On Photography – Researching My Sequel

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amwriting, books, creative process, Novel, photography, writing, writing process

I’m working on a sequel to my novel From the Far Ends of the Earth, mostly research and note-taking at this time. The sequel will be following the “missing” mother’s journey of self-discovery and re-invention through the lens of her camera as she travels through Mexico to the tip of South America.

The mother’s photography plays a key part in the first novel. It becomes an obsession for one of the main characters, the son, a struggling drug addict. He receives packets of his mother’s photos, black and white glossies, with no notes or explanations of why she’s sending these to him. They are stark, often disturbing images, wildlife mostly: a horny-head lizard, mean face, wicked eye, flash of tongue; a nasty looking rooster perched on top a fence post, its wings in a flurry, beak open, eyes wild and furious.  Another of a dead tree, all bare limbs, like outstretched arms, like someone shaking its fists at the sky, or trying to tear it to pieces.

He doesn’t know what to make of these and pins them on a wall to study. In his drugged haze, he comes to see the photos as pieces of his mother she’s cut from her own body and sent to him to put back together. If he does, she’s saved, and he’s saved, and she come home. If he doesn’t they’re both doomed.

I love photography but have never studied it professionally, so I have a lot to learn before writing this. I began my research by  foraging through all my bookcases, large and small, tucked in various corners of the house to discover any books I might already have on the subject. I was delighted to find a few gems:

On Photography, by Susan Sontag. A collection of essays about the art and its cultural significance and influence.

The Joy of Photography, by the editors of the Eastman Kodak Company. A 1979 guide to the tools and techniques of good photography.

Ansel Adams’ Examples -The Making of Forty Photographs. He describes equipment, techniques as well as the inspiration and vision that guided his art in making these. Fantastic photos too!

The Family of Children  A 1977 collection of photographs about childhood around the world  from the greatest photographers of the time. This is a sequel to the iconic The Family of Man collection curated by Edward Steichen and Carl Sandburg published in 1955.

Photography and the Art of Seeing by Freeman Patterson. A visual perception workshop for film and digital photography.

In addition, I’m reading the The Age of Light, a novel by Whitney Sharer based on the life of Lee Miller, a fashion model who becomes a photographer, studying with the famous surrealist painter and photographer Man Ray. Eventually she becomes his muse and lover. She goes on to establish herself as a noted photographer as well as the first female war correspondent embedded with the Americans. She was there when they freed the concentration camps and took photos of herself bathing in Hitler’s bathtub, after his suicide.

I’ve also ordered a book by the photographer Sally Mann, Holding Still: A Memoir with Photographs. She caused quite a stir in 1992 when her book of photographs Immediate Family was published. Although highly acclaimed as one of the greatest and most influential photography books of the time, it was also criticized for the extremely intimate and personal photographs of her children, some unclothed.

My character begins her journey in the year 2000, before digital photography was popular.

What kind of camera would she have had? Could she create a dark room and develop her own film in the back of her camper?

How would she earn a living as a traveling photographer?

How would she advance enough over the course of two years to earn a cover story in the National Geographic, which she has done by the end of my first novel?

These are just a few of the questions I have. If any of you know the answers or can suggest other reading or research material that might help, I’d be most appreciative.

Doing research for a book is one of the easiest, most rewarding and inspiring stages in the process of writing a novel. I’m a little bit in heaven.

 

A Happy Ending for My Novel? For My Son?

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Addiction, amwriting, happy endings, heroin addiction, Novel, novel writing, Publishing, revision, writing process

Florence Harrison, 1887 – 1937

One of the publishers we sent my novel to wants a rewrite of the ending. While their readers said they loved the first 2/3 of the novel (the novel is divided into 3 parts), they felt I tried a little too hard to tie up all the loose threads into what they called an “uber happy” ending for my characters.

I can’t say I’m surprised by this reaction. I too worried that I might have tied up the novel in too pretty a bow. Perhaps I should have left at least one or two threads dangling for the reader to play with. But I believed, despite that, the transformations of the characters, their coming to grips with their past, their fears, their demons, their very real struggles and eventual triumphs are what we all hope to find at the end of our stories, both the real and the imagined.

Happy does happen, after all.

But, of course, in reality, our stories and struggles do not end as they do in a novel. Our lives keep on going after that final page, whether it ends on a high note or a low. We all know that. So what’s the harm of ending the novel on an upbeat tick?

I wanted that for them, for these deeply flawed characters who I had come to love. Weren’t their flaws and failings, their addictions and anxieties, their grief and doubts and fears enough grit to ground the story? Couldn’t we soar a bit too, near the end?

Happy happens too, right?

But does it last?

Probably the most improbable part of my ending is the struggling son’s recovery from heroin addiction. Not an easy thing to do. The statistics are all against it. Few survive, and those who do never feel completely free. It’s always there, slippery beneath their feet, breathing hard down their necks, a giant question mark dangling on the horizon like a sharp, deadly hook.

Some parts of this novel are based loosely on my son’s struggle with heroin addiction. For all I tried, I never could completely wean him of his addiction. I could help him: Pull him off the street, put him into rehab, pick him up from jail, search for the medication and counseling he needed; call an ambulance when he overdosed.

Sometimes it worked. Woven through his battles with addiction are the times he won, the year, or two, or three he was free and happy and thriving. But it never lasted much more than that. Four, tops.

I always thought: If only he would listen to me, take my advice, do what I say; if I could lock him in a closet and keep him safe; if I could trade places with him, get into his skin and live his life for him, beat down the addiction once and for all and then give him his life back again, I would. But I couldn’t. I never could control him any more than he could control his addiction.

