Creating a New Home for Readers—and Myself

Many years ago, while writing my first novel, Each Vagabond by Name, I obsessed over every detail of character and story, making sure I got everything exactly right. I spent weeks researching a backstory for bartender Ramsy, ensuring that the way he was injured in the Vietnam War was realistic, moving, and thematically significant.

I modulated the level of hope my bereft mother, Stella, held onto, shading it so her story fell on the right side of desolation. As I crafted these characters and the events that pulled them together and through the pages, I also built the world they lived in: a small town called Shelk, Pennsylvania. My focus was the locals’ level of welcome toward outsiders and their tolerance for things they didn’t understand. Other details of setting fell into place as I wrote, but mostly my setting was in service to my characters and story.

I was surprised, after publication, when Shelk stole the spotlight. Readers told me how much they loved Shelk, how they didn’t want to leave, how they wished they could live there. I’d succeeded in doing something I hadn’t consciously set out to do: created a world where readers would want to be.

What happens in Vagabond isn’t gentle, and most of the people who fill the pages are uncompromising, fearful, even cruel. Yet the inherent nature of Shelk emerged despite what happened there. Its singular peacefulness, and the hope and love it shelters, elbowed through the plot—insisting on its place in the narrative even as I short-changed it again and again.

I fell in love with Shelk too. But it happened after I held my finished book in my hands.

This lesson stayed with me when I began writing my second novel, The Distance from Four Points.

It’s about an affluent suburbanite named Robin who’s forced to return to her Appalachian hometown when she discovers that her late husband blew their savings on decrepit rental properties there. Robin and her teenage daughter move from ritzy Mount Rynda to isolated, struggling Four Points, where negligent landlords hold all the power and let their rentals crumble.

To make this story resonate, I had to make both Mount Rynda and Four Points complex and multifaceted. Mount Rynda couldn’t be all ease and lightness, and Four Points had to embody more than just economic devastation. Robin’s experiences in both places had to reflect the complexity of her life and deceptions. And since almost the entire novel takes place in Four Points, I knew I had to get that one, especially, right.

I knew the stakes. With Shelk, I’d created a world people loved. There was no way to make Four Points all puppies and rainbows; and what Robin experiences there is traumatic and ugly. Yet I knew the success of this story depended on how well I built the world of Four Points. It wasn’t something I could leave to chance, and I created it as deliberately as I created every plot point, and every character.

Because of this, writing The Distance from Four Points has forever changed the way I write. I’m not talking about process: I’ll always lack time; I’ll always be inefficient in how much I draft and discard; I’ll always stumble around through stacks of pages before I find my narrative way.

What I’m talking about is an awareness of responsibility. Maybe “scope” is a better word. A novel has a lot of moving parts, and if one cog isn’t working, the whole thing grinds to a halt. This I knew. What I didn’t understand before—at least not consciously—was that writing a novel means undertaking the monumental task of creating a world readers want to live in. And, almost as important, a world I want to live in. Because I’ll be there a while.

It’s hard to explain the writing process to non-writers, the way years can pass in a blur of words and paragraphs, the way characters can become so real it seems incredible that they’re not actual people you might run into at the grocery store, the way a fictional world—if rendered well—takes on all the heft of the real one.

To write a novel, you make a home in a new place, and part of the writer’s mind never really leaves it, even as regular life churns on. The writing process is all-consuming. Weird synchronicities appear. Someone will speak and you’ll hear the words in your character’s voice; a casual remark will untangle a story problem with elegance and ease. Writers live with a foot in the real world and a foot in their novel’s world. 

I loved the time I spent in Four Points. This is important, because life carried on while I worked on this novel. Four Points wasn’t a bad place to spend a few years. What if it had gone the other way?

Writing The Distance from Four Points has changed the question I’m asking myself now that I’m on the cusp of starting a new work. The driving questions used to be, What’s my story about? Who are my characters, and what do they want? These are still, of course, fundamental and formative questions. But the question that’s in the forefront of my mind now is, Where do I want to spend the next few years? 

At a certain point in the writing and revising process, a novel takes on its own momentum. Characters begin speaking and acting on their own; they make choices that are surprising and sometimes inconvenient to a planned trajectory. Communities form and break apart. Storylines complicate, veer, fade.

The moment a novel becomes more like a self-driving car than an unwieldy tractor with a rusty steering wheel is the moment I live for as a writer.

But next time, with my next novel, I want to spend even more deliberate time creating place. The home where the story plays out. I want to consider it carefully; I want to burnish every detail. The next place I conjure won’t be found on any map, but it’ll be as real as anywhere. Writing The Distance from Four Points helped me understand that any world I create will be a place I’ll forever consider home. 

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Bio:

Margo Orlando Littell is the author of the novels The Distance from Four Points and Each Vagabond by Name, which won the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize and an IPPY Awards Gold Medal, was longlisted for the 2017 Tournament of Books, and was named one of fifteen great Appalachian novels by Bustle. She received her MFA from Columbia, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Originally from southwestern Pennsylvania, she now lives in New Jersey. Her website www.margoorlandolittell.com.  

Social Media:

https://twitter.com/margolittell

https://www.instagram.com/margolittell/

https://www.facebook.com/margoorlandolittell

 

THE DISTANCE FROM FOUR POINTS

Soon after her husband’s tragic death, Robin Besher makes a startling discovery: He had recklessly blown through their entire savings on decrepit rentals in Four Points, the Appalachian town Robin grew up in. Forced to return after decades, Robin and her daughter, Haley, set out to renovate the properties as quickly as possible—before anyone exposes Robin’s secret past as a teenage prostitute.

Disaster strikes when Haley befriends a troubled teen mother, hurling Robin back into a past she’d worked so hard to escape. Robin must reshape her idea of home or risk repeating her greatest mistakes. 

Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/books/the-distance-from-four-points/9781608011797

 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips