We were fortunate enough to read David Francis's excellent new novel, Stray Dog Winter, in manuscript, and we're delighted to have him offer this guest essay on the unexpected problems its success has brought, as he embarks on a series of events in L.A. and New York in support on the book.
If a writer is being nudged by an agent or publisher towards a genre or style that doesn’t feel right, what should the writer do? Listen up carefully, or write what he or she feels is intrinsic? In the old days, when a writer was given the opportunity to gradually build a career, the answer would be more obvious.
Stray Dog Winter, my recent novel, is what you might call an accidental thriller. Set mostly in Cold War Moscow in the early 1980’s, it started out as a strange family story unfolding in Australia, progressed into a literary mystery when the protagonist visited the Soviet Union, then ended up as suspense. Sold in Frankfurt to Australian and American publishers simultaneously, they each encouraged “upping of the suspense factor” so I went back in and re-inhabited it, jettisoned anything that didn’t propel the narrative intensity. The result is an unusual type of thriller – it has been compared to Graham Greene and yet it moves more quickly through time and space, threaded, still, with a faraway back story. Now that it’s out in the world, my agent reminds often of my new niche. “You do suspense so well,” she says, wanting more. More of the same characters even, innocents abroad but less innocent now.
So here I am starting something new – it has a motor and a certain confluence, but it’s not related to Stray Dog Winter and, so far, isn’t exactly paced like a thriller. It’s literary; a story that begins, as mine seem to, in Australia. Someone comes to visit. And I’m really into it, yet in my head my agent’s counsel speaks up. “You’re garnering a particular following.” But I don’t know how to write a thriller on purpose. I’m not the sort that comes up with some “idea” to pitch, all plotty and thrillery. That’s not me.
So, maybe I have no choice. I will allow a new story to unfold organically, see what the pages reveal. I’ll honor that desire to lay out the lines of words as they appear, as Annie Dillard suggests, securing a sentence before building on it, allowing it to grow "cell to cell, bole to bough to twig to leaf; any careful word may suggest a route, may begin a strand of metaphor or event out of which much, or all, will develop." That still feels right to me, to let it be what it becomes. Robert Olen Butler talks about "dreaming around your novel," allowing it to well up from within you, meditate on it until you see it all the way through, then write. While I don’t quite have that resolve, I can say that Stray Dog Winter unfolded from a dream that emerged from a memory.
I finished my first novel, The Great Inland Sea, and was in Paris on a fellowship from the Australian Literature Fund. There, in my studio bed, I dreamt that a wayward aunt had a fling with my father and then went away, secretly bearing his daughter. I woke and wrote long-hand about this boy, Darcy. An aunt he'd only seen in photos arrives in a taxi with a young girl named Finola who transpires to be his half-sister. The girl is dumped on the drive unannounced as the aunt disappears, back towards the city. Scenes of these two began to unfold, of them together in Australia and then separated when the girl is banished to boarding school. Reunited at university, they rekindle their strange consanguinity, an interest in art and radical politics, and each other. Then, in 1984, Fin unexpectedly receives a fellowship to paint the industrial landscapes of Soviet Moscow. Darcy, the real artist, suspicious of her disappearance, gets a call from Moscow: She pleads for him to join her there, to paint. I imagined Darcy traveling from Prague on a train into the Soviet Union (a trip I'd made in the early '80s), and the story of these two in an alien winter became real, each chapter building on the last, "bole to bough to twig to leaf," until their lust and proclivities revealed them in ways and in places I'd never have imagined had I been a writer who structures a novel more consciously.
So I’m setting out, as so many of us do, on fresh unchartered ground, trying to stay true to my instinct – to write from some emotional truth, not a formula or bright, contrived idea. In this era of publishing, those smarter than I (like my agent) might say it’s self-sabotage, but unless I feel a hunger for the narrative as it’s appearing and hold to John Gardner’s notion of the “vivid, continuous dream,” it won’t ring true. Not for me. I need to seek the emotional landscape from where scenes rise up out of the well, because if I don’t it will all turn plain before me. If I don’t fall in love with it, the reader won’t either. So I’ll write what I see and feel, what I care about, with as much attention to story and rhythm and detail and language as I can muster. I will not avert my eyes. For all I know, I’ll have a thriller on my hands.
David Francis is the author of The Great Inland Sea and Stray Dog Winter, 2008 LAMBDA fiction finalist.
Monday, May 4, 2009 (7:00 pm - 8:00 pm)
A Conversation With Australian Authors David Francis & Brian Castro
Sponsored by the American Australian Association
Book Soup
8818 Sunset Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90069
www.americanaustralian.org
Tuesday, May 12, 2009 (7:00 pm)
Event and Reading for LAMBDA Literary Award Finalists David Francis, Chris Freeman; John Morgan Wilson
SKYLIGHT BOOKS
1818 N. Vermont Avenue
Los Feliz
www.lambdaliterary.org
Thursday, May 28, 2009 (7:00 pm NEW YORK)
The 21st Annual Lambda Literary Awards
Proshansky Auditorium
CUNY Graduate Center
Fifth Avenue at 34th Street
New York, NY 10016
www.lambdaliterary.org/awards
Tuesday, June 2, 2009 (6:00 pm NEW YORK)
David Francis Reading and Reception at the Australian Consulate in New York
150 E 42nd St New York, NY 10017
www.australianyc.org (invitation only – email for info)
I absolutely loved Stray Dog Winter. Beautiful. Lyrical. Spare. Haunting. In addition to Greene, it reminds me of Robert Stone. Thanks to Mark for inviting David to write this guest essay.
Posted by: denise hamilton | May 17, 2009 at 07:39 AM