?

Sure, I get lots of fan mail—my favorite part of this job—but all I have to do is glance up at the sticky kitchen counters, the shoes, text books, and sports apparatus scattered liberally around the house like pepper on scrambled eggs, and I’m back to the reality of my non-glamorous life.

I don’t want to burst anybody’s fantasy bubble, but I feel a dire need to set the record straight. I recently signed a two-book contract for my Tradd Street mystery series, but the books are going to come out two years apart because I simply couldn’t fathom keeping up with writing two books a year and having a life, glamorous or otherwise. When I mentioned this at a book club, the readers—and I love them all!—were up in arms that they would have to wait so long between installments. I told them if I could get the two teenagers and dog to move in with them for a year, I might be able to write a bit faster. Oddly enough, I didn’t have any takers.

Yesterday, as I was cleaning dog vomit from the back seat of my car, I found myself wondering why I make my life so crazy. Why do I have to write? Couldn’t I just keep to a leisurely schedule of a book every five years or so? The answer is easy: no. Writing isn’t just something I do—it’s who I am. When I get a story snagged in my brain, I’m compelled to write it—even if it means carting my laptop to the carpool line, the horse barn, the football field or the laundry room to get it written.

In my April book, The Lost Hours, the protagonist, Piper Mills, finds out too late that her grandmother, whom she’d always relegated to the back of her life, had a story to tell her. And when she goes to dig into her grandmother’s past, she opens up a Pandora’s box into her family’s darkest secrets.

I don’t want to be like Piper; I want to listen to the stories I hear in my heart, then put them down onto the pages of books to share with others NOW—not later. Even if it means getting less sleep than I should, and sometimes picking my children up from school at 3:30 in the afternoon still wearing the pajamas I wore when I dropped them off.

My life might not be glamorous, but it’s mine, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Besides, my children won’t be teenagers forever, and before long I’ll have a quiet, orderly life and house, and they’ll be calling me and telling me how wonderful I am and asking for my advice about life. And if that doesn’t happen, then I’ll just have to write them into my books so I can bend them to my will. Hey, I’m the writer and in my world, fantasies happen.

Thank you, Karen! Is anyone else horrified by the idea of picking up kids from school in pajamas? I'm absolutely 100% certain that if I did so, the day I wore pajamas would be the day someone rear-ended me and I would have to face a couple of deputies, a raft of hunky firefighters and two adorable paramedics . . . imagine that while wearing either robots or One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (yes, those are the designs on my pajamas). Not happening.

More about Karen:

Always, Karen credits her maternal grandmother Grace Bianca, to whom she’s dedicated THE LOST HOURS, with inspiring and teaching her through the stories she shared for so many years. Karen also notes the amount of time she spent listening as adults visited in her grandmother’s Mississippi kitchen, telling stories and gossiping while she played under the table. She says it started her on the road to telling her own tales. The deal was sealed in the seventh grade when she skipped school and read Gone With The Wind. She knew—just knew—she was destined to grow up to be either Scarlet O’Hara or a writer.

Karen’s work has appeared on the South East Independent Booksellers best sellers list. Her novel The Memory of Water, was WXIA-TV’s Atlanta & Company Book Club Selection. Her work has been reviewed in Southern Living, Atlanta Magazine and by Fresh Fiction, among many others, and has been adopted by numerous independent booksellers for book club recommendations and as featured titles in their stores. This past year her 2007 novel Learning to Breathe received several honors, notably the National Readers’ Choice Award.

In addition to THE LOST HOURS, Karen White’s books include The House on Tradd Street, The Memory of Water, Learning to Breathe, Pieces of the Heart and The Color of Light. She lives in the Atlanta metro area with her family where she is putting the finishing touches on her next novel The Girl on Legare Street.