It’s my pleasure today to welcome Lisa Jahn Clough to The Writing Barn blog. When I was a student at VCFA getting my MFA, Lisa was on faculty (now, she teaches at Hamline) and a good friend of mine was working with her for the semester. My friend, Alicia Potter, drafted many picture books while working with Lisa–many of which have gone on to be books. I, myself, was studying the picture book and attended a lecture of Lisa’s, which had a funny title I can’t fully remember. “Once Upon a Pickle” or something like that. Lisa broke down the picture book into the 32 pages, 16 page spreads, and we story boarded some book that had a pickle as the MC. I never would have guessed a pickle could have been so enlightening but it was. And that’s because Lisa is. She is honest, forthright, and she works with words day and night.
Today, Lisa joins us to discuss how writing Nothing But Blue, which Booklist states: “with tight pacing, motley characters, and touches of the spiritual, this is a furious, illuminating adventure,” changed her a writer. Lisa, is a woman I admire and her essay below will touch many writers as deeply as it touched me.
What My Last Book Taught Me
This is some of what I’ve learned (in no particular order):
1. Enjoy the process.
Before this novel, several major changes in my life occurred—my long-term editor retired, publishing (i.e. the economy) went crazy, I left my teaching job and moved far south in a new relationship (the latter was the one good thing). Nothing was the same and no one wanted to publish me. I thought my career was over. But I’ve been writing stories since I was a kid, why stop now? If I never published again, I could write whatever I wanted. Most important I had to like what I was doing, or there was no reason to continue doing it. The dilemma was what to write, not what to sell.
An idea that had been brewing in me for years finally managed to rise to the surface. I wrote as if I were my character who suffers from memory loss and wanders aimlessly looking for answers. I wrote most of the first draft in spiral bound notebooks sitting in cafes or on park benches, pretending this was Blue’s journal. When I finished a scene I’d get a coffee refill or wander to another place.
This how I’d spent my teens and early twenties, before I was published, so the process felt natural. Exploring Blue’s problems was better than dwelling on my own. Her problems were bigger and it was up to me to figure things out for her. For a long time the book wasn’t under contract. If the process hadn’t been intriguing, I never would have finished.
2. The book I am writing parallels the life I am living at the time.
For the first two years of writing Blue I was living in a new state—jobless, editor-less, friendless. Except for the boyfriend, I wouldn’t have survived very well. I walked the dogs a lot, I wrote scenes in my journal. Like Blue, I was lost and confused.
For the last year of the book, I had a teaching job back north and lived there with one dog and without the boyfriend. I taught classes, wrote, walked the dog a lot. Again, I was lost and confused.
Three years later, I married the boyfriend, we now live together with both dogs, we have teaching jobs, my book is out, and another is on the way. Writing Blue’s journey was a tiny mirror of my own journey. I have found my way back into writing and a more settled life.
Life is about survival. The question that started Nothing But Blue was how does one survive? What happens when something so awful happens that you do not know how to carry on? Where is the good? Writing this novel allowed me to explore those questions. Blue discovers that the good is in people and in her ability to survive.
3. Trainhopping, Long-Distance Walking, and Acute Stress Disorder.
Even fiction requires fact-based research. I am no expert on any of these, but I spoke with experts, read a lot, and now I know a little bit. For example:
Trainhopping: I spoke with someone who used to trainhop. It still exists, there are railroad police called “Bulls,” trainhoppers create a new identity, and there are communities of Hobos, very much like the one Blue visits. There are fewer boxcars, but it is possible to jump one, although illegal and extremely dangerous. Someone recently lost a leg from hopping a train.
Walking: Humans are capable of some very serious walking—the longest non-stop walk in recent history was 418 miles in six days, eleven hours. Of course, Blue’s long distance walk is not by choice and she does get the occasional ride. It’s never stated in the book, but Blue travels from upstate New York to Maine—approximately 450 miles in fifteen days.
ASD: Sudden trauma, such as what Blue experiences just before the novel opens, can lead to short-term memory loss lasting one-three weeks, and is accompanied by dissociation, physical and emotional numbness, paranoia, and illusions. This is clinically known as Acute Stress Disorder.
4. Challenge my craft.
Something I discuss with my students is excess exposition, what I call “info dumps,” to relay backstory. Could I write a story with no backstory? If a first-person narrator is in traumatic shock and has no memory she won’t be able to explain much—she can only live and experience the present. So I wrote scenes completely in the moment and labeled them “Now.”
Eventually, I discovered I needed some backstory. I had to face my fear of the flashback. I wrote past-tense flashback scenes and labeled them “Before.”
These Now and Before chapters intertwine so the story plays around with time as well—dipping in and out of past and present.
Tackling a craft element that I had previously avoided makes the writing process worthwhile.
Check out the Nothing But Blue book trailer: http://youtu.be/IG6ZO-Qw2o8
5. Create characters unlike me.
My previous novels have autobiographical elements—I related to the protagonists from the beginning. I did not have to find my way in to these characters—in fact I had to find my way out in order to separate myself from them. But the older I get and the more I write I am less interested in myself. Many years of self-exploration has freed me from the need to fictionalize my own reality. (I can save writing about myself for blog posts!)
With Blue I created someone so different from me that I had to pretend to become her in order to write from her viewpoint. I was unfamiliar with her and had to become familiar. I had to find my way to connect with her.
The hardest thing was making Blue afraid of dogs. I love dogs, so it is almost impossible for me to imagine someone who doesn’t. But when Blue finally befriends a dog and learns to love and trust him I was able to connect and experience that joy.
6. Make plot a puzzle.
I avoid plot—the part of the book that has to crescendo with cause and effect all leading to an unexpected, yet logical conclusion. In order to structure a plot I have to pretend I am doing something else, something fun.
My first novel uses traditional chronological chapters, my second uses snippets of journal entries. The first draft of Blue was a pile of scenes, sixty total—fifty present and ten past. To figure out the order I turned to my picture book process. I use a storyboard grid for picture books, so why not do the same with my novel? I summarized each scene on a post-it, then moved them around my office trying to make them fit. Plot may cause me trepidation, but puzzles are pleasurable.
7. I can write more books.
Each book I write teaches me things practical and spiritual. Unfortunately whatever I learn from one book is of little help with the next. But if I learned everything in one book, I’d never have reason to write another.
After a twenty-year career of mild success, thinking I was done, then writing again, I have become more of a realist. My books may never have awards or massive sales, but I’m the one who has to keep it going, regardless. I make my life in and around words, and that is good. One book won’t make or break me. If I want to write another, I will. It’s up to me.
Enjoy the process.
Lisa earned a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA from Emerson College and has been writing, publishing, and teaching ever since. She has taught at Emerson College, Maine College of Art, Vermont College of Fine Arts and Hamline University. She is now Assistant Professor at Rowan University. Lisa also speaks to hundreds of elementary, middle and high school students and teachers as a visiting author.
She lives with her husband and their two dogs in Portland, Maine in a little yellow house in the summer, and across from a cornfield in southern New Jersey in the winter.
For educators: See here for a pdf of the Teaching Guide for Nothing But Blue.