Ten Authors on Their Pivotal Books

Last week, I asked people to send in comments on “pivotal books.” It was a slightly different take on the “book that made me want to be a writer” theme—which has been done a gozillion times. What interested me were the books which, when read by someone who was already writing, affected the direction of that reader’s work. I received great responses from nine authors whom I admire: Michael Haskins, Lyman Feero, Kieran Shea, Patti Abbott, Sophie Littlefield, Dave Zeltserman, Dawn Potter, Clair Dickson and Sandra Ruttan. We’ll start with my pivotal book and move on to theirs.

By 1987, I’d been writing for a decade but was only then becoming serious about it. Most of my stories were lousy pastiches of Michael Moorcock, H.P. Lovecraft and Roger Zelazny’s “Amber” novels. I was spending weekends at my then-girlfriend’s house, and one rainy Sunday needed something to read—hey, our activity choices were limited with both of her parents home and on the alert.

Anyway, I was tired of flashing swords, cunning sorcerers and eldritch terrors from beyond the stars. Nothing wrong with those things, but I had the urge to try something new. Tonia’s father had just finished reading a novel called The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute. Now, I’d heard of this book, which had been out for a couple of years. It was the center of regional controversy for its unflattering take on rural Maine life. I picked it up and figured what the hell.

This novel floored me; not because it was a brilliant piece of writing, but because the language and the subject matter were so raw and honest. Chute wrote about the Maine that I knew. Her characters—warts and all—were people I saw every day of my life. Many of the books I read in high school left me cold because I could not relate to the characters. The very idea that someone could write a novel about common, salt-of-the-earth people in an empathic and nonjudgmental way came as a revelation. It was also the first time I became aware of how the landscape of a story shapes character and plot, how the setting itself can be a character. Reading The Beans of Egypt, Maine became my road to Damascus moment as a writer.

Since my first encounter with Beans, other writers and books have affected my work—hell, most of the good ones do. But it was Carolyn Chute who set me on the path I’ve been following for the last 22 years. It isn’t a great book, but I still love it and reread it every couple of years.

Michael Haskins (author of Chasin’ the Wind): An interesting question! I would have to say it was James Lee Burke's In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead. Two reasons for that, 1) he had his character, Dave Robicheaux, see ghosts (Confederate soldiers), 2) I'd been reading his books in order and I realized at this point that Burke is one of the greats because you smelled the aromas of New Orleans and stench of the swamps while you read. I would kill to have those abilities!

Lyman Feero (genre-defying author of “The Switch” and other stories): The seminal work that shaped my writing career is actually the oeuvre of Edgar Allan Poe. I started writing because of Stephen King but it was Poe that shaped me. As a kid I loved "The Raven" and started writing poetry when I was ten. At the same time I found King and read his works voraciously. I started reading Poe's short stories and found them just as appealing as King's. "The Tell Tale Heart," "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Pit and The Pendulum," became easy favorites. Still it was King I fashioned my works after in high school.

Then came college. I branched out and read more obscure works by Poe. I read his Dupin detective stories, his essays on short stories and the creative ideal, his minor short stories like "Eleonora" and "Hop Frog." I always felt a little stifled by one genre. As I looked at the broad spectrum of Poe's work I realized that he was not simply a horror writer of the American Gothic tradition. Instead he was a storyteller who used many means to tell a story, even going so far as to create his own genres to do so. It was then that my long journey to tell stories beyond genre began.

Kieran Shea (author of “Shot Back,” “Thoroughly Yours” and other kick-ass crime stories): I'm not going to bullshit you, I mean every single book I read has me second guessing ANYTHING I attempt.

About twenty years ago, just before I was scrabbling in the Washington-DC theater scene and getting my first understudy acting gig (equity mind you) I picked up Sam Shepard's (out of print) short story/essay collection The Motel Chronicles.

Fuck me. That is it....that is all. All...I...ever...want...to...achieve.