But I could control my characters. I could manage their recovery. I could give them a happy ending. It does happen, doesn’t it?

Rarely.

So I’m rewriting the end of my novel with that sharp, thorny question mark dangling in the air. As it always does, for each of us, whether we struggle with addiction or not.

Paradise burns to the ground. Mudslides swallow homes. Daughters lose babies. Sons relapse. Again, and again, and again.

But strangely, miraculously, hope never dies. Not completely. Homes are rebuilt. Lives turned around. Marriages mended.

Families come together at Thanksgiving and look across the table at each other with all their flaws and fears, their unhealed hurts and scars, and they love what they see. Through it all, despite it all, they just love.

That’s what my novel is all about. That “despite it all” kind of love, happy ending or not.

Loss & Desire, and the Search for Something More, in Life & Literature

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amwriting, desire, life, literature, loss, Novel, poetry, writing, writing process

These are the themes that run through so much of what I’m compelled to write about. No doubt because they are the great themes running through all the arts, through myth, religion, psychology–through life itself.

The poem below captures that so eloquently.

Meditation at Lagunitas

By Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

So much here resonates with me:

• how “each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea,”
• how each particular presence is “some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light,”
• how “a word is elegy to what it signifies,”
• how “desire is full of endless distances,”
• including “the moments when body is as numinous as words.”

I wrote a series of blog posts several years ago about how these themes are developed in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and Lacan’s Mirror State, starting with Some Tragic Falling Off into Difference and Desire.

I wrote in Our Quest for Wholeness:

Writers of fiction know that to create a compelling story that keeps readers turning pages we must:

• Create a protagonist with an overarching need or desire (derived from some sense of loss, of being wounded, or incomplete)
• beset by constant conflict that intensifies and delays achievement of that desire (to gain what was lost, find healing or wholeness)
• until that need or desire is eventually realized (or not), but either way,
  leaving the protagonist in a better place (happier, wiser, more whole) than where she had been before the story began,
• having learned something important or significant about herself, the world she lives in, or what it means to be human.

What drives the story and develops the character is a quest to return to wholeness, to regain what was lost. But what is regained is never simply what was lost, but “something more.” Some new realization– wisdom chiseled from the hard knocks and setbacks of a difficult journey, insights into human nature that will light her path moving forward.

Perhaps we find these stories so compelling because they parallel our own psychic development from the womb to maturity and beyond.

I should not have been surprised when rereading and editing my novel to find these themes repeated in each character’s journey from loss and desire to the search for “something more.”

But I was surprised. Perhaps even as we all are surprised to find it running through our own personal history and journeys. We are so close to it that even while we know it is there, we miss it in the particularity of the moment, in the ordinary humdrum of each day. We have to step back, way back, to see it, the path behind and before us. Even then, which fork will we take next? Which way will our lives unfold? It’s all part of the mystery of being, even being ourselves.

I’ll be exploring this more in future blog posts.

Walking Each Other Home – Why We Write

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amwriting, creative writing, Deborah J. Brasket, Novel, writing, writing process

I’ve reread my novel after being away from it for well over a year.

I did so with some trepidation. Much earlier in the writing process, after I had completed and revised the first draft, I put it away for several months. Then read it with a fresh and very critical eye. The result was terrifying: I hated it.

Eventually I came to realize that if you approach any piece of writing with too critical an eye, from a disdaining or resisting distance, you fail to grasp the thing that connects reader/writer. There must be, at the very least, a willingness to allow the story to lead you forward.

I was pleased that my reading of the novel this time did grab hold and keep me reading, keep me involved. I’m going over it again for a final edit but finding little that wants or needs work. The place I’m spending the most time now are the those crucial opening pages, and these too I now feel are ready to go.

I plan to write more about this novel on these pages in the coming months. For I find that I enjoy writing about writing, as so many writers do. And the topics the novel touches upon and themes it explores are important to me, painful as they sometimes are: addiction, homelessness, poverty, life on the street, father-son-mother-daughter relationships, the inability of ever truly knowing anyone, loss and grief, art as self-discovery and redemption, love and romance, spiritual transformation.

In some ways, all I care about, all I am, why I write, why I care, are contained in these pages.

Recently I came across an essay on writing that captures so clearly why I write, and perhaps, why I read. The passages excerpted below reflect my own writing experience.

From Why Writers Write about Writing by Brianna Wiest

 Writing is speaking to yourself, but letting other people overhear the conversation.

The people who are compelled to write down what they feel are the ones who feel it hardest. They make up truths where they didn’t exist before. They put to words what would otherwise go muddled in their minds. Every single writer who can be honest can stand and ratify the fact that wedged between their words, laid subconsciously before them, were great loves and greater losses and deeper insecurities and projected fears. Nothing gets written without the intrinsic motivation to make something confusing and painful clear and beautiful.

I recently saw a quote that went like this: “we’re all just walking each other home.” And sometimes our maps and hands are offered in words. Sometimes we are lighthouses and sometimes we are lost sailors. Writers know you are best crafted out of being both.

And ultimately, the thing about writing is that it forces you to surrender yourself to uncertainty and vulnerability, which, if you ask me, is the most important task to master. My favorite writer . . . Cheryl Strayed once said something along those lines: that the place of unknowing is where the real work gets done — the vulnerable, uncertain place.

Because the best things are written out of the dark parts of us. Because things are always scary when they matter. Because things are inherently neutral and we assign value to them, and looking deeply into the words that touch us may be the greatest way — or the only way — of understanding those parts of us.

“To make something confusing and painful clear and beautiful.”

To help “walk each other home.”

That’s why I wrote this novel.