Read We Only Know So Much Online
Authors: Elizabeth Crane
E
ndless gratitude for all my awesome and great friends who read various and/or multiple drafts: Nina Solomon, Kirk Walsh, Jami Attenberg, Jamie Quatro, Anne Hutchison Hensley, Ike Turner—you people know what’s up.
Cal Morgan, jeez, it’s impossible to overstate the hand you’ve had in making this what it is. You rock it.
The fine people of JVNLA, most especially Alice Tasman, but also the whole team, Tara, Jessica, Jean, Jennifer, who have all worked hard on my behalf—for a long time!
The Corporation of Yaddo, and the inspiring place of Yaddo, where this thing got off the ground. I went there with no plan to write a novel, and you gave me that lovely little cabin, and Sylvia Plath’s thermos, I’m certain, and this happened.
My UCR colleagues who I admire so, and who continue to inspire and amuse me.
My Chicago writers group: Gina Frangello, Megan Stielstra, Emily Gray Tedrowe, Patrick Somerville, Thea Goodman, Billy Lombardo, cheerleaders always that I am honored to have sat among and absorbed their mad wisdoms.
Also, a special shout-out to those of you who read the draft of the thing that got put on more or less permanent hold for this: Nina, Ben, Alice, Kirk, Gina, Peter Birkenhead, Deanne Stillman, and Donny Ward. Your time, wisdom, and encouragement are invaluable.
And for Ben, ’cause you know.
A Letter from Elizabeth Crane
D
EAR
P
ERSON
Holding This Book,
Usually, when I tell the story of how I became a writer, I talk about how Harriet the Spy changed my life when I was eight, and that is true enough. Weird little misfit girl in NYC taking notes on everything around her?
I’m in
. I started writing right then and I never stopped.
How I became a
good
writer (if I can make any claim to that adjective) is another story entirely, and it happened somewhat by accident.
Back when I was a kid, one of our primary means of communication was actual mail. Telephones existed (I’m not
that
old), but long-distance calls were expensive, and my father lived a thousand miles away in a magical land called Iowa (where stepmoms took you to the grocery store and let you put
frosted Pop-Tarts and grape soda and anything else you wanted
in the cart).
So we wrote letters. For several years, my stepbrothers and I built an organization dedicated to spying on my dad (called the S.F.W.A.—the Secret Fred Watchers Association—that revolved entirely around anonymous, typed letters issuing extremely silly demands for things we wanted, at the cost of some absurd peril if our needs weren’t met). During the summers, I’d write letters to my best friend, Nina (another future author). And somewhere along the way I started writing rough drafts.
Of my letters
.
I was hardly fabricating stories at this point, but there’s no question, looking at it now, that I was honing my voice. At the time, I was just aiming to entertain, ideally to make my intended reader laugh via my ongoing missteps and romantic kerfuffles. (Okay, well, who am I kidding? This is still my MO.) Anyway, people claimed to love my letters, and I loved writing them, and these people always told me I should be a writer, and I would say I
was
a writer, even though I was making a living as a waiter, a preschool teacher, and about sixteen other things over the years.
Mind you, the stories I was writing over those years bore no resemblance to my letters whatsoever. I spent a lot of years trying to be all fancy-like, describing stuff I had no business describing, and trying to make my storylines neat and tidy. Did I know from neat and tidy? I did not. There had always been a few writers I loved, but it was years before I read anything that rocked my world—enough to show me that the way I wrote letters was the way I
actually wrote
. (I’ve named these people ninety hundred times before, but David Foster Wallace was the first; then I finally discovered people like Rick Moody, Lorrie Moore, George Saunders, and Lydia Davis, and my universe more or less exploded.) So after, what was it—let’s say twenty-five—years of writing, after these writers fell into my hands my writing started to improve, and started to really sound like
me
. It turned out my writerly instincts had been pretty good all along; I’d just been ignoring them.
No one ever said I was a quick learner. (See also: my love life. But that worked out nicely too in the end.)
Your friend,
E. Crane
From Short Story to Novel: The Making of
We Only Know So Much
W
ELL, THIS WAS AN INTERESTING THING
.
I really didn’t plan to write a novel. After three collections of stories, I was pretty sure they were my thing, and that was fine. I love short stories; I love to read them and I love to write them. The novel thing eluded me, and a few false starts from time to time confirmed to me that I just had no idea how to do it.
Then, in the summer of 2010, I had the good fortune to spend a month at the Yaddo writers’ colony, in a sweet little cabin in the woods,
1
and set about writing a short story. I had some characters in mind who would eventually become the four younger members of the Copeland family, but that was about it. In fact, I had initially thought these characters would each be the center of their own individual stories, unrelated to one another. There were some things I was wondering about: What would it be like if your daughter was a bitch? What would it be like if someone came up to you and told you that you’d dated him for a year—and you had zero memory of that person?
2
What would it be like to lose someone to suicide?
So I started some character sketches of these folks, but they quickly became a family. In a short time I had thirty pages, but I was nowhere near finishing this “story.” Sixty pages in—and having a lot of fun, I might add, but still nowhere near done telling this family’s story—I began to think, Well, now I’m totally screwed! Because it still felt like a short story to me, and I liked that about it, but there aren’t a lot of places that publish sixty-page short stories. It wasn’t until I hit ninety pages that I started to realize—or maybe
accept
is a better word—that I was probably maybe possibly writing a novel.
The first (semicomplete) draft of the book was very short, in the ballpark of 150 pages, or forty-six thousand words. My agent read it and loved what I had, and more or less said
Keep writing
, at which point I had a sudden inspiration: that if Gordon was caring for a father who had Parkinson’s—who was dealing with
real
cognitive decline (vs. Gordon’s mostly imaginary one)—it would serve to exacerbate Gordon’s fear that he’s losing his own mind, and might add depth to the story. This idea was sudden, but not totally random. My dad had Parkinson’s, and though he was lucid to a great extent, in recent years he had been suffering from not just physical but various cognitive issues. So I threw a version of him into the mix, and added his mother, my grandmother, for good measure.