When I read SS's TMC one night I bitch cursed that talented fucker like I was lanced with a cod hook. I had no idea, none, ZERO...just how hard so little words could slash.

So, I read Sam and kept pushing the slim volume on my friends, saying...read THIS.

Only a decade later did I realize the accuracy of Shepards's hawkish aim....

Sam Shepard.

Pure. Acid. Watershed.

Patti Abbott (Derringer Award-winning author of “My Hero” and other stories): For me it would the series of short stories (mostly published in The New Yorker) written by John Updike about the Maple family. They were eventually collected in the volume Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories and filmed in TV drama starring Blythe Danner and Michael Moriarty. The stories took the couple from their first married days through the dissolution of their marriage. My very favorite of the stories is titled "Giving Blood," where the two lie at right angles to each other giving blood, and thinking about the state of their marriage. It is incredibly sad.

Sophie Littlefield (author of the forthcoming A Bad Day for Sorry): When I stumbled on an early short story collection by T. Coraghessan Boyle in the 1980s - not even sure which it was, though a quick search gets me thinking it might have been Descent of Man - I was riveted. I was in my first year or two of college, home for the summer, broke, bored, and trolling for something new at the local library. I was shocked that you could write in such an unvarnished way about human appetites and still get published. There was also an element of emotional violence in Boyle's work that struck a resounding chord in me, one which, it turns out, later formed the basis for most of my own work. Also, some of the stories were also just so wonderfully, unapologetically, fantastically weird. I had certainly never heard of magical realism and, if I had, would have assumed it wasn't allowed in Missouri.

I wondered which of the librarians had test-driven the book - I was under the impression there was some round-table vetting process - and hoped I would not meet her eye by accident, because surely she would know: reading the book, I was convinced, had marked me forever.

In those days I felt deeply ashamed that I was so viscerally attracted to raw writing. A decade later, books like Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here made me see that you could reveal the drama at the core of human relationships without necessarily having to introduce sex and violence into the story. Though damn if those don't make handy story elements.

Dave Zeltserman (author of Fast Lane, Small Crimes and Pariah): This one’s easy. A Hell of a Woman by Jim Thompson. The book blew me away, and changed the way I thought about writing. I realized after reading this book that you could break every rule in writing if you can make it work.

Dawn Potter (author of Boy-Land and Other Poems, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton and the forthcoming How the Crimes Happened ): David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I've recently finished an essay called "Dickens the Novelist: A Love Letter," which is coming out someday in The Sewanee Review.

Here's the final paragraph of that essay: I love David Copperfield so much that I can hardly bear the idea of taking it apart to critically examine its insides. I really don’t care how or why it works. All I want is to keep rereading it forever. As David says about his friend the Micawbers, “I had grown so accustomed to [them], and had been so intimate with them in their distresses, and was so utterly friendless without them, that the prospect of being thrown upon some new shift for a lodging, and going once more among unknown people, was like being that moment turned adrift into my present life.”

Clair Dickson (author of the “Bo Fexler, PI” stories): The book that impacted my writing the most would be Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. I read the book in college, maybe seven or eight years ago now. I'd been writing for years before then, even dabbling in mysteries. In my quest to better understand the genre I was writing in, I came across Raymond Chandler. And I fell in love with his prose by the end of the first page. By the end of the book, I wanted to be the next Raymond Chandler. I love the way that Chandler plays with words. Everything I've read since then has not been able to compare. Chandler was my first taste of darker writing-- where bad things do happen to good characters and where no one bothers to find a silver lining. My kind of writing.

Sandra Ruttan (author of the Nolan, Hart & Tain series and editor of Spinetingler Magazine): "Criminous kids are bad enough, but Ruttan, a disciple of the Val McDermid school, takes things a bit further. To say more is to give away a terrific plot."

Margaret Cannon's review (of The Frailty of Flesh) in The Globe and Mail hit the nail on the head: a key book that had an undeniable influence on my writing was Val McDermid's Wire in the Blood. I read it at a time when I was exploring new-to-me authors, and much of what I'd read to that point had followed the point of view of the protagonist, who was almost always a cop. WITB chilled me to the bone with scenes told from the killer's perspective, and through the eyes of victims.

