Published: April 15, 2011

Miranda Literary Magazine brings a brief insight into the creation of this novella and the art collaboration that is included.

Restore grew out of the bits and pieces of life unfolding around me back in the summer of 1998. Charlie was going through a divorce, I was weeks away from being terminated from my job, one of my favorite readers had cancer, thoughts of my maternal grandfather (Albert Bergeron) who had died a few years earlier were festering, and my wife and I were caring for a young cousin of hers who had the energy of a nuclear reactor churning beneath the façade of a beautiful, fresh-faced fourth-grade girl.

I’m sure there was more, but on a sunny day on a small square of campus green, Charlie Lemay and I were finishing a shoot, packing away props, when he asked if I’d be interested in writing some text to accompany a series of triptychs he had developed.

A few nights later Charlie and I met over dinner at his apartment and I saw these fantastic images for the first time. I was startled, and through them got to know a lot about Charlie (who I had only known as a fellow faculty member in the Humanities Department of a small New England college). The images as you see here were built from and around Charlie’s fascination and obsession with the minor deformities he had possessed since high school—the bent and misshapened fingers that he had worn like badges of courage constantly bandaged through the four years of his high school football career. The way these fingered figures were created, shaped and reshaped through the magic of digital photography and computer graphics to represent ideas mythic and ancestral, modern and in your face, forced me to spend weeks with them before I could even take to the keyboard.

Meanwhile, I had just completed a short story, “Head Over Heels in Love Over You” that Ann LaLonde, a secretary in the development office of this same small New England college, had fallen in love with. Soon after her reading of it she had come to me to reveal that her cancer was terminal.

When I began to play with how I might “illustrate” Charlie’s images, poetry was the first tool I tried to crack them open—and a series of Galapagos Island poems resulted. Charlie hated them all. He wanted a narrative that somehow joined his triptychs together in a way as free-flowing and startling as he had attempted in joining his separate graphic images into one—forming a biblical trinity of sorts. Section Eight’s introductory scene is all that remains of the poetic reminiscing found in the original Galapagos poems.

It was Anne who suggested I take my short story “Head Over Heels in Love Over You” as inspiration, and find where Albert and Irene’s love might take them. As you’ll see, they led me to Mark Plante’s love affairs with Marie, Pauline, and his daughter Mary Jo. But perhaps most importantly they led me to Colton. But that is for you to decide.

Anne LaLonde died before the task was completed, but I dedicate this task to her.

I worked in my basement, the images displayed on black poster board for nearly a year as the characters began to appear and reappear like spirits between Charlie’s mysterious fingers. There was more than one story to tell here, but it was Charlie’s images that called the attention—so my words needed to be narrative and weaving, not long-winded. This was more a small joined collection of stories, not a novel.

Albert and Irene gave birth to Mary Jo, the vibrant and determined third-grader, and together they helped shape the final story as it appears before you here. I hope they and Charlie’s fingers have told it well.

–Michael J. Brien

Back to the novella

“A book itself threatens to kill its author repeatedly during its composition,” Michael Chabon writes in the margins of his unfinished novel “Fountain City” — a novel, he adds, that he could feel “erasing me, breaking me down, burying me alive, drowning me, kicking me down the stairs.” And so Chabon fought back: he killed “Fountain City” in 1992. What was to be the follow-up to his first novel, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” instead was a black mark on his hard drive, five and a half years of work wasted.

That’s why you’ve never read “Fountain City,” just as you’ve never read John Updike’s “Willow,” Junot Díaz’s “Dark America” or Jennifer Egan’s “Inland Souls” — all abandoned by their authors after years of toil and piles of pages. Chabon, though, has recently published the first four chapters of “Fountain City” in the literary magazine McSweeney’s, complete with annotations that in turn bemoan and belittle the book that stole so much of his life before he put his misery out of its misery.

Read the entire essay at the New York Times website.

Vampires live forever, but vampire novels, even ones as popular as the “Twilight” series, eventually molder just like everything else, so publishers of young-adult fiction and the moviemakers who find inspiration from them have already moved on from fantasy about the undead to science fiction. A harbinger of what’s to come is “I Am Number Four,” based on the novel of the same title, which just opened in theaters. “I Am Number Four,” sold to DreamWorks even before it found a publisher, is ostensibly the work of one Pittacus Lore, an extraterrestrial. It’s really by James Frey, the author of the factually challenged memoir “A Million Little Pieces,” and Jobie Hughes, a minion hired as part of Frey’s latest project: Full Fathom Five, a literary sweatshop modeled on Damien Hirst’s art factory and designed to churn out Y.A. material for books, movies and TV.

Read the rest…

The whole idea of writing a novel can be intimidating. Let’s face it, we all know that writing is work and writing a novel can be compared to building a skyscraper. It is a good idea to have some character sketches, outlines, plot ideas, and maybe some themes floating around in your brain before you start your novel. For me, it takes more than just a basic skeleton to begin writing. I never start writing a novel until I have an ending. I know, you might be saying – I don’t have a beginning, how am I going to come up with an ending? Don’t panic. Knowing the ending will help you develop convincing story and significant plot.

