How To Make A Quiet Novel Roar #AmWriting podcast

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How to Make a Quiet Novel Roar

3d ago 27:19

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You kids I can’t even with Catherine Newman right now because I am a Wreck and a Sandwich myself at the moment but wow, she’s a good writer, so honest it’s like there’s no skull between her mind and the readers. We talk about what it means to use yourself and your world in your fiction and what it’s meant to Catherine to play as big as she possibly can and go bigger and deeper with every book.

We ALSO talk about Catherine’s totally granular technique for planning and tracking and keeping her eye on the ball in every chapter while still pulling in all the other things while making sure that if it’s Friday night a teacher character doesn’t get up and go to teach the next morning and the blackberries never ripen in April, and let me tell you that I just went back and listened to that now and I am about to implement it because it’s brilliant.

Ok, time to let you listen (although links to what Catherine and I are reading and loving are below). ALSO…

Truth? We wanted to tuck the transcript away behind a paywall, but it turns out we can’t do that and still give you the episode… so, here it is. But we have to pay someone to make a good one, that you can read. And we still have to pay ourselves and all our people. BUT LOOK YOU GET ALL OF US. We’re not just one writer, we’re a whole bunch—a Groupstack, and yes we coined the term, and you get a lot of bang for your subscription. So, if you could kick in, we’d cheer.

Please don’t make us try to sell you Quince clothing or gambling sites to support the pod.

#AmReading

Catherine: A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews

KJ:

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

KJ Dell’Antonia

It’s fall, y’all, and there’s got to be a T-shirt that says that, right? So it’s, you know, fresh notebooks, sharpened pencils, sharpened sense of ambition, excitement after the languid summer days, and, of course, the glory that is decorative gourd season. You can say that with all the swears that you like, but I’m not going to hear “falling leaves” and “Halloween,” which means it’s time for smoky, eerie, witchy reads, and I have just the thing for you—Playing the Witch Card. Expect a woman starting over again after her marriage collapses, hampered by her magic-obsessed daughter, her flaky mother, her enchanted ex, and a powerful witch who’s thrilled that she’s back in town—and not for a good reason. To keep her family together, Flair has to embrace the hereditary magic that’s done nothing but ruin her life in the past and make it her own. I was inspired by what I see as the real magic of tarot cards, which play a huge role in this book—and tea leaves and palm reading, and honestly, every form of oracle. They’re here to help us see and understand our own stories, which is pretty much what Flair figures out. And as someone for whom stories are everything, I love that. You can buy Playing the Witch Card everywhere, and I hope you will do exactly that—and love it too.

Multiple Speakers

Is it recording? Now it’s recording, yay. Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. I don’t remember what I’m supposed to be doing. All right, let’s start over. Awkward pause. I’m going to rustle some papers. Okay, now—one, two, three.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Hey, kids, it’s KJ, and this is the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast—the place where we help you play big in your writing life, love the process, and finish what matters. Today on the pod, I’m talking with Catherine Newman. She is the author most recently of We All Want Impossible Things and Sandwich, and also, earlier in her career, Waiting for Birdy and Catastrophic Happiness, as well as two fabulous “how to be a person in the world” books for kids that, honestly, I think we could all benefit from. I’m considering just, you know, sending out copies. They are How to Be a Person and What Can I Say?—that one’s really useful. Okay, so now, just out, she has Wreck—which kind of comes after Sandwich, but you could read them separately. They’re both small, intense books. Wreck, like all of Catherine’s work, is inevitably about exactly what I just said—it’s how to be a person in the world. Which—I didn’t actually ask Catherine this; I’m recording my intro for y’all after talking to her—but she would not tell you she knows how to be a person in the world. But she is so fantastic about the part where we’re all figuring it out, and being aware that we’re all figuring it out. And that’s what all of her books are about. In the interview, which you’re going to love, she calls herself the queen of the slight plot element, which made me laugh really hard and also made me realize that I think Catherine Newman is the modern Anne Tyler. So tell me what you think in the comments on the show notes—which you’d better be getting. They are at...there’s no hashtag in our name—AmWritingPodcast.com—or search anywhere they will have the books that Catherine mentions, and also all of your chances to do all of the things, like have your First Page appear in a Booklab episode. Talk to us. Get in there. Tell us what you’re thinking about writing. Write along with us. Really just—just all the community stuff that we all so desperately want. Okay, here comes my interview with Catherine. I know—gosh, it was so fun to talk to you. You guys are going to love it. Catherine Newman, welcome to the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast, where you’ve been at least once, maybe twice—I need to go and look. It’s so fun to have you back. I remember us walking in the woods before you had finished We All Want Impossible Things in 2021.

