Fighting Against Myself and My Past

Fighting Against Myself and My Past: The Story Behind “Saving Ruby King”

By Catherine Adel West

“You should write a book!”

It was a comment made in passing at a friend’s wedding sparking the first wisps of inspiration that eventually became my debut novel “Saving Ruby King”. 

That statement shouldn’t have affected me so deeply, made me pause mid-bite into my last piece of wedding cake, but it did. And I thought, “Could I do that? Could I write a book?”

Could I craft a story about black people, one others would want to read, one where our tragedies weren’t exploitatively dredged up for dramatic effect or worse an unintentional white savior narrative? Could I write a story, one a publisher would want to pay money to acquire? 

Then I ate my cake and answered in my head, “Why the hell not?” What makes my story any less worthy than anyone else’s? Not a damn thing! 

Sitting on my bed, a cursor blinking in anticipation of my genius-laden words, I had no clue how I was going to do this, and so I closed my laptop and left my room and thought myself a failure after an hour as a budding novelist. 

I went to my front porch, sat on the first step, and read part of a James Baldwin novel, “Giovanni’s Room” and became desperate. I knew I could never write like this, lay bare my desire and love and hate and regret with such eloquence, such unabashed bravery. How did Baldwin do this? How could I even begin to try? 

Writing is a full contact sport. It takes so much from you but can replace it with an infinite space of accomplishment and a sense of self you didn’t think possible to possess. And on my porch while I felt sorry for myself in a cliched, melancholic haze. With a reckless wind raising goosebumps on my brown skin, I heard my Grandma’s voice, “Ms. Kay you can do anything, but not if you don’t even try. Get yo’ behind up!” 

So I did. And I wrote the first pages of what would become “Saving Ruby King”. And those first “genius-laden pages”, were …horrible. It turns out no one’s first pages are great, or even good, they are just the pages getting you to passable, then okay, then halfway good and so-on. 

In the beginning, I wrote about a daughter constantly fighting against her father. Fighting against expectations and the past, both of them kept apart by anger and the subconscious understanding you can never make people what you want them to be even if you try your damndest to do so. The adage to write about what you know was true for me and it is for many writers, but the thing is, that can’t be the only thing which sustains your story. It wasn’t the sole thing sustaining mine. A story just of how my dad screwed up being a dad could get me into a therapist’s office, but not on a publisher’s desk. 

I needed more. 

So, I turned to the black church, to one of the organizations that molded, not just me, but my dad, mom and brother. I went to the place where I found not only love (sometimes conditional) but also found sanctuary in parts. I examined the damage it perpetrated, the scars it created that never healed, the relationships it destroyed. I used fictional characters to do this. I used dialogue and description and plot to help me reconcile how something so pure in intent can at times create some of the darkest bindings of the human psyche. 

I also used the place I was born and raised. Chicago. I made it a character in the pages of “Saving Ruby King”. People have many thoughts about Chicago, where it seems the violence is focused many times on a few key predominately African-American neighborhoods. I focused on the atrocities we inflict upon ourselves, the short-sighted narrative consistently fed by the media, but also on the hypocrisy of those who are meant to help us (police, politicians, etc.); how they make promises they fail to deliver on because of greed or racism or just an inherent inability to reach people who’ve been constantly lied to, abused and marginalized. 

These interlocking issues, my childhood, the black church, my city swirled in my head and it took me about five years to complete the rough draft of “Saving Ruby King”. 

And good God was it rough! 

I didn’t realize it at first. How jumbled and meandering the story was, how there were cracks and giant fault-like fissures in plot and character development, because I just finished this book. It didn’t occur to me how much of a fight it would be to find an agent, to learn how to take legitimate literary criticism and do rounds and rounds of developmental edits because when I finished my book, I was thrilled! Relieved. Happy. Exhausted! 

To those who finish writing a book, give yourself time to feel all of this, mostly give yourself time to feel hope, even if that hope won’t ever result in anything material. 

For me, it did. I found an agent after nine months of querying the first book I ever wrote. She sold my book in six weeks. And now you think perhaps, I’m a Cinderella story. That I was graced with some sort of finnicky magic touching some writers and not others. 

I wasn’t.

It was a statement breathlessly uttered during a wedding and just like that I began fighting for a dream I didn’t know I had, and that resulted in “Saving Ruby King”.

I took on my past and God, a city steeped in injustice and racism. I used my hope and some stubborn vision of what I envisioned my future to be to do something I didn’t know was possible. 

Remember, writing is a full contact sport. Rejection and fear will bruise and batter you, but you’ll get up. 

I did.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing