::drumroll:: Varian Johnson, Everybody!
I'm delighted to welcome Varian Johnson today as part of the blog tour for his WONDERFUL new novel, Saving Maddie, and share an essay on his writing process. For those of you who don't know, Varian is sometimes known as the hardest working man in show business, er, or at least one of the hardest working writers I've ever met. (See his recent post over at Justine's for reference.) His last novel My Life as a Rhombus garnered a whole heap of acclaim and I suspect this new one will surpass even that. Saving Maddie is a complicