An Evening with Novelists

Conversations From the Archive
September 2015
Corona Del Mar, California

The Nakeds, Lisa Glatt
Orhan’s Inheritance, Aline Ohanesian
Remember Me Like This, Bret Anthony Johnston

Excerpts:

Lisa Glatt: From six to fourteen, I was in a cast with crutches [after being hit by a car], and my mother was a nudist, [but I write fiction because] when I sit down to write, I’m lying.

Bret Johnston: [The premise of my novel is] long-winded. I’d only have time to read half a sentence if I explained how I came to write the book.

The book is about the summer [a missing boy] returns to his family [after four years]. I had no inclination to write about a kidnapping. It wasn’t on my radar. I was a skate punk high school student. I didn’t have a girlfriend. I didn’t have a job. I thought the overnight shifts [chronicling the movements of a dolphin in an above-ground pool that had washed up onshore] were a great way to spend a night.

I was obsessed with the person who took all the shifts I wanted. I began developing a character based on this person about whom I knew nothing. The character of this person crystallized over twenty years.

[I decided] she has insomnia and wants privacy. She’s married. She’s signing up for shifts under her maiden name. The question was, “Why couldn’t she sleep?” Maybe her kid is missing. That’s what’s keeping her up.

[At one point, someone brought the dolphin a beach ball at the pool.] People without kids don’t have beach balls. I thought, “Her son’s breath is inside the beach ball, her son’s last breath.”

[I imagined, as she sat with the dolphin, she thought,] “I failed to save my son, but I won’t fail to save you.”

I wrote the book to figure out what would happen next.

I will read from the end because you know the whole thing. Is that career suicide?

Aline Ohanesian: I was working on a PhD in history. I dropped out. I had the compulsion to lie, but I did a ton of research [for the novel]. The book tries to answer the question, “Why does what happened to my great-grandparents one hundred years ago matter today?”

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett (Moderator): How do you decide what to keep and what to leave out [in autobiographical fiction]?

Ohanesian: It’s like weaving smoke. [Incorporating research into fiction is] taking what you have and weaving it.

DeMarco-Barrett (to Johnston): Prologues are controversial. At what point did the prologue come?

Johnston: I was so happy we didn’t talk before I wrote the book. I always knew the book would have a prologue because I didn’t know they were bad.

The original prologue was the scene of the boy being found. I decided the reader shouldn’t know that information up front. The reader should be with the family.

Spoiler alert: Around page seventy, they find the kid. Random House put it right on the cover: “missing boy found.” Turns out we weren’t on the same page after all.

[The book no longer includes a rescue scene.]

We should make a pact: We’re for prologues.

Glatt: The accident challenged my mobility so much I was reading big novels as a little, tiny person. [I tell my students] “find the material.” I call it lying, but it’s something else: telling something that’s not factually true.

DeMarco-Barrett: How do you deal with time?

Glatt: I deal with students who immediately want to see their name in print. This [novel] took four years. The first one took about seven. I won’t be someone you hear from a lot.

[For the first novel, I received] a year of faxes from my agent with rejections. Although self-doubt is always there, write through the hate.

Johnston: I don’t understand quitting. It doesn’t compute for me. I’m not saying that with bravado. It doesn’t mean everything I publish is good, or that I publish everything I write, but once I sign on, I will finish.

I can teach everything technical about writing in about twelve hours. The rest of the time, I’m teaching patience, stubbornness, and faith. I’m teaching to outlast everybody.

Ohanesian: I didn’t have an agent or an MFA. I didn’t know it was a novel. I didn’t have lofty goals. I just wanted to tell the story. I Googled “how to get an agent” and learned the word “query.”

I followed agents for months and picked the ones who represented the books I loved. Then, I wrote agents love letters. I wrote ten query letters and received four offers. I was too stupid to know writing a novel would be hard until I was four or five years into writing it.

I became a master historian before I started lying. I love the process. I love being lost in the research.

DeMarco-Barrett: How did you choose your characters?

Glatt: I knew the child who was hit by a car had to be a point-of-view character. [Another point-of-view character is from the perspective of the person who hit her, but] it’s mostly Hannah’s story.

With this novel, I reined in the points of view because my first novel kept getting away from me.

Johnston: I knew there’d be a number of points of view. I’m fascinated by two people looking at the same thing and seeing something different.

[Everyone in the kidnapped boy’s family looks at the boy coming home and sees it] four different ways. The boy doesn’t get a point of view. The reviewers say, “He’s doing the Jaws thing.” It makes it scarier if you don’t see the shark. That is patently wrong. [The boy] is not ready to talk. We can’t imagine anything worse than what these [kidnapped] kids went through.

Ohanesian: It was necessary for there to be a character who wants to know the story. This character is based on my brother, who is politically apathetic. (My brother hates when I say that.)

[I also] love old people who surprise you. My favorite character provides comedic relief because the book is so dark. [In the beginning, my novel] had six characters. The editor only cut one: a nine-year-old boy. Having five perspectives in a novel is ambitious for someone who doesn’t have an MFA.

DeMarco-Barrett: How do you keep track [of the logistics of the material]? Do you use Excel and other programs for organizational purposes during the writing process?

Ohanesian: It’s sheer chaos. I have piles on the floor. It’s a hot mess.

I do outline a bit. I have a timeline in Excel, use Word, and even fill out 3 x 5 cards. My husband says, “What’s next? Stone tablets?”

Chaos works for me. If I was organized, I’d feel restrained.

Johnston: I work on a sweet Commodore 64.

It’s all Word all the time.

I wrote the whole book without rereading any of it until I finished a draft. As I reread it afterward, I created a bullet-point list of events in each chapter, as if reading the story for the first time.

I bought the biggest bulletin board you have ever seen in your life. I pinned four colors of Post-it notes, one color for each point of view in the novel. I looked at it holistically: “We need more blue over here.”

DeMarco-Barrett: How do you create suspense in literary fiction?

Ohanesian: I was conscious of making sure the reader would ask, “What happens next?” at the end of every chapter. One way I did this was by changing the viewpoints to tease the reader.

Johnston: We have so many things vying for our attention. It’s harder to return to a book than to keep reading a book. I feel vulnerable to that. There are so many things more instantly gratifying than a four-hundred-page novel. I value suspense. I value plot. It’s a tool. It’s not just for airport mystery novels.

[Sometimes writers] confuse shock with suspense. Shock stops you. Suspense pulls you forward.

Glatt: I tell my students to write a good sentence. Then you’ll have a certain amount of mystery and suspense.

No more dragons!

Ohanesian: It’s about world creation. I’m immersed in the world [of the novel]. I read dry stuff. I know how many goats died at the Mission San Juan Capistrano in 1776, if anyone wants to know.

My research informs every sentence of my work.

Audience Member: Why isn’t the prologue chapter one?

Johnston: It doesn’t feel like a tease to me. It feels like an invitation. “There’s going to be a party next week, and I want you to be there.” Chapter one already feels like you’ve accepted the invitation.

The cover of the book is the sole jurisdiction of the marketing department. The prologue is art.

[When Random House sent me cover options,] it was like they were testing me. Apparently I picked the wrong ones. I don’t think I know what a cover is supposed to do. I never look at a cover. If Lisa Glatt has a new book, I go to the Gs. I read the book. I fall in love with the book, and then I think it’s the perfect cover.

Glatt (on rules): You need a good verb. You don’t need an adverb. I don’t think about the rules. It’s all in the execution.

Ohanesian: I didn’t know the rules. Now I’m a craft book junkie. I learned the rules through osmosis by reading good fiction. I learned the rules organically. I can smell it when it’s bad.

Johnston: On the first day of class, I pass out “things you should try to avoid.” I have this whole list. If you need an adverb, you have the wrong verb. I trust the rules usually but not always. No one is a bigger fan of subversion [if it works].

Plot comes from Aristotle. He didn’t sit at home and think, “I need to come up with the rules.” [Instead, he] mapped the journey [after careful observation].

When I first began my writing career, I thought “writers’ workshop” was like my dad’s garage. What are we building?

Ohanesian: Writing is building word by word, brick by brick. I don’t call myself an artist. I toil. I continue to toil. [With that comes] a lot of self-loathing, [but] you get up and do it again.

Johnston: I don’t attach romantic ideals to writers. All it is is logging an inordinate amount of time to create something that didn’t exist before. [If it doesn’t go well,] I still show up the next day. I go to work. There are so few people in the world who will commit to this. It’s so daunting, but some can’t find a way to not do it. You don’t have to be fast. You just have to be willing.

Glatt: [On good days,] I feel like a woman who has worked.