My opportunity to broach the subject came on a Tuesday during library hour when Ms. Chu appeared, shadowlike, beside the table I shared with Kate. Ms. Chu’s first name is Mandy. She is tall and skinny, with glossy black hair that swings across her cheek. She has acne in her T-zone, which is where mine is coming out, and even though she’s twenty or thirty years old, she has braces. That day she was wearing a white blouse and a gray skirt that flowed around her like water. Around her neck hung a tiny ball of crystal on a silver chain.
“Do you need any help, Aris?” she whispered, because Ms. Chu always whispers. If you spend most of your time in a library, it becomes a habit.
“Well, actually,” I whispered, “I need some advice. I’m writing a novel?”
She nodded, lightly touching the crystal around her neck. Out of nowhere, Anders Anderson materialized and plunked himself down in the chair beside me. I shifted my shoulders to exclude him from the conversation and continued.
“I’ve got all the characters going,” I said, “but I have trouble with settings. I forget all about settings.”
“I hope this isn’t a love story,” said Anders. “Am I in it?”
“Maybe,” I mused, watching the light refract from Ms. Chu’s crystal, “it’s because I skip settings when I’m reading? Actually, I skim. Skim settings and descriptions.”
“Is there something disturbing in your novel?” she asked.
“No, of course not,” I said.
Ms. Chu looked disappointed. “There must be something disturbing in your story,” she said. “Some parts should be painful to write. Sometimes you’ll feel like you are bleeding the words onto the page.”
“Right,” I said, but I was worried. The author of Write a Novel in Thirty Days! had not mentioned blood. What if I had the wrong book on novel writing? I asked Ms. Chu about this, but she discouraged me from reading more writing advice.
“One how- to book is plenty,” she said. Then she disappeared into a secret chamber behind her desk where she keeps new books that haven’t been cataloged. In a few minutes, she emerged and handed me a small brown volume: Songs of Innocence and of Experience, by William Blake.
“When I need advice, I read poetry,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said, and cracked the cover of the book to hide my disappointment. I had skimmed enough of Blake in Mrs. Waller’s class to know that pastoral poetry about lambs and cherub-children wasn’t going to help me write a disturbing novel.
“Just write a poem,” said Anders. “It takes too long to write a novel, and who really reads them?”
“I do,” said Kate. She sat up very straight in her chair and quoted her favorite writer, Jane Austen. “ ‘The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.’ ”
Kate looks like a character in an Austen novel. She’s a blue-eyed ginger who has worn sunscreen since the day she was born, so her skin is pale even in the summer. She enunciates her words so clearly that Kanugians sometimes suggest, “You ain’t from around here,” but she is. “I am a nerd,” she tells people proudly. To prove it, she has clipped a small bottle of hand sanitizer to her backpack.
Ms. Chu led Kate to the shelves to find a Jane Austen novel Kate hadn’t already devoured. While Anders created a missile with a pencil, a rubber band, and an eraser, I sniffed the wonderful new-book smell of Songs of Innocence and of Experience. I was skipping the prologue, of course, but an interesting quote caught my eye: “The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.” As I considered this, a pencil-missile pinged the cover of the book I had erected between myself and Anders. When I glared at him, he laughed triumphantly.
“Heard from Billy lately?” he asked. Wrapping his arms around himself to suggest a couple making out, he emitted vulgar kissing sounds.
I sighed. How did this emotional retrograde sneak into the first chapter of my novel? In any case, I will now have to share with you, dear reader, the sad news that my fiancé, Billy Starr III, moved to Boston last summer after his mother, a professor at KCC, was fired for staging a proabortion demonstration. Diane says that professors aren’t fired—that word is too plebian for academia. Instead, they are “denied tenure.” Whatever you call it, my fiancé was picked up like a suitcase and transported to another state.
I hate it when people go on about their long-distance relationship—you start to wonder if they’re making it all up—so I’ll refrain. Let me just say that Billy Starr III once sat in this same seat that Anders now occupied. His library voice was a sweet, low growl, meant for my ears only as he leaned forward to gaze meaningfully into my eyes. Most of the time I didn’t care (not that much) that he was talking about baseball or basketball. Sometimes his hand brushed against mine, and then, like two repressed fools in a Jane Austen novel, we blushed.
“Billy is fine,” I told Anders. “I’ll tell him you said hello.” Ha, right. Last year, when Billy announced, with sorrowful blue eyes, that he was leaving the Lab, Anders asked him if he could have his girlfriend. EXCUSE ME? Am I a locker to be passed on to the next student? When I heard about this conversation, I sat Anders down and spent an hour explaining the absurd injustice of treating females like chattel. I thought he might have come across the word “chattel” in his frequent Bible reading and hoped this would strengthen my argument, but he didn’t hear a single word. When I finished my lecture, he only asked me to sit beside him at lunch.
“The average amount of time it takes for a long-distance relationship to break up is 4.5 months,” Anders said now.
He waved five fingers at me—yes, Billy had been gone for five months. Thankfully, the bell rang, and he loped out the door like his ass was on fire.
