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.

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Following the Yellow Brick Road to Publishing

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books, Novel, Publishing, writing

So far I’ve heard from nine publishing houses, all complimentary, all passing on my novel.

Highlight the word “complimentary.” I do. We writers are like that, or so I’ve heard and found to be true in practice. A particularly complimentary rejection letter can keep us smiling for weeks.

It’s all part of the publishing process, those mounting rejections while waiting for that miracle, or what feels like a miracle in the waiting, the hand of god reaching out of the sky to bliss our work, to name us, oh holy of holies–a published novelist.

In the meantime I print out the rejection letters and mark with yellow highlighter all the praise large and small. A sunny bulwark against disappointment, I suppose.

“It only takes one to fall in love,” says my agent. “The right one, for the long haul.”

Finding the right publisher is like finding the right marriage partner. We can fall in love with someone, or some book,  and yet still not be ready to commit. To slip a ring on a finger or offer the ultimate pledge, to death do us part.

So I’m still waiting for “the right one” to come along, to be so swept away by my novel they cannot bear to pass on it.

In the meantime, I gather Toto in my arms and happily follow that yellow brick road of sunny highlights on my way to see the wizard and find a home for my novel.

Keep your fingers crossed.

 

 

 

“Writing from the Underbelly” – My Revamped Website

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Blogging, creating a platform, memoir, Publishing, the business of writing, Website, writing, writing for yourself, Writing from the underbelly

I’ve been busy recently re-vamping my writers website at www.djbrasket.com, as well as creating a Facebook Author page, and setting up a Twitter account. All part of the writer’s life these days, if you want to be professional and impress agents and publishers, as well as sell books.

I did all this while still in the midst of writing my novel—well, actually I’ve got two in progress. That doesn’t include the short stories I’ve pulled out of the drawer and dusted off and the new ones I’ve been coming up with as well, all which like good little piggies are trying to find their way to a market.

But back to my website. I created it a couple of years ago as a kind of writing dump. Yes, dump. I’ve been writing all my life and some of it has been published and a lot of it hasn’t, and most of it I never even really tried to publish, unless you call sending a few stories and poems out to a dozen literary journals over a ten-year period as “trying”. Probably not.

So yes, dump. My mother had just died, you see, and I realized that the dream I had always had of being a writer “someday” might never happen. And the writing I had done was scattered all over the place. I wanted a legacy. Whether I ever published another thing or not, I wanted what I had written to be gathered into a single place for all posterity to view and, if so inclined, to actually read. The plan was to include excerpts of everything I had ever written that I truly liked and links to pdf files so people could read the complete work if so desired. I was going to give away everything to the public for free.

Public! Here it is. Have at it! Or not. You decide.  That was the plan.

It wasn’t that I had given up on the desire to write and publish. I’d been waiting to do this for a very long time. I was waiting until I “retired.” Well, here I was, having happily taken an early “retirement” when my husband retired early and we moved too far from my work to commute. Here was my big chance. I was already, after all, actively pursuing my art, even while I had worked, which included writing as well. In my off-hours two drafts of one novel was completed, and another novel that would just not wait its turn was half-drafted as well.

But I also was very much aware that I might not live so long to complete either. Not because I was sick or anything, but because, well, things happen. Things happened to my mother, and they happened very quickly. In three months she had gone from well to buried.

So this website was my legacy in a way. An archive of all my work. Prettier ways to put it, I suppose, than “dump.” But basically that’s what it was. And it was a labor of love.

I took my time and I had a lot of fun creating the site. It didn’t look at all like what other writers, mostly published, were doing on their sites. But that was okay because this was for me. And besides, I wasn’t selling anything. I was giving it all away!

Fortunately I came to my senses. I realized I couldn’t give away stories I still hoped to publish. So I skipped the pdf part and just left the excerpts up. And as one or two or three stories “sold” (yes, I still think of it that way, no money exchanged, not even complimentary copies, but still “sold”), I was able to include links to those works.

But lately, as I’ve been getting more serious about the business of writing, creating my “platform” and all that, I looked again at my writing website and realized that it just wouldn’t do. I was going to have to completely revamp it.

First to go would have to be its name: Writing from the Underbelly. No author site I had seen had anything so silly or pretentious. Gotta go.

And all those quotations about art and writing? Out the window.

And the page called “essays” (who says that anymore?) with excerpts from some of the weekly columns I used to write, or the book reviews I’d written when I managed a book store, or the academic papers!? Give me a break! I was marching them all into the trash bin.

But I couldn’t do it. I looked at it all again and decided, “I like this!”

Sure, it was silly, it was homespun, it was pretentious. It was not professional, compared to what REAL writers sites looked like. But it was me. And I liked it.

That “Writing from the Underbelly”? That was me all over. That’s how I write, from that soft underbelly of thought, that place of vulnerability where you feel things before you see and know them and put them into words. So I kept it and added this:

“When thought reaches deep below the surface of things encountering the half-forgotten memories, dreams, and fantasies that please or surprise, haunt or terrorize–that’s where writing emerges. You have to dig deep below conscious thought, like tree roots pushing down into the earth, breaking up the soil, wrapping around rocks, sucking up subterranean waters, before your branches can take shape and reach up to fill the sky.”

And that “root” and “stone” and “branch” metaphor? That inspired just what was needed for a background cover photo of, guess what? Roots and stones and branches.

I ended up changing very little.

Even the discomfiting essays—the excerpts of “social commentary” and book reviews and academic paper. Not only did I keep them-I added a new one! Yikes! What was I thinking?

But yes, they stayed. They stayed because they said something important about me and my writing and even why I write.

One paper was on Wallace Stevens, Lacan, and quantum physics. It was all about the slipperiness of language and the capacity for play. I wrote:

[M]eaning could be said to be slippery at best, relative more than relevant, dependent upon a complexity of interrelationships between opposing agents–imagination and reality, signifier and signified, observer and observed; or, in broader and more flexible terms, subject and object, I and Other.

My God! Have you read any of the blogs? That’s what I write about all the time.

The essay I added was called Faulker’s “The Bear”: A Feminine Mystique. I wrote:

“It is the unspoken mystery of the wilderness, fertile and profuse, that, permeating Faulkner’s text, is the source of this strong feminine odor. It is the wilderness, this strangely feminine presence, ‘Which breathing and biding and immobile, watched {Ike} from beyond every twig and leaf . . .’ It is this same wilderness, this uncanny, myriad, feminine presence, ‘breathing and biding and immobile,’ which seems to peer silently at the reader from beyond every word of the text.”

That’s what this blog is all about! “Living on the Edge of the Wild” is about exploring that mysterious, feminine ground of being at the edge of consciousness that somehow permeates everything. Everything I write, to some extent, touches upon that.

So it stayed too. Nearly all of it stayed. Why? Because I like it.

And as Harper Lee once wrote: “Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself…It’s a self-exploratory operation that is endless.” Thank you, Harper! Would you like to spend time with the other quotations on my pages?

If you want to check out my website for yourself, here it is: www.djbrasket.com