Every Last One-The Illusion of Safety
March 17, 2011
Anna Quindlen’s novel Every Last One explores the moment when safety–the whole illusion of safety–is pulled out from under a family and a community.
In the interview below, Quindlen discusses writing, reading (including her own favorite authors), winning the Pulitzer Prize, how she became a novelist, why she began writing nonfiction first as an Op-Ed columnist, and what happened in the national furor over being uninvited from a university commencement address.
Reading, she remarks here, is transgressive. How, you ask? Take a listen!
And if you’ve read or are reading Every Last One, let us know what you think.
Tell us your favorite passages.
What is this novel teaching you about the craft of storytelling?
And what insights do you learn from Anna Quindlen herself, speaking below….
Can You Tell a Story and Prolong the Suspense?
January 14, 2011
We’ve all had those friends who were just plain old natural born storytellers, the kind that gather big groups around them at parties and on sprawling front porches, everyone leaning in, straining to catch every word. Down here in the South, we home-grow lots of them. In fact, the National Storytelling Festival meets every year just up the road–okay, a good ways up the road–in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and while I’m not claiming that Tennesseans are always better storytellers than the rest of the country, still, you’ll notice I’m hoping you’ll draw that conclusion.
The art of storytelling, with vivid characters, conflict, rising action and sustained suspense have nothing to do with education or fancy degrees. Truth be told, the further away I get from my own graduate school years, the more I’m convinced that I wasn’t really doing myself any favors by reading Samuel Richardson’s 1,000-plus-page (and you think I’m kidding) 18th-century novel Clarissa, a story in which a young woman is seduced, drugged, raped and proceeds to die a slow and painfully melodramatic death–over the course of hundreds, and I do mean hundreds, of pages. It might still serve me well when I’m teaching literature to refer back to it with a self-confident flip of the professorial hand (the one that says I’ve read that–don’t recall much about it–but dang it, I’ve read that). Yet, when what I’m wanting to do these days is construct a story that keeps readers turning pages late into the night, Clarissa is not my friend.
A couple of years ago, a friend led me to bestselling author Ken Follett’s site (Pillars of the Earth, etc.) on which he offers a marvelous four-part lecture, free for the on-line viewing, on “The Art of Suspense.” I’ve since used it in many of the creative writing classes I’ve led, and I’m happy now to pass it along to you. Let me know if you find it useful in your own suspense-making!
Ken Follett speaks on The Art of Suspense
Story and the Past: When the Fictional Story is True
February 12, 2010
Here’s the awkward truth–awkward, as so much truth is: I was nervous about the five little words my editor suggested adding to the marketing description of my first novel. Her voice was all enthusiasm over the line–but then she gets jazzed by everything, everything, I tell you, from character development to comma placement, which is why writers adore her.
“What if we added,” she wanted to know, “the words ‘Inspired By a True Story’–what do you think? Because that’s true, right? And people would love to know the story behind the story. Right?”
Well, yes. Sure. Exactly. Sort of.
Because certainly Blue Hole would never have been written without the Appalachian Mountains.
Or the brutal 1980 shootings on 9th Street in Chattanooga, or a cross-burning at the home of a Sri Lankan family in my hometown, Signal Mountain, Tennessee, or my friendship with the daughter of that family.
It wouldn’t have been written if I hadn’t loved my little Southern town, and boasted to the friends around me as an adult in Boston that my mountain was home to some of the kindest people ever to draw breath.
And it never would have been written if I hadn’t also been knocked-flat horrified as an adult living in Boston to learn that my hometown had also been beloved by the assassin Byron DeLaBeckwith. After he’d been acquitted by an all-white jury twice in Mississippi for the murder of Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers, Ku Klux Klan member DeLaBeckwith apparently found our pretty mountaintop a safe, comfortable haven during the years I was growing up there. So all that was true.
But regarding this truth thing, I’d had fear struck into me when my brother–who is, okay, yes, at least a rough model for the protagonist’s brother Emerson–read an early draft of the novel and proudly pronounced, “Yep, I can pick out the real person behind every character.”
“What? No, see, this is fiction,” I was desperate to explain–like he might’ve gone muzzy on the definition of fiction.
True, all fiction writers draw on real life, of course. We borrow a dimple here, a balding head there, our own ugly experience of betrayal and forgiveness and deceit.
But the last thing I wanted was old friends of my brother’s and mine drawing lines from each character to an actual person–suggesting sometimes a not very flattering portrait that was never intended as a portrait at all. The characters in the novel came, perhaps, from what Jung calls the “collective unconscious,” a mish-mash of conglomeration and imagination. But in the end the characters were fictional creations, and while the story was based on historical events, it, too, was fictionalized. It wasn’t a strictly accurate rendering of events–and wasn’t supposed to be.
Still, the key words “Inspired By” convinced us all the tag was fair to use with the book.
Now here’s what’s been so intriguing to me about a fictional story rooted in Truth–that is, the truth that human beings are horrifically prone to finding others to despise in order to feel themselves superior. And that the stories of these hates are all around us, some covered up, some blazing away in full view. And that human beings also have access to improbable grace. To forgiveness. To change.
Since Blue Hole Back Home was published nearly two years ago, I regularly hear from people who’ve read the book, then give me the gift of their own stories. Sometimes these are people who grew up thousands of miles from where I did, but something in the novel triggers tales of similar hate–and reconciliation–they’ve seen and lived out. Sometimes it’s people from my own hometown telling what they remember of events that few of us talked about at the time.
One story-giver was a cameraman who’d been sent to interview me, a guy about my own age who’d grown up near where I had, but raised in a whole different part of town. Now both in our forties, one of us black and one of us white, we spun out stories together, his filling holes in what I’d known or seen or remembered–his having personally known, for example, the five African-American women described in my story as being critically injured by drunken white guys–two of them let off entirely by the jury, the third serving only a handful of months. He was the one who finished that thread of the truth for me: all five women died without one penny’s compensation.
Just this week, I received a letter from a man in a maximum security prison who grew up in a valley not far from my mountain. He’d just read Blue Hole, and wrote to tell me how he remembered much of what I described in the novel, and how his father had taken him as a boy to a Klan rally at a nearby elementary school (an elementary school! Dear God). And how he was heartbroken now by the cruelty and senseless of the racism that brewed in those days, long after the height of the Civil Rights era. His words, written from prison by a white man who committed I have no idea what kind of serious crime, spoke of gladhearted change. In our culture. In himself. A story in trade for a story.
So I’m thankful today for stories. For the way they get us offering up our own little peepholes on Life and on Meaning: our stories –some of which we rightly call fiction. But when they speak from the gut and the heart, they can also be terribly, painfully, startlingly True.
If you want to hear more of the actual events that inspired–note that key word INSPIRED–the novel Blue Hole Back Home, check out this television interview with Channel 12 in Chattanooga.
Or view the YouTube video below:
Connect with Joy
