Category: bittersweet

This is part of the Bittersweet Book Launch case study, where Dan Blank and Miranda Beverly-Whittemore share the yearlong process of launching her novel. You can view all posts here.

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Miranda had some serious deadlines recently, and when we last spoke, she was just coming out of it, and getting ready for a month in Vermont (as you are reading about here.) We recapped all of the small projects we are working on for Bittersweet. When you do that, there is an immediate pressure – you want to feel that you have made progress on EVERYTHING.

But of course, you can’t.

And our call sort of went through each thing she was working on, and then the goal was this: let her off the hook. It is important for some things to simmer. To say… this specific thing will be STRONGER if I don’t do anything with it for 3 weeks. That if we come back to it in September, it will have sat in our minds, evolved without effort, and be ready for action.

Sometimes, things need to simmer.

This is part of the Bittersweet Book Launch case study, where Dan Blank and Miranda Beverly-Whittemore share the yearlong process of launching her novel. You can view all posts here.

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by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

One of the challenges of fictionalizing something from your life is being honest (with yourself and others) about what is made up and what is real. I began thinking about this when I was writing and publishing The Effects of Light (which was based on my experience of being photographed as a fine arts model, although the plot of what happens in that book does not reflect what happened to me).

I’ve discovered about myself that when I’m writing something substantial, I’m trying to explore a deeper question which a specific experience awakened in me. In the case of The Effects of Light, that question was “would I really believe in the innate goodness of fine arts photographs if critics’ worst possible fears about those pictures came true, namely, a child died because of her involvement in them?” The seeds of Set Me Free sprouted from my life experience of spending time on a reservation in Montana as a girl, as well as in my mother-in-law talking about her time as a political radical in 1970s New York. And Bittersweet was born from my family’s home up on Lake Champlain in Vermont, as well as the isolation I felt coming here as a child.

Now, I hate the idea of people being angry at me: at the grocery store, in my house, and, most especially, because of my books. But beyond that, I write with a pleasure principle in mind. I don’t want my books to hurt people: not myself, not my readers, and not the people I care about, even though I know I can only do so much in that regard. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to provoke or to make folks question their beliefs—I believe great writing should do that. But I also believe in being careful about what I say about what I publish—owning up to what, in the book is my own and claiming responsibility for that.

I’ve been thinking about all this recently in terms of Bittersweet. The novel is about a family who has owned vacation property in a strip around Lake Champlain for over a century. That’s an accurate representation of the community where my grandparents built their house in in the sixties; my family were the first “outsiders” to build on land owned by a storied Vermont clan. In my novel, the main character, Mabel, who is a “nobody,” feels her outsider status profoundly—she feels isolated, lonely, afraid. These were emotions I often experienced when I came here as a little girl; I spent hours longing to be included, comparing myself to the beautiful blonde children who summered here, knowing I’d never truly be one of them. The land in my book is nearly identical to the land I’ve grown up on, from the pines and maples, to the wood thrushes and great blue herons, to the thunderstorms that move in over the water.

 

But that’s pretty much where the comparisons stop. Because the family I’ve invented, the Winslows, are really bad people. Like, really really REALLY bad people. And the family I’ve grown up knowing are really good people. Really really REALLY good people. People who don’t know (as far as I know) that I’ve written a novel about this place we all love, and peopled it with a selfish, corrupt clan.

I also want to own up to the fact that the isolation I felt when I came here was mainly to do with what was going on within my own family when I was a girl: the culture shock of returning to the States from a small west African village, the fact that this place was very much my grandparents’ home, which meant I never really felt, until my twenties, that I could call it my own.

Since coming up to the lake this summer, I’ve been aware of the fact that I will need to tell the lovely people who live here about the book I’ve written, the book that will come out next summer, and be thoughtful about how to frame the story of how that book came to be. I don’t want to be euphemistic or lie, but I also want to upfront with the folks I know up here that although I’ve used the place we love as fodder, I haven’t used them.

If you’re a writer, how have you dealt with/ thought about these issues in your own work?

This is part of the Bittersweet Book Launch case study, where Dan Blank and Miranda Beverly-Whittemore share the yearlong process of launching her novel. You can view all posts here.

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by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

August 6th: Sunny and windy (a bit cold for a swim):

 

August 7th: Cold air moving in. Tomorrow’s view will probably be rainy…

 

This is part of the Bittersweet Book Launch case study, where Dan Blank and Miranda Beverly-Whittemore share the yearlong process of launching her novel. You can view all posts here.

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by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

I’m back up north. Ahhhh.

