The Writing Barn is pleased to welcome Natalia Sylvester, author of critically acclaimed novel Chasing the Sun, for a six-week class, Writing a Literary, Page-Turning Novel. Are you stuck in a manuscript, unable to move forward? Bring ten pages of a manuscript to this class and be ready get some helpful peer editing, notes for revision and fresh insights into your plot, characters and structure. In the meantime, read this awesome Q&A with Natalia!
When writing a compelling story, where do you draw from for inspiration or ideas?
It’s never from the places that I’d expect. For the first book I ever wrote (but didn’t sell) the idea came from a property my parents had rented out, but which turned out to be abandoned by its tenants for reasons that are still a mystery to us. With Chasing the Sun, the story came out of family history—the fact that my grandfather had been kidnapped for ransom before I was too young to remember—and my desire to want to understand how an event like this shapes a family. And for the current book I’m working on, the idea has mainly come from a desire to explore the unseen side of a story that we’re constantly seeing in the media. I’m most inspired by stories that start with more questions than answers. Writing fiction is my way of trying to arrive at some sort of truth.
Do you have a specific routine or schedule for writing novels? How do you break up your work into manageable chunks?
I tend to do my best writing in the morning, before anyone else in the house is awake, and before work-related worries fill my mind. But the reality is that I don’t always wake up in time, and so on those days, I try to carve out a few hours in the afternoons. On days when even that doesn’t work, I make myself write something, anything (even if it’s just one sentence) to the manuscript. On a perfect day, I’ll hit my word count goal of 1000 words a day, but the truth is, there’s no one way to do it, and definitely not one way that I do it consistently!
There’s this idea we writers get that if we’re not writing every day, we’re not writers. And I’m not sure I buy into any absolute rule in writing. So while I definitely believe in cons
istency and building momentum as you write a novel, I also know there will be days when you have to step away from the manuscript to just live a little and reflect. We all need it, for our own well-being (and that of the work). The trick is to be honest enough with yourself to know the difference between this and procrastinating…and that’s always the hardest part.
istency and building momentum as you write a novel, I also know there will be days when you have to step away from the manuscript to just live a little and reflect. We all need it, for our own well-being (and that of the work). The trick is to be honest enough with yourself to know the difference between this and procrastinating…and that’s always the hardest part.How have your childhood roots in Peru and Florida been influential to your writing?
I think my childhood roots have been influential in much the same way that all of our childhood roots are. And by that I mean, our roots pop up in sometimes expected, and sometimes completely unexpected ways.
For example, Chasing the Sun was very much a book that I wrote to explore parts of my roots that I either didn’t understand or didn’t remember. I was three when my family left Lima, and though I visited throughout my childhood and still do, for a long time there was this huge gap in my own history and memory that I realize I was trying to fill by writing this book.
The book I’m working on now takes place in Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley (where I also lived for some time as a child), but I’m not sure it’s come out of my childhood so much as it’s come out of experiences and questions I’ve had as an adult. I find the complexities of our roots fascinating: sometimes they’re this very fertile ground our ideas are born out of, and other times, when we find ourselves branching out and exploring things that are completely unknown or uncharted, we’ll still find pieces of ourselves because our roots are so much more far-reaching than we can ever imagine.
What’s been the biggest obstacle or hardship in your writing career that you’ve overcome?
There came a point, about seven or eight months after my agent was shopping around my first book, that I realized I’d have to start over and write another. I’d spent nearly five years working on that book, and getting an agent was such a difficult process, I think I just assumed (very naively) that clearing these obstacles would mean I wouldn’t have to face any others. Letting go of that first book was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do in my writing life; I’d say it was even harder than the next step, which was writing Chasing the Sun. But I’m grateful it happened early on in my career because it taught me not to take anything for granted. I know there are no guarantees in the writing business, and it makes me push myself harder each time I sit down to write. And quite honestly, it’s also empowering to know that I was able to start over; it helps chip away at the fear of failure.
With your editing and journalism background, how did you transition into writing fiction?
It’s interesting, because journalism and fiction are of course very different disciplines, but I’ve always been drawn to both for the same reason: I love getting to an unobvious truth, or to an unheard story or voice, through writing.
One of my very first journalism teachers told me that everyone has a story, and that there’s a story behind every story. I used to think that this meant being relentless and asking more and more questions and always digging deeper, but writing fiction taught me the other half of that lesson: it’s also about listening and having empathy, and what greater empathy is there than the act of imagining? So I guess going from journalism to fiction always felt like a very natural progression for me; not so much a transition as perhaps the place I was heading all along.