“It took me a long time to realize that there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look.”
Author: Margot Sannes
What is your book about?
I’ve been asked this question on numerous occasions (often directly proportionate to the number of times I’ve blurted out unprepared for followup, “I’m writing a book!”), and somehow, I always find myself an inadequate resource for the information.
I know exactly what I’m writing when I’m writing it. I know what it’s about because I’m in it, passenger and conductor. What am I after? What are my themes? Who are my characters in their real, raw places? These and other concepts are well within my grasp if the document is open.
Take me out of that world for even an hour, and I’m lucky to remember which of my imaginary women is, in fact, the main character. A nervous, sputtering repetition of the word “allegorical” is likely to occur. I might call the book a psychological thriller, a young adult drama, a dark fairytale, or the deconstructed story of an Alaskan childhood. Once, I said to a late-40-something fellow accompanying his young son to the annual Georgia Writer’s Museum conference, “It’s metaphorically about the body horror of a young girl going through puberty.” Nobody involved was comfortable with my response.
I leave conversations about my work a little startled, a little confused. The asker of the question usually does, too.
It’s no good to have a writer walking the world unable to discuss her craft, so recently, I’ve been committed to the deceptively simple task of learning how to categorize the work I’ve spent my last 6 years on.
At length and with pains, this effort led me, babbling and shivering and barefoot, to the sympathetic doorstep of the Snowflake Method.
Resisting the urge to evangelize, I can only say that this system of storyline development enabled me (a lifelong and chronic “pantser”) to see the fundamental framework of my love’s labor all at once, one stone laid neatly atop the next, and though I have yet to complete all 10 steps I’m able at last to answer that most dreaded and essential of questions – What is your book about?
A volatile coming-of-age story in which the untreated mental illness shared between three generations of women culminates in violent tragedy, Fire in the Wildlands is both a literary exploration of cyclical trauma and the author’s personal love letter to the wild, ancient magic of her childhood hometown.
Young Edith Brolly and Elisa, her dissociative, doll-like mother, are moved into the suburban Alaska home of Elisa’s new husband, Osman. Soon after, Edie witnesses a disturbing transformation in her mother that creates a widening distance between them. Feeling isolated from the new family unit, Edie begins surrendering to manic impulses – including petty theft, public nudity, and fire-setting.
As Edie enters young adulthood and her first turbulent experiences with love and loss, the instability of her household ecosystem is pushed to a violent break which will permanently alter all of their lives.
On Writing – Marguerite Duras
“To be alone with the as yet unwritten book is still to be in the primal sleep of humanity. . . being alone with the writing that is still lying fallow. It means trying not to die.
When close friends came to see me, that, too, was horrible. My friends knew nothing about me: they meant well and they came out of kindness, believing they would do me good. Strangest of all is that I thought nothing of it. This is what makes writing wild. One returns to a savage state from before life itself. And one can always recognize it: it’s the savageness of forests, as ancient as time. It is the fear of everything, distinct and inseparable from life itself. One becomes relentless. One cannot write without bodily strength. One must be stronger than oneself to approach writing; one must be strong than what one is writing.
It’s an odd thing – not only writing, the written word, but also the howls of animals in the night, of everyone, of you and me, of dogs. It’s the massive, appalling vulgarity of society. Pain is also Christ and Moses and the Pharaohs and all the Jews and all the Jewish children, and it’s also the most violent form of happiness. I still believe that.“
I want to see your teeth
Drunkenness feels insular, slippery. Edie pries at her mouth with the rim of the bottle, opens her lips with it; tugs at her bottom lip with the slick glass ridge, embracing the grotesque. The details of things have become extraordinary and she can see them up close.
Her hold on having a body goes sideways. She finds she can exist within the individual components of her; she finds that she does not, in fact, exist entirely in the brain, or behind the eyes, like she’s thought all her life. She can shrink her consciousness and fit herself, every molecule, into the shining bridge of tendon that anchors the base of her lip to the root of her gums, she can think from her ribs, every fingernail is a pale, rippled eye.
The howling subsides. Edie is a cave. She drinks, she crawls inward toward the central light of her own ancient fire.
Margot Sannes 