LIVE! #49
2 April 2023
Agenda
- Why We're Here
- Literary Forensics
- - What do I bring?
- - What do I feel?
- - What do I notice?
- - What do I study?
- Next Month's Reading & Study
Why We're Here
We Writers want to improve our craft
by Reading like a Writer
through Literary Forensics training
we learn from each other
Roundtable Rules
Always refer back to the book
We practice active listening & serendipity
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but not every conclusion
Always refer back to the book
Meet today's author: Jennifer Egan
- Has written 6 novels & 1 short story collection
- PEN American president; teaches at U Penn
- Egan is a panster who writes 5 pages a day, longhand, followed by:
- 1) Is it alive? If so, where?
- 2) What does it feel like it is?
- 3) Completing a few chapters, she creates an outline, describing what's written, and makes a list of tasks, focusing on compression
- 4) Begins revising (hard copies, or on screen)
- 5) 8-10 revisions of each chapter + critique group reviews
- 6) When draft complete draft, she reads it all & repeats steps 3-6
- Awards: National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (A Visit From the Goon Squad), National Book Critics Circle Award
- Editor: Nan Graham; Agent: Amanda "Binky" Urban; Married, 2 kids
What do I feel?
What in the book elicited that feeling?
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but every conclusion should be questioned
We practice serendipity
- nothing is too crazy
Always refer back to the book
What do I notice?
- • Language and Grammar
- • Context
- • Point of view
- • Character & character development
- • Pacing
- • Horizontal structure
- • Layering of themes
- • Overall effect
Writing The Candy House
- Egan fleshed out characters from A Visit From the Goon Squad not yet fully realized
(except Lou Kline and family) Earliest? drafts in 2012 & even earlier short stories - To read previous drafts, go to JenniferEgan.com and click on a blob
- Interested in interaction between novels and dreams
- Inspired by David Wiesner's The Three Pigs (for 9-10 year olds) Meta story:
Pig exits the story, saves two other pigs, and finds other stories to enter. - Soundtrack: Paper Boats (2003) by Nada Surf - Egan wanted to emulate form.
- Additional inspirations: role-playing games, baseball stats, & sculptor friend Sarah Sze
- The machine to enter peoples' minds (Consciousness Cube) came to Egan very late in the process.
- In the end, the novel is the machine. - Title inspired by anti-Napster billboard: "Never trust a candy house" [What the Forest Remembers]
- Fairy tale message: tech gives us things, but takes things away, too
- Alternate titles included: The Thing That Changes Everything; Random Walk;
No Reunions; Through the Trees a Candy House
Piet Mondrian - Composizione (1916)
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Sarah Sze - Centrifuge (2017)
Stats & Background
- Marketing: Contemporary Literature & Fiction, Psychological Fiction, Literary Fiction, Hard Science Fiction
- Genre: Realistic Historical Arch-Plot Long-Form
- Print Pages: 352; Word count: 96,334
- Reading Grade: 10th; Avg. wds/sent.: 14.82
- Lexical Density: 50.03; Flesch Reading Ease: 64.27
- POV: 16; Person: 1st (& plural), 2nd, 3rd; Tense: Past, Present, Future
- Publish date: April 5, 2022
- Publisher: Scribner
- Audio book narrs.: Michael Boatman, Nicole Lewis, Thomas Sadoski, Colin Donnell, Griffin Newman, Rebecca Lowman, Jackie Sanders, Lucy Liu, Christian Barillas, Tara Lynne Barr, Alex Allwine, Emily Tremaine, Kyle Beltran, Dan Bittner, Chris Henry Coffey (11 hours 11 minutes)
- Recognition: Top Ten Best Book of 2022 by The New York Times Book Review,
The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Slate
A Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker, NPR, Oprah Daily, Time, Harper's Bazaar,
Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Vogue
Writers Who Read: Up Next
May 7: Sea of Tranquility – Emily St. John Mandel (USA, 2022)
Required reading: Structure (Horizontal)
Writers Who Read: Coming Up
June 4: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin (USA, 2022)
- Summer Break -
September 3: The Passenger – Cormac McCarthy (USA, 2022)
October 1: Stella Maris – Cormac McCarthy (USA, 2022)
November 5: Avalon – Nell Zink (USA, 2022)
December 3: TBD