This lake house (which doesn’t look like much from the driveway) is the home my grandparents built in the late sixties overlooking a beautiful bay. The home, and the land and water surrounding it, hold innumerable meanings for me, so many more than you could guess just by glimpsing it from a passing car:

 

It’s the only family house that’s remained constant in my lifetime (every other family, including mine, has moved multiple times). It’s the house my mother, father and I moved into when we came back from Senegal and I was six; the house where I learned all about what it felt like to be an American. My sister was born in the master bedroom; we celebrated her thirtieth birthday here yesterday. Now that I have a child of my own, it’s a place where my own family is establishing new traditions and memories; already, it’s one of my son’s favorite spots on earth. I’ve returned, and continue to return, to this land: in difficult times, in moments of creative retreat, for family reunions, to ski and sail and swim, and to watch the leaves change.

And now, this place is the setting of my novel Bittersweet.

I find it can be hard to write a place I know well, or know constantly (when I wrote The Effects of Light and Set Me Free, for example, I hadn’t been living in Oregon for at least seven years, which I gave me some perspective). But I also knew that this spot is so enchanting, so wild and beautiful, and so lonely, that it needed to be set down on paper.

More on that tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to almost a whole month up here, a month of playing with my boy and family, and working on the next steps of this book process (collecting blurbs, working on Friendstories, revisiting my author questionnaire, blogging here, working on a few creative projects, and so much more). There’s a spot on the dock that I make a point of standing in every day, to take in the new sky and the changed water and the color of the Adirondacks. Every day, I try to take a picture, to stockpile summer memories for the cold city days to come.

Here’s the first two:

The day we arrived, August 4th:

 

August 5th, my sis’s birthday. That’s her in the small sailboat in the middle, having the time of her life:

 

This is part of the Bittersweet Book Launch case study, where Dan Blank and Miranda Beverly-Whittemore share the yearlong process of launching her novel. You can view all posts here.

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by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Bittersweet is due tomorrow! As in, these next 24 hours are the last in which I’ll be able to make substantive changes. Yes, there will be the copyedit (thank god for copyeditors—they are the unsung heroes of the publishing process). And yes, I’ll get a last pass. But that’s to catch the minutiae; this is the last chance I have to change paragraphs, question my character’s motivations, and revisit every promise that I, the author, makes to my reader.

Put that way, it seems like a terrible idea to actually ever turn in my book!

But I’m actually excited. When I stop long enough to think about it, I realize that I’m ready to release this book into the world. Better yet, that Bittersweet is ready to meet the world.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking a lot about revision. When I was teaching, I found it shocking how unaccustomed my students were to the reality of revision. So many of them believed that a good writer just got better at writing first drafts, so much better, that editing became unnecessary. This is pretty much exactly the opposite of how it works. The “better” you get as a writer (whatever that means), the more nuanced your understanding becomes of how vital the revision process is. The more you embrace the process, and struggle with it, and yield to it. You know the only way you’re going to get even close to that little seed of a thought you had about what the book might be before you began is by questioning its every aspect now that it’s “finished.”

That doesn’t mean that when you’re facing down revision, you don’t resist it. It usually takes a long time to yield to it, but once you do, it actually becomes, well, if not fun, then understood as necessary.

Here’s some thoughts about all the revisions I’ve done of Bittersweet:

1) In the fall of 2011, I finished the first draft, and immediately went back to it, fixing whatever was obvious, so I could send a clean copy to my agent.

2) In the spring of 2012, my agent came back to me with notes, most of which I agreed with wholeheartedly. It took me a couple of months to get the book into shape.

3) In the fall of 2012, I revisited the book again, and, based on a few external notes I’d gotten, revised again.

4) In February 2013, when my (future) editor first read the book, she had a real problem with the ending. So over a weekend, I rewrote the last fifteen pages! (Sometimes revision can mean scrapping whatever lame idea you were holding onto in the interest of listening to someone wiser than you). It felt great to show her I could turn quality work around quickly, not to mention take constructive criticism and run with it. I really welcomed the chance to show someone who I wanted to work with what I’m made of.

5) In May 2013, my editor came back to me with a substantive edit. In the meantime, I’d reread the whole book myself and had my own changes. The revision that followd was the deepest I ever went with Bittersweet. I questioned character arcs, plot points, narrative flow, plot points, sentences, words—everything I could get my hands on. I’ve found the best way to do this kind of edit is to immerse myself in the universe of the book, and so, the first three weeks of June were spent living, breathing and sleeping Bittersweet.

6) In July 2013, I’ve read the book aloud to myself, which has been incredibly helpful in hearing what hasn’t been working, on a more global level and also the level of the word and sentence. My editor has been reading it too, and has come back with very few (and mostly incredibly encouraging notes). In the meantime, I’ve re-read the book in the last few days and have caught a number of tiny things I want to tweak, mostly on the level of the sentence. I’m now combining her notes with mine to create one final draft of Bittersweet—which will be back in her hands, for good, in 24 hours!

A book never feels done. The secret is knowing you’ve worked hard enough on it that you’re allowed to let it go.