My father had actually cared for his parents in their old age, and my grandmother was a pretty rich character as well. But I would be grafting both of these real-life people onto an entirely fictional family, and I had no idea if that would be believable in the end. Still, I proceeded to develop these two new characters, and moved them into the Copelands’ house. I gave each of them their own issues and then interspersed these chapters where they seemed to make sense—though one of my concerns had always been the order of the chapters, as they weren’t entirely written in order. And since I’d never written a novel before, that was just one of my concerns about structure.
I had originally been opposed to traditional chapter breaks. I really, really wanted the novel to maintain the feel of a short story, to keep the Crane-ish tone and voice of my shorter work, and I had the idea that if this novel didn’t have breaks it would have the movement of a story, and you’d just keep reading. I knew there were novels that were written this way—particularly shorter ones, as mine was. But in many cases I wasn’t sure where those breaks should go, so this was something I held on to until almost the last minute. Finally, I sat down and forced myself to choose the appropriate breaks, and not long before we submitted the book to publishers—I think it was actually the night before—I actually broke down and numbered the chapters. (Which I now like just fine.)
I also really didn’t
necessarily
want the characters to change too much, which may seem problematic (and possibly even hilarious) to those who know how novels are supposed to work. But, again, I wanted it to feel like a short story, like
my
work, and I wanted any changes the characters went through to be subtle.
Somewhere in here, my agent
3
had also brought up another reasonable but troublesome idea: she thought the characters should interact more. At first I was still attached to the idea that the story was all about what was going on in each of their individual heads, that it would all be very internal (or interior, as my colleague David Ulin likes to say); that they would interact with people
outside
of the family, but what little interaction they would actually have with each other would be riddled with something like miscommunication, inappropriateness, or latent hostility of some kind. (Which is still more or less the case.) But apparently this is not terribly “novelistic,” whatever that means, so Alice encouraged me to write more dialogue between family members, confident that I could do this in a way that wouldn’t compromise my (
brilliant artistic
) vision, in which, no matter what their interactions were like, they were still very much in their own little mental worlds, and not connecting very well even when they were in the same room.
Okay. So I worked on it a little more, we sent it out, the awesome and great Cal Morgan at Harper Perennial made an offer I couldn’t refuse. Before we’d finalized the deal, he called me up, told me at length how much he loved the book, and made a few casual suggestions for me to think about. One of them was something Alice had talked about—which was to have more scenes in which the family members interact with one another—but the other was that he thought the family needed what he called a “game changer.” Specifically, he thought—and he was certainly not at all adamant about this—that if the grandfather died, the family would have an opportunity to connect (or not), that it could serve to tie their storylines together and give any or all of them an opportunity to change.
Sigh
. So. Initially, I was very, very,
very
resistant to this. I’m not superstitious in any way, and yet I felt extremely uncomfortable about the idea of killing off a character based on someone I was close to. (Cal, it should be said, had
no
idea about my dad’s condition when he made this suggestion.) I have no issue creating characters based on real people once they’re gone, and/or even real people when they’re alive. But this is something I’d given some previous thought to, and I just didn’t want to do it. I understood very clearly why this might make a lot of sense for this book, and I wanted it to be the best book it could possibly be, so I sat with the idea for a good while, and I mentioned it to my stepmom as well.
My dad knew I was writing my fourth book, and I think he even knew he was a character in it, but we both knew that no matter how I went ahead with the storyline, his reading days were behind him. He believed he’d read it, and was excited about it, as always, but we knew he wouldn’t actually read it, as he’d given up reading at least a year or two before this. My stepmom said that she completely understood, and that she had no problem with it, and that if that was the choice I made it would be totally fine. Now, this may be an extremely specific editorial issue, and if you’re a writer, you probably won’t be asked to kill off your living family members. You may, however, be asked to make changes that are similarly difficult for you to consider, though they may not be quite as personal. But I tried to remember that it is fiction, and that fiction writers should remain open to any solution that makes the best story and the best work.
Cal also suggested that at some point Gordon should discover Jean’s infidelity, which I was also very, very resistant to. It wasn’t what the story was about to me; I wanted her processing this entirely on her own, and not particularly well, and I didn’t want them to have a conversation about it, a) because Gordon is supposed to be historically, vastly inattentive to his wife, more now than ever because of his obsession with his memory, and b) because I feared that having this come out into the open would make the book a story about infidelity. This may seem weird, but to me the infidelity is a subject that belongs to Jean alone, whereas the overall story is about this family’s inability to communicate.
Eventually, though, with Cal’s insanely detailed guidance—he provided me with
twenty-two single-spaced pages of notes
—I was able to accomplish both of these critical changes, without compromising what I had in mind creatively, and ultimately I think they made it a vastly better book. (And side note: in the case of this particular book, the editorial work involved
developing
material. Very little of what I had originally sent was cut—maybe sentences or short bits here and there—and by the end we had added about fifty pages.)
While I was in the process of editing, as it happened, my dad died. That sucked, but he was eighty-four, and it was very obviously going to happen a little sooner for him than it had for his parents, who lived past one hundred. (Yes, I actually made Vivian younger than my real grandmother!) But my father was my biggest fan, and I was pretty sure he wouldn’t mind being immortalized in this way. My grandmother, well, that’s another story. :) She might have had a thing or two to say about it, but she only lived to be a hundred and four, so she’s not here to argue. But I hope I’ve finally done something better with my life than the time all those years ago when I lay perfectly still on a baby blanket.