This one book, more than any other I can think of, made me consider carefully the use of point of view in storytelling. The added perspectives give the reader a God's Eye overview that allows you to see how it is - or isn't - coming together, and heightens the suspense as the investigation unfolds. I had always thought not knowing who did it, or why, kept people turning the pages, but WITB taught me that a great writer can divulge details and draw you in deeper at the same time.

WITB was also one of the first books I read that forged a bond between the reader and a central character and then killed the character. The sense of loss only amplified my desire to see justice done by the final page.

Every time I sit down to write I carefully consider the point of view I'm using, and what perspectives I'll use in the work as a whole to tell the story, and whether or not I'm limiting the perspectives to cheat the reader into false suspense, or whether the other perspectives add depth and richness to the story, and sometimes, I ask myself if letting a character live is pulling a punch that weakens the overall effect of the story being told. These are valuable lessons learned from one of the greats of our genre, and lessons I'm glad I learned early on.
***

There you have it. I want to thank everyone who took time out from their busy schedules to respond. If anyone else wants to talk about a pivotal book, feel free to add a comment.

Behind the Story

I recently assigned the students in my Writing Mystery and Crime Fiction class to read Chris F. Holm's "The World Behind." This excellent story appeared in the June 2007 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Track it down if you missed it.

Knowing that Chris is a cool guy, I asked him to write a paragraph or two about what went into the writing of that story. It would be a great help to my students. Well, Chris was more than generous with his time. He wrote four pages about the writing and submission process. With his kind permission, I am reprinting that essay here. Thanks again, Chris.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Behind “The World Behind”

When Patrick asked me to write a few words about the genesis of “The World Behind,” I wasn’t sure what I should say. It’s not that there’s no story to the writing of the “The World Behind”; the problem is, there are two. The first of them plays nicely into the romantic notion of being a writer – you know, inspiration strikes, and suddenly you find yourself scribbling on a Post-it/notepad/the back of an old grocery store receipt in a desperate attempt to get it all down. Thing is, that’s only half the picture. I’ve got dozens – hundreds, maybe – of such notes scattered throughout my house, the vast majority of which are never going to wind up a finished (much less published) story. Some of the ideas I never get around to writing seem to me to be every bit as good as the ones I do, which suggests it’s not so much quality that dictates what gets written as it is motivation. Now, the story of my motivation for writing “The World Behind” isn’t very romantic. In fact, I considered leaving it out entirely, but that struck me as cheating. After all, for most writers, inspiration comes easy – it’s the motivation that’s the tricky part. So, at risk of getting long-winded, here goes.

The first story begins with a walk.

I suppose all writers have their rituals, their habits – their ways of recharging the well when it runs dry. For me, that way is walking. Maybe it’s that walking, like writing, has its own natural rhythm. Maybe it’s the fact that while you’re walking, you can lose yourself in the details of the world around you, or the thoughts inside your head. Maybe all of that is crap, but either way, it works for me.

Anyways, this particular walk took place in the dead of summer (August 10th, to be exact. Yes, I checked the Word file, and yes, I know that makes me a dork.) Mine is a quiet neighborhood at the edge of town, where dead-end streets give way to forest. I remember seeing, at the end of one street, two houses in the midst of being built, and a narrow path worn through the weeds between them. I guess it got my wheels spinning, because when I got home, I wrote this:

Timothy lived in a well-manicured little house in a bland little suburb at the edge of town. At the end of his street was a turnaround, around which sat the Tyvek-clad skeletons of three houses, identical to each other, and, for that matter, nearly every house on the street. They’d been erected years ago, when the market was better, but then the market declined and the money dried up, and so now they sat, hollow and empty and unfinished. A dense thicket of brambles lay beyond them, encroaching on their uneven, rock-strewn lawns, and fading gradually into an old-growth forest. A single, winding path of bare dirt cut through these brambles into the forest beyond.

