Ghosts In the Process
The invisible elements that go into a novel
The farmworker civil rights movement; university drama programs; the history of migration from Oaxaca, Mexico to central California; the temperature-controlled warehouse industry; the People’s Temple time in Ukiah before they moved to SF and, finally, Jonestown; Yucatan actor/crooner Carlos Lico.
These are things I researched in the writing of my 2020 YA novel, Goodbye from Nowhere. I also wrote the first draft in alternating POVs of all six Baker cousins. The final book is a very straightforward coming-of-age narrative with a single POV, with little to no mention of any of the above.
As I work on my current novel project, I’m watching a lot of Errol Morris documentaries and Terrence Malick movies, reading Dana Spiotta and Alice Munro, revisiting a favorite ME Kerr novel of the 80s, and doing deep dives into court records about [redacted out of “don’t say too much about you’re working on” superstition].
I know that it will eventually narrow down into something that does not include all of that. It’s far from wasted time, though. Readers will never specifically know just how many hours a writer spends digging up fragments of knowledge that we hope will inform the work or somehow unlock a story door we’ve been knocking on for months.
But the ghosts of that research will haunt their reading experience. They’ll float around as subtext and context, giving the reader a sense of what may lie just outside the frame, a “there’s something more here” vibe that can help a reading experience transcend the literal text.
If you’re a writer, I’m really curious what random bits of research you did or are doing that haunt your work but don’t end up on the page.
👻 👻 👻
Now begins the season where I’ll be periodically reminding everyone I’ve ever met that they can pre-order my next book, Kyra, Just for Today. It’s a follow-up to A Song Called Home, this time focusing on Kyra. It’s two years later, she’s newly 13, and her Mom’s previously rock-solid sobriety may not be as stable as we all thought. *cue ominous music*
I’ll be talking more about it as the publication date gets closer. It comes out on March 4, in hardcover, ebook, and audio, along with the paperback of A Song Called Home.
🔜 Pre-order Kyra and/or pre-order the paperback of Song (or get it in another format right now)
Last month, I read Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein (not to be confused with Naomi Wolf) and it’s very, very good, and extremely relevant.
We finally finished Reservation Dogs over the weekend. We consumed season 3 very slowly, not wanting it to be over. The penultimate ep, “Elora’s Dad,” was about as perfect as TV and storytelling get (so is the ep before that, “Send It,” really), and the season’s whole arc just has so much going on. I’m looking forward to rewatching.
I’ve been listening to a bunch of Depeche Mode lately. They were a favorite band of my adolescence, and the album Black Celebration especially takes me back to being 15/16—helpful for something I’m working on right now. The band is out on tour, and while the real tour is too pricy for me, we’re going to check out a DM cover band. I’m extremely curious/dubious about how that will go.
real Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode, from $102/seat