Catherine Newman

I remember it too.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Which, actually, for three books, is not that long ago.

Catherine Newman

Hey, that’s true. I know... I remember your dog.

KJ Dell’Antonia

He’s here somewhere.

Catherine Newman

You had a young dog with you. It was the best. And you—you said so many things that I’ve thought about so much on that walk. But I don’t want to derail the thing you want to talk about.

KJ Dell’Antonia

But, but same—it was a great walk. We must do it again. All right, meanwhile—okay, so I already described in the introduction all the things you’ve ever written in the past and raved about you, so don’t—don’t worry about that. You’ve been—sorry you don’t get to hear the petting. But the question is, tell us—tell us a little bit about Wreck.

Catherine Newman

Yeah, so Wreck...

KJ Dell’Antonia

I know, I know, it’s painful. Elevator pitch or whatever you want to say, because seriously, I did just tell everyone about them in the intro.

Catherine Newman

I really need an elevator pitch. I feel like We All Want Impossible Things was like a woman whose best friend was dying while she, like, slept with everybody.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah, it was joyful.

Catherine Newman

That was easy.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Also sad.

Catherine Newman

Sandwich was like Cape Cod for a week, reproductive mayhem, sandwich generation. Wreck is so weird because there’s these two sort of very slight plot elements. So it’s, you know, a woman in her mid-50s living in a house with her husband of many years, her daughter, who’s between college and grad school, and her dad, who was fairly recently widowed and in his 90s. And that’s mostly what the book is, but the little plots are that she has a rash—she notices that she has a rash—and it inaugurates this kind of diagnostic tornado. A slow and quiet tornado, but a tornado nonetheless, where she has to see a billion doctors. She has to constantly check her patient portal to see if she’s dying or not, and anyone who’s had—who’s been anything but healthy in the last 10 years will understand the patient portal.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yes, I love the checker. I checked a patient portal from a hockey-rink parking lot, and that’s a mistake, just FYI.

Catherine Newman

Just don’t...

KJ Dell’Antonia

To anyone considering it, don’t do it on a Friday night. Don’t do that.

Catherine Newman

Just don’t even look. And then the other plot point is that there’s an accident—there’s a collision between a car and a train—and a schoolmate of her kids, like someone they went to high school with, is killed in this accident. And she becomes kind of weirdly obsessed with the accident. She looks at it online all the time. She stalks everyone’s...

KJ Dell’Antonia

Which so tracks for the character that you have created.

Catherine Newman

Doesn’t it? And that’s it. And so the book sort of is those things unfolding in this parallel way—these uncertain things.

KJ Dell’Antonia

So when you wrote it, what—what was your intention for this? What did you want Wreck to be in your career and for your readers?

Catherine Newman

What? It’s so funny to be asked questions about my career. I don’t know what I wanted it to be in my career, but maybe while I’m talking to you, I’ll figure that out.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Okay.

Catherine Newman

Or you can tell me. But for my readers—I do think we’re in this funny place where some of us are hungry to read about the experiences of other menopausal women who are taking care of aging parents, whose nests are emptying, who are in long marriages, who are, you know, doing the things of this age, including tracking weird illnesses. So I guess that—you know, I think, I feel like the thing that I love about writing—one of the things—is when people say to me, like, “Oh yeah, I feel the same way about that,” or they write me and they’re like, “Oh, I read this, and I felt so relieved that I wasn’t alone.” And I guess I have a lot of that hope—you know, that it speaks to someone, or someone’s been in their portal rummaging around and finding out horrible things about their health and Googling them. Like, that’s not a small part of the population who’s probably doing that. So I guess just that—you know, the handout, the “I’m with you on this” vibe.