As I walked out of the library, I happened to pick up a catalog for Lavender Mountain Laboratory School. Holy moly! There, on the front page, was the setting I needed to steal for my novel.
The Lavender Mountain Laboratory School, affectionately called “The Lab” by students and families, is a private co-educational day school nestled in the foothills of northwest Georgia. Our campus stretches across four hundred acres of field and forest at the base of Kanuga’s beautiful Lavender Mountain. On the LMLS campus, you will find modern convenience and the latest technology housed in rustic cabins constructed of local pine and native stone. White-tailed deer graze alongside cobbled paths connecting our main learning centers with a state-of-the-art gymnasium and a media center that houses an impressive collection of classic and contemporary works in print and digital archives. Ducks, geese, and swans dot the ponds scattered throughout the campus, where students are encouraged to engage in outdoor, hands-on learning with our interactive science, math, language arts, and fine arts departments. The faculty is composed of dedicated, highly skilled professionals who are devoted to helping our students achieve their academic, social, and spiritual potential.4
In the margin, someone (a student? parent? teacher?) had scrawled, “oh PULEESE.”
I was ready for the next exercise in Write a Novel in Thirty Days!, Choose a Protagonist and Uncover Her Motivation. The first part was a no-brainer. If you can’t be the heroine of your own novel, why bother? Diane agrees that I make an exciting protagonist, but deep down, she was hoping to have the starring role in my novel. Her theory: If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.
Sorry, Diane! So I’m the protagonist, and my motivation is … To be perfectly honest,5 I’m not a very motivated person. Teachers are always checking off “Lacks Motivation” on my Lab report. Diane likes to remind me that I rank in the top one percent in the nation on standardized test scores, so I should be able to pass Algebra or whatever. I agree that the dichotomy here is disturbing, but just the thought of picking up my room or factoring a trinomial makes me really, really tired. Sometimes after a day of thinking about doing some kind of work, my arms and legs ache so much I think they might fall off. Diane says these are growing pains. Normally, a prota
gonist in so much pain would never get a motivation, and the novel would go kaput, but something unexpected happened.
1 Pronounced Ka-NOOG-aah, like a sneeze.
2 A writer gets one hyperbole per novel.
3 Best friends forever.
4 Skim recommended.
5 My English teacher, Mrs. Waller, takes off a point for that phrase because she says only dishonest people use it.
Write a Novel in Thirty Days! says that your book must have a conflict. Something has to happen that changes the world the characters inhabit. Since nothing happens in Kanuga, I was afraid this might be a problem, but when I thought about all the library books Ms. Chu has loaned me, and all the yarns I hear at church, I realized that great literature often begins with a flood.
Our flood happened on a Sunday when I was supposed to acolyte at St. Michael’s. Diane had signed me up to be an acolyte in hopes that my sacred duty would compel her to get us to church. At the time, Billy was in town, and he was an acolyte, so of course I agreed. Gradually, however, we lapsed back into our heathen habits.
This Sunday, Diane had again woken up with the alarm clock in her fist. She staggered down the hall in Joe’s old flannel bathrobe with her slippers on the wrong feet, yelling, “Get up! We’re late!” With her left hand she banged on my bedroom door, and with her right hand she banged on Max’s door. It’s a real gift she has, the double-fisted knock, but I’ve never mentioned it to her because she doesn’t have a sense of humor until she’s had two cups of coffee. In fact, if we say anything to her at this time, other than “Yes, ma’am,” she wails, “I haven’t had my coffee yet!” Translated: My name is Diane, and I am a caffeine fiend. I am incoherent, completely dysfunctional, and probably dangerous. We never come out of our rooms until she has poured her coffee and taken it back to the brown leather chair in the corner of her room, where she chugs it down while she talks to God about the day at hand.
However, on this morning, the fated February first, both Diane and God had gone back to sleep. Max was in the shower, and he wasn’t howling, so apparently he hadn’t confused the “H” knob with the “C” knob.
After pouring myself a cup of java, I pulled out the stack of papers Diane had been meaning to grade. Difficulty getting out of bed in the morning is a sign of depression, and I didn’t want Diane to slip into the blues and fall behind on her work. So far, she had only commented on one paper.
I am throwing the grading rubric out for this paper and giving you an A because, despite minor flaws, you reveal something profound. A+ A+ A+
Cut
Charles Hutchins
English 1102
The Most Important Person in My Life:
Mrs. Octavia Hutchins
To begin with, we live in a society and all of us are influenced by others who might be constantly changing us for better or worse. There are a lot of people who help us form our personalities and become who we are. I believe that my mother is the most significant person in my life in this regard. I call her Mama.
Mama is a big woman with arms that are strong enough to do justice to a child’s bottom if that is needed, and fat enough to feel soft and warm when she hugs you. Before she bought colored contact lenses, her eyes were brown, and they got big and dark when she was mad.
The story begins here.
If I back talk her, she’ll say, “Excuse me? To whom are you talking?” I am the first one in our family to go to college, and she was the first one in her family to graduate from high school. She wanted to be a teacher, but my father convinced her to marry him and bury her dreams. He resented her education, especially if he had a hangover.
telling detail
One morning, he almost killed me. She had made us fried eggs with bacon, biscuits, and gravy. I must have been pretty small because she was still cutting my biscuit for me. She glanced over at my father and said, “Marvin, please chew with your mouth closed.”