When Timothy was eleven, he set out to find where that path led. He struck out through the brambles on the path scarcely wider than the shoeprints he left behind. He pushed through them for what seemed like forever, mindful of thorns and poison ivy and bees and the like. Eventually, the path widened and merged with another, larger path, and that path, with another. He followed them until dusk, amazed at where they led – he could see his school, and his doctor’s, and the Quick Stop at the edge of town. They seemed to go on forever, to lead everywhere – invisible, anonymous. The world behind the world.

Problem was, that’s all I had. I had no idea where the story was going, or even what kind of story it would be. Fantasy, maybe, or psychological horror. So, not knowing what do to with it, I shelved it, not even looking at it again until the following April.

Which brings us to the second part of the tale. This one begins with a rejection.

A lightning-fast rejection, to be precise. I mean, I didn’t think the staff at Ellery Queen could possibly process submissions fast enough to get a rejection to my door a mere twenty-eight days after I dropped my story in the mail. And yet there it was, staring back at me from an envelope addressed in my own damn handwriting. “Dear Writer,” it began. Shit. Not even a personalized response.

I admit, that rejection threw me for a loop. Never mind that Ellery Queen is one of the toughest markets in genre fiction to crack, or the fact that this particular story (a nasty little hard-boiled throwback) wasn’t all that well-suited for their pages. I was pissed. I was determined. So I resolved that I was going to sit down and write a story they couldn’t possibly reject.

It’s worth noting, I think, that trying to change your style in a crass attempt to crack a particular market is a bad idea. If you don’t have a passion for the story you’re writing, it’s probably not going to turn out very good. So the trick was, I had to come up with something that fit within my own style, but would also appeal to the tastes of Ellery Queen’s editorial staff. So I thought to myself, for the first time in my fledgling literary career, “What would Stephen King do?”

The answer I came up with was a coming-of-age story, in the vein of King’s “The Body” (or at least, as I remembered “The Body” to be, since I hadn’t read it in damn near twenty years). The way I figured it, there was a certain innocence and relatability inherent in all good coming-of-age stories, and those traits might prove the spoonful of sugar to make the violence go down. And once I knew what kind of story I wanted to tell, I realized I’d already started telling it – I just hadn’t known it at the time. So I dusted off the old file and got writing. The first draft took me three weeks. Editing took another two, and then “The World Behind” was out the door.
Now, you might question the logic of writing a story that includes cursing, animal deaths, and a child murderer in an attempt to crack a magazine known (erroneously, in my opinion) for sleuths who knit and crime-solving cats, but luckily, I was too stupid to let that stop me. When I dropped my story in the mail, I was simultaneously certain they’d accept it, and that I’d wind up one month later with a form rejection. Such is writing, I suppose.

As it happens, my story was accepted on Friday, October 13th – a lucky day in my estimation. It was to appear in the April 2007 issue, but got bumped at the last minute in favor of a story by Joyce Carol Oates. Janet Hutchings, the editor at Ellery Queen, had the unbelievable good grace to apologize. Then she informed me I’d be in the June issue alongside Lawrence Block – a living legend, and one of my all-time favorite authors to boot. I swear I could’ve kissed her.

So there you have it. The story behind the story. Probably not as few words as Patrick had in mind, but brevity has never been my strong suit. And there’s still plenty of stuff that I left out. Some, like the inspirations for specific bits within the story, are just plain dull. Some, like using the short form as a lab of sorts (with a nod to fellow writer Lyman Feero for stealing his term) to experiment with new techniques (in the case of “The World Behind”, with a present-tense frame around a past-tense story told in flashback), just didn’t fit into the neat little two-story thesis I was shooting for. And there’s always the chance that my Muse is off somewhere stewing, because this ain’t the way things really went down. Still, it’s as close as I can manage.

So if you’ve read this far, then thanks. I hope you found it helpful. Oddly, I’m pretty sure I have.


Chris F. Holm
October 2008