KJ Dell’Antonia

So what do you love most about it?

Catherine Newman

(Laughing) I mean, that’s a funny and embarrassing question. I... you know, the father character is based very closely on my own father. Many of the things he says are verbatim lifted from conversations and texts with my dad. And I just love that character so much. I think he’s so funny and has this kind of deep wisdom. I mean, Wreck plays him for laughs a little bit, but he offers so much to her. He’s still this really profound caretaking force in her life, even though he himself, you know, is failing in different ways. So I guess that’s what I like.

KJ Dell’Antonia

How does your dad feel about you taking his stuff?

Catherine Newman

He loved this book.

KJ Dell’Antonia

I love this!

Catherine Newman

He has not felt that way always about the way I represent him. I represent him in Sandwich in similar ways, and Sandwich—there were just particular things that bugged him. He loved the book overall but didn’t love his character. I think in this book, maybe because there’s so much of his character, that it gets to be a very well-rounded kind of person, and also somebody whose opinion it’s obvious the other characters respect. So he really loved it, which was, like, everything to me, you know?

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah, oh, wow. I’d give a lot for that. That’s—that’s wonderful. I would—it’s... although all my dad ever says is, “Why don’t you—you only write about mothers? You never write...” I’m like, well, I don’t know if you read some of the mothers. You’re kind of lucky. You’re doing okay. I don’t know why—you guys were great. You should have been better fodder for affection, and then I would... yeah. All right. So, okay, so that’s what you love about it. What was the hardest about this?

Catherine Newman

It’s funny—it’s a little hard to talk about without spoilers, but, um, there’s a difficult part of the plot that involves Rocky’s son, who works for a consulting firm in New York, where she really questions his values, questions the decision to do that kind of work.

KJ Dell’Antonia

That would stun me, frankly.

Catherine Newman

However, he knows a lot about that kind of work, and talked to me a ton about it for the book—like, went on a million walks with me and let me pick his brain about it. And I really just found it so hard to write about this kind of painful conflict between Rocky and her son. I just found it really hard. Yeah...

KJ Dell’Antonia

Obviously, yeah, that’s actually what you did, wasn’t it?

Catherine Newman

I can imagine... that’s it. I imagined it. And honestly, my husband could hardly stand to read it. He found it so devastating. Just—and it’s, as you know, it’s not massive conflict. It’s like...

KJ Dell’Antonia

But it is. It’s...

Catherine Newman

But it is. Yep

KJ Dell’Antonia

I mean, it’s, you know—

Catherine Newman

Yep.

KJ Dell’Antonia

It’s it—goes back to Alex Keaton, right? [Unintelligible] Both of us, yeah, yeah, no, I get it. It’s a really—and by writing it, even if it’s not autobiographical, which it’s not, it’s fiction, you are saying something about some compatriots, you know, some other—you’re really, you’re—you’re putting—you’re putting a stake in the ground, which I think has always been pretty obvious for anyone who knows you or has read you, but maybe you had not verbalized even in a fictional form.

Catherine Newman

Hmm, maybe.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Could feel judgmental because—it’s judgmental (whispered). But it’s values. That’s what values do. A value that doesn’t judge anyone isn’t a value, even if you don’t want to judge people. But I think it’s kind of true, like...

Catherine Newman

Yeah, yeah.

KJ Dell’Antonia

You can also be open. But, I mean, that’s—I don’t know if, if you don’t offer that up, then we’re all just sitting here going, “Oh, it’s fine. It’s all...”

Catherine Newman

Everything’s fine.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Everything’s fine, it’s fine. That’s a joke in our house, because we had this Spanish exchange student, and he would always say, “Oh, it’s fine,” when—and it—what that meant was, it wasn’t.

Catherine Newman

Oh no, it wasn’t fine.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah, no... that’s what it means when we say, “It’s fine.”

Catherine Newman

Oh my God, KJ.

KJ Dell’Antonia

All right, so this kind of gets to, I think, my next question, which—which is, what about this was, um, bigger for you? Was a bigger leap to take in your writing?