E. M. Forrester explains story as a linear tool or what happens next. The reader will then ask – what happens next? Plot is not based on time, but on characters. The reader will ask – why? The difference is time sequence verses character desires and motivations. Among the many constructs that an ending may provide for you in the beginning, these two elements are important. Yes, writing a novel is exploration. Yes, writing a novel will take a shell of a character and fill it up completely, so that they will actually begin to function outside your wishes and desires. And you should be listening intently. But, they can’t move blindly. We must make our characters move somewhere logically. That is why knowing your ending will strengthen story, plot and character motivation.

If you are writing historical fiction, memoirs, or non-fiction, you might have a series of factual events from research that dictates your plot and final scene selection. When I was writing the historical account of Harriet Quimby, the first woman pilot to gain her aviation license, I knew the ending – I just had to get there. When I wrote the second novel which was entirely fiction, like a vision, I saw the ending very clearly. Knowing exactly where I was going made the scenes and plot tangible, giving me room to think of some of the higher constructs of the novel, like theme, subplots and hidden conflicts. Let’s look at character, setting and writer comfort with this strategy of writing to a known ending in mind.

The importance of seeing that ending clearly gives your characters direct desire and motivation that relates to those final scenes. In fact, you may realize, as you write, that they have conflicting desires and motivations concerning the ending – but that is what makes clear and meaningful plot twists and good storytelling. It won’t happen automatically, but as you project an ending and move your characters to it – the novel will move toward a purpose. It is similar to imposing an unforeseen fate upon them. Be sure to develop your characters to fulfill the ending scene and see it through. In Moby Dick, Ahab is driven by his loss and revenge to face the white whale and we expect nothing less by the time we get there. Did we ever think that he wasn’t going to find the white whale? Of course not.

The next element that is set right by knowing the end of your novel is the structure of your setting. Knowing the end, you can begin to construct locations and significant detailing for this ending to play out on. If you are going to have a barn fire at the end of your novel – then you need a country side, a farm, and yes, a barn. By knowing this ahead of time – it helps you build these elements in as you write. Setting is more than just scenery in many great novels and writing. Knowing where and how you will get to the end will define the construction you will use. You have so much to do when you start a novel, explain characters, define time and setting, establish plot, have a decent voice, the right point-of-view – to name a few – that it is important to flush as many of these elements as possible and direct them to your established ending.

Defining a clear ending will help you mentally as a writer. Having a sense of the ending makes it clear in your mind where you are at any given time in your novel. If you are writing a normal novel of 300 pages and you get to page 100, you have completed a third of the novel. This is a time to check and make sure you are where you hoped to be when you wrote the first paragraph. This will keep you on track and give you some indicators as to your scope and time remaining. My first novel was a gluttonous 530 pages. It came from a lack of experience and an attempt to write two books when I only needed one. My second novel was a brilliant 252 pages and it was a perfect length. I knew the ending and went to it without changing course too often. Mentally, as a writer, you have to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I must say that this method works for me. In the early stages of writing a novel-length project, I have a very difficult time writing outlines and character sketches because I feel that I don’t know my characters and motivations well enough. However, having an overall novel concept and an ending helps me define the answer to the questions I am about to put to my characters. That’s not to say that once you get to know your characters that you won’t modify the ending a bit; you probably will to keep your character’s motivations and desires in proper order.

If you can’t see the ending or a series of scenes that would conclude your novel project, then perhaps you’re not ready to write just yet. Once you write a novel, you will start to think, like any other writing form, about how to make another one. I do it by discovering great characters and defining where they are at the end of the novel (which includes people who are dead, alive, angry, confused, happy, miserable, satisfied or triumphant) and writing to that moment. If that final scene inspires you, makes you cry, makes you angry, makes you feel alive: that’s when you’ve got it. You will write to it. Don’t forget, by the time you write your characters and story to the known end, it will be stronger, filled with emotion and meaning. You will know your characters and their desire, you will have defined a sequence and a strong plot. And that end, like fate, will draw your characters quickly along to the end, like it was meant to be. It always was.

One day, my 95-year-old mother asked me about the book. Had she given it to me? Yes, I said. Well, she’d like to look at it again. So, I brought it to her house and we went through it together. My mother’s memory had always been distorted– the result of a lot of suffering and struggle. And it didn’t improve with age. How would I ever get the story beneath the story if my mother never told me the truth and most of the characters in the book were dead? I decided that the story beneath the story demanded my fictional attention.

I began my writing life as a journalist and book reviewer and began writing fiction much later. It was a relief to leave the fact gathering and corroboration behind with this particular story. In the pictures I look like a happy baby–
the firstborn child, everyone doting on me—so, I decided to tell the story from this baby’s point of view in New York City in the summer of 1944. Though it’s gone through several revisions, the initial draft fell out of me in one long breath. Process Notes by Carol Bergman / December 2010

Sincerely,

Ron Samul

Publisher – Miranda Literary Magazine