Under the Skin, Into the Bone
On writing the kind of story that writes you back.
I see that it’s been well over a month since I last posted a substack here, which is laggardly even for me. This is why—all I have room for is the book I’m writing. It is what we sometimes call an attack book, or a gift book, a book that demands to be written and pushes and pushes until it gets its way. I’ve had a few others1 but mostly they’re not.
Being here, more than halfway through the rough draft of a book that is obsessing me, is one of the greatest blessings of the writing life. When I was a child, dreaming of writing because I so loved books and wanted to live inside them, this is what I thought it would be like—living in a book with a wild passion, loving the people and the world so much that it’s almost sinful.
People talk about the challenges of writing, how hard it is, and how the business will wear you out. The talk is so often about selling books, making lists, getting noticed, and all those things are right and true and natural.
But they are not this—this mad dive into the joy of creating this kaleidoscopic world, this carnival of color and light and movement and passion, a world I love exploring. I am alive within it, and it is alive in me. Its images are weaving themselves into my bones, the characters swimming through my blood.
This is what I live for.
It is an ambitious book, more ambitious than anything I’ve previously attempted. My office, and the area outside my office, and the table beside my chair, and my nightstand are all piled high with research texts on four time periods, three cultures, two countries. I went into it knowing the basic facts and sensibilities of most of it (or why choose it), but as we all know, writing is about details, and sensibilities can’t tell you what someone had for breakfast in 1914. Every tiny thing in a novel comes out of my head, and it must be placed just so. It must be correct. It must either stand out or be absorbed into the scene, but it must be chosen. That takes a lot of research reading and note taking and documentation in case a copy editor (bless their vigorous questioning) flags it.
A tiny snippet, just for my Substack readers:
Most of those pieces were landscapes, with some portraits, though none of the ones I most treasured, which were locked away in a secret closet behind a panel in the basement. The mere existence of them would have caused a scandal at one time, and although that day had passed, they were my secret and I would not share them. Honestly, I feared what Peter might do to them in a fit of drink.
Better to keep them hidden away.
Every writer loves a challenge. It’s one of the reasons most of us choose the profession—it is impossible to master, endlessly fascinating, and each work teaches something new. How exhilarating to spend our lives learning new things all the time! How can a person ever get bored?
But the challenge and the ambition of the project are not why I’m so engaged. Those aspects stem from my need to tell this story, about these people, in this particular place and time. These characters have been following me around for a couple of years, jumping up on stage like persistent actors every time I started a new book to ask, “Now?”
They insisted it was their turn this round, and I was very willing. I’m swamped with it, with them, with all of it, and honestly, I sort of dread finishing. It’s what one must do, share the work eventually, or the circle isn’t whole, but I already know I will miss them terribly.
Have you had a gift book? Or are there books you read over and over again to immerse yourself in the story? Tell us about it.
In The Midnight Rain, No Place Like Home (which I wrote during one of the worst years of my life), The Lost Recipe for Happiness, The Sleeping Night, which took years to write and then didn’t sell until decades later; a romance called Marriage Material ( a title I hated but had no control over) and one called The Last Chance Ranch that won a big cash prize and allowed me to start traveling. A Bed of Spices, an offbeat historical, only sold 12,000 copies on first release, but became a cult favorite and—when I indie published it later—outsold all the others by a mile.
I wish every book arrived with this urgency and force, but they don’t. It doesn’t mean they’re bad books. When We Believed In Mermaids has sold a more than a million copies but it worked me half to death. I loved it, but it was far from an attack book.
This. This is the way my novel feels to me. I am an accidental fiction writer. Competent, with an excellent grasp of language. A lifelong reader. A lover of words. But on December 31, 2014 something shifted. And I had to tell the story I’ve now spent over ten years trying to put down on paper. Most of that, learning HOW to write fiction. This year, I finished my first draft.
My very first creative writing teacher at Gotham Writers said “This is a very ambitious first novel.” And he was right. It’s dual timeline, dual POV, historical fiction. However, I can’t NOT write this novel. These characters and this story will not let me go. They bang around in my head, causing a huge ruckus, if I try to put them away. They cry with grief at never being heard, they shout in rage that they are being ignored. And so, I keep writing. Thank you. Thank you so much for the sense of validation I have after reading this.
This is wonderful. I love that you are so happily and thrillingly immersed in this book!