Catherine Newman

It’s like, you know, I think it’s just a little more plot in a novel than I’ve ever managed. Even though, you know—don’t laugh because there’s not a ton of plot. But nonetheless, there were sort of these two vectors of significant—I thought—dramatic contention that I had to manage in the writing, and—and I was anxious about it. Like, I—I like a quiet story that’s not like—is too plot-driven. But anyway, so that is—it was, you know, I definitely plotted it a little more actively before I wrote it, like I wanted to make sure that these plots were unfolding in the timeframe I wanted them to unfold in.

KJ Dell’Antonia

And did that present some new, like, “Oops, I did this too fast, oops...” just that you hadn’t really had to...?

Catherine Newman

No, because I plotted it. It actually didn’t, but it just presented—before I started writing, I had the challenge of, you know, practically trying to graph these two plots to see where they would intersect, and—and the sort of ways that the two plots together create this kind of character arc for Rocky, the main character. And so I was—I just, like—I usually, I have this way that I plot stuff, and it’s kind of based on that book that I use because of you, which is like, you know, Put On Your Pants—or Take Off Your Pants, or, you know, the book...

KJ Dell’Antonia

Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Catherine Newman

And—and I, so I do this thing where I make a—I write down the numbers 1 to 25, and I print that. I print a piece of paper that has the numbers 1 through 25 in type font. I don’t know why I don’t just hand-write the whole thing. That—and I guess the thought’s how many chapters it’s going to be, but it’s never quite right. And then I fill in what I know. So I put in everything I know, and guess where it’s going to go in terms of the—what are the things? What’s it called when it’s like a thing...?

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah, the... the turning point or the...

Catherine Newman

Or the beat...

KJ Dell’Antonia

Or the moment of last resolve? Yeah, the beat!

Catherine Newman

Yeah.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah.

Catherine Newman

So I fill in everything, like, I know, you know. I have a sense of how it’s going to open. I have a sense of the different elements of the two plots, and I put them in this weird numbered-chapter thing. And usually—like, usually as if I’ve written so many books—but with the other two novels, I did that a little willy-nilly, and it was fine. Like, I sat down and wrote the books beginning to end without all of it totally sorted in terms of where everything would go, and that was fine. This book, I really had to understand where it was all going to go, so I had to just be sure that all of the most important plot points were plotted in that 1-through-25.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Do you? I mean, you have a lot of moving emotional pieces too. Asking for a friend—how do you make sure that those are all resolved? Or do you? Or does it just happen?

Catherine Newman

That’s a really good question. I hope they’re resolved, or if they’re not, that that’s intentional, by the way. Yeah, I—I’m just thinking about, like, the different relationships. You know, most of what the book is, is like Rocky’s relationships with the people she loves—like, that is sort of the heart of the book. And then her grappling with herself, both physically and psychologically. I think I have a sense of those. Those are kind of included in those. I have, like, a—in that 1-through-25— sorry if this is too granular.

KJ Dell’Antonia

No, I love it.

Catherine Newman

In the 1-through-25, I have the plot thing that’s like, “Rocky reads her biopsy results,” or, you know, whatever the thing is. And then I have this other column that’s like, the other things that need to happen in that chapter, if that’s what’s happening in the chapter. And that’s where I keep information about stuff that’s like, “Willa forgives her,” you know—whatever other thing needs to happen. So I sort of track the plot, and then I—and I also have a little other column that’s just like, seasonal details. And that I don’t fill out super carefully, but, like, because this book moves from essentially Labor Day to New Year’s, I—I just tracked a little before I started writing, like, around when in that season things were going to be happening, you know, that’s Halloween, it’s Thanksgiving, it’s the winter holidays, New Year’s, and then it’s going to be, like, the leaves are turning, the blackberries that, you know?

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah, no, it’s so hard. Is it Tuesday? Like...?

Catherine Newman

Yeah (laughing).

KJ Dell’Antonia

Dang it. Oh, wait—if its four days from the first day, and the first day was a Thursday, that means its Sunday, and Sundays do have a particular rhythm on their own. And yeah, no, it’s so hard.