You are inside the narrative voice here.
He looked at her slant-eyed. “You the smart one in the family,” he said. I knew what was coming. I wished we could hide in the mornings, but she taught me you can’t hide from life. You look life in the face.
Excellent dialogue!
My parents whipped me with a belt, and I still hate them for it. The physical pain is bad, but it’s the shame that never goes away—that crouching, excruciating loss of human dignity.
This scares me. Did you go to the hospital? Did anyone press charges against him?
Wait—where did he go? I WANT TO PUT THIS GUY AWAY.
Watch for clarity. The name change might work here, but we need more.
“You so smart. Ain’t your mama smart? She talkety-talk and I workety-work? Fuck that shit.” He stood up, unbuckled his belt, and whipped it out of his pants. I watched as it made the familiar loop in his hand. I hated him for making us afraid. I wanted to slide under the table, but I had to protect my mother, so I grabbed his arm.
When he flung me across the room, my head hit the edge of the refrigerator. I remember seeing the linoleum up close, and her screams. “He’s hurt!” she yelled. “Charles is hurt! Stop! He’s not moving!” My father kept beating her with the belt. Over her screams, I heard this hiss, slap, hiss, slap, hiss, slap. Then nothingness started falling into my head, all cool and sweet, and I disappeared for a while.
Later, after my father left us, I had to wear his clothes. Mama got a second job, but we still didn’t have money for new clothes. Marvin’s clothes were big for me, even after she cut them down. The kids at school called me Big Foot because of the shoes.
Mama said it didn’t matter what those fools called me. She said, “You are there to learn. Learn it all. When you get a scholarship to college, I’m going to make all this up to you.” At night sometimes I could hear her praying for me through her bedroom door.
She is an amazing woman!
“You buy something for yourself,” she said. “Buy something that makes you proud of your accomplishment.”
Show this earlier? Where does she work?
I received a full scholarship to Kanuga Community College, paying room and board, books, and full tuition plus a stipend. Mama would not let me give her any money. Instead, she gave me the money she had put away, year after year, to help pay for my education.
When I pulled up in front of the house in a black BMW: all-wheel drive, 400 horsepower, she came out on the porch and started crying. Then she went back inside and changed her clothes. That day I drove her to the optical shop to get fitted for colored contact lenses. The ones she chose were purple. I can’t say that I liked the new color, but I got used to it.
“What do you think?” she asked me.
I LOVE THIS GUY!!!!
I agree.
“Very striking,” I told her. What was really beautiful to me was her smile. To conclude, I consider that I am a lucky person to have Mrs. Octavia Hutchins for my mother.
Wow, I thought, putting Charles’s paper back in the pile, this guy has a story. Most of Diane’s students write papers like this: Hello. This essay is a bag over my head. I’m not here. Give me an A. That’s five hundred words. The end. I looked over Diane’s comments again. Was she giving him enough encouragement? Writers need a lot of love. When I had a chance, I decided, I would add my own comments to Charles’s story. At the moment, however, I needed some fresh air to clear my head. I put on Joe’s mad bomber hat and was headed outside when Max screamed.
It was the kind of scream you feel in your own throat. My heart went blip, and for a second I couldn’t breathe. Diane says that mothers feel the burn when a baby touches a hot stove. As a co-parent, when I heard that scream, I felt something wet all over me, like blood. Crazy thoughts flashed through my mind. He’d drunk nail polish remover. Swallowed a razor blade. Impaled himself on the shower curtain rod.
“I’m coming!” I yelled, careering through the living room and hitting the hallway at full speed. I skidded to a stop on the wet floor. Water was overflowing the bathroo
m sink and had started running into the hall. Max was in the middle of it all, ankle deep, buck naked, a blow-dryer in his hand.
“Turn it off!” I yelled. “Max! Turn it off right now!”
“I can’t! The handle came off!”
“No, the dryer! You’re going to be electrocuted, you idiot!”
“Help!” he cried, clenching the dryer with both fists. “Somebody! Please! Help me!”
“Oh fuck,” I said, splashing toward him, ready to die. Then I saw the electrical cord from the blow-dryer lying on the sink, unplugged. Beneath the sound of sobbing and rushing water, the tinkle of Diane’s alarm signaled the end of meditation.
“Turn that water off!” she yelled from behind her locked bedroom door. “Our water bill was fifty-eight dollars last month!”
“You said a bad word,” Max informed me with one eyebrow raised.
“No, I didn’t. That was your imagination. What did you do? Why is water pouring out of the sink?”
“I didn’t touch it!” He stood with his feet planted wide and his face set in defiance. The doctor says that Max might grow to over six feet. Already, football coaches look him over with a gleam in their eyes. With Diane’s hand-me-down short genes, I’ll be lucky to clear five, but for now, I rule.
“Tell the truth, Max.”
“I did it!” he sobbed. “It’s all my fault. I’m stupid! I’m so stupid! I’m an idiot!”
How to Write a Novel Page 2