Catherine Newman

It’s really hard, although that part’s my favorite part, probably—besides, I love dialogue. But I love—I keep a lot of notes that are really dull on their own about, like, the weather and the landscape, just in general. I don’t even know what I’m going to use them for. I just keep a ton of notes about the seasons. And I love pilfering stuff for fiction from them because it’s just like—it’s going to be fairly accurate. Like, I will have dated it. I’ll have a fairly strong sense of whether that will work or not.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah, you’re not going to put the blackberries in April.

Catherine Newman

And I’m not going to put the blackberries in April, and I have that cheater feeling of chunking in something I’ve already kind of written down, and then your word count goes up by, like, 300 words.

KJ Dell’Antonia

You’re like, hey... [Unintelligible].

Catherine Newman

Yeah, exactly.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Oh my gosh, I love this. All right, well, one last question, and that is—what have you read recently where you felt like the writer was really, you know, playing big, doing their very max?

Catherine Newman

Yeah, I just read—well, I just got it in the mail, although my kitten—I want to show you, she has, like...

KJ Dell’Antonia

She had some fun with it...

Catherine Newman

Chewed up every corner.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah.

Catherine Newman

So this book is A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews. And she is a very, very favorite writer of mine. She wrote the novel All My Puny Sorrows that I always press on everybody, because it’s like the perfect funny, sad novel. This book I got to blurb, so I read it a while ago, and it just came—and I think it just came out maybe this week, I’m not sure. It’s so incredibly good. It’s really strange—someone—she’s doing some conference in Mexico, and she has to write an answer to the question, “Why do I write?”

KJ Dell’Antonia

Okay.

Catherine Newman

And she keeps starting and stopping, and it’s so—it’s nonfiction. I mean, it’s just authentically this, and she includes, like, letters to her sister. Her sister killed herself some number of years ago, and that’s the event that All My Puny Sorrows—which is a novel—is based on. But this, I am under the impression that’s the first time she’s written about it...

KJ Dell’Antonia

In a nonfiction way—yeah.

Catherine Newman

In a nonfiction way. And it is just—I did that thing, you know, when a book is so good? I picked it up because I knew I was going to talk to you about it, and then I read it for, like, an hour.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah, no, I get it.

Catherine Newman

Even though I have, like, already read it. It’s so moving and beautiful and so—like, she’s just struggling in this, like, really profound way to process loss and to understand herself and what she’s created in the world. And it’s so good.

KJ Dell’Antonia

It sounds huge, and I would—yeah, I’m going to pick it up. I have a funny story about All My Puny Sorrows, which is that I took it to Spain while I was waiting for one of those patient-portal things. I had cancer at the time, and that’s—the character of the sister who wanted to kill herself made me so angry that I had to hide—not only did I have to leave the book behind, I had to hide it in the hotel so it would not juju me. I obviously survived, because this was, I think, seven or eight years ago. But I couldn’t—like, I just—it was... but that actually speaks to the power of the book.

Catherine Newman

Interesting... yeah.

KJ Dell’Antonia

It’s not that it wasn’t an amazing book. It was that I literally couldn’t handle the particular, you know, mental illness that the sister was struggling with when I, you know, did not really want to die. Did not want to die, yeah. So I...

Catherine Newman

That’s amazing... yeah.

KJ Dell’Antonia

She’s a really powerful writer.

Catherine Newman

That—that is a really powerful story. Wait, were you going to share with me a book? Or it doesn’t work that way?

KJ Dell’Antonia

Well, it doesn’t...

Catherine Newman

KJ looks around...

KJ Dell’Antonia

Because I did not prepare.

Catherine Newman

What are you writing, KJ? What are you working on? What’s happening?

KJ Dell’Antonia

All right, we’re going to call this as an episode.

Catherine Newman

(Laughing)

KJ Dell’Antonia

Because it was excellent, and then I’m going to answer Catherine’s question, which all of you listeners kind of vaguely know. Let’s just say I’m trying to play big. All right, so this is me ending with: thank you so much, Catherine Newman, for joining me on the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast.

Catherine Newman

Thank you, KJ; it was a pleasure, as always.

KJ Dell’Antonia

And for all you listeners, we’re still saying it—keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game.

Narrator

The Hashtag AmWriting Podcast is produced by Andrew Perrella. Our intro music, aptly titled Unemployed Monday, was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output, because everyone deserves to be paid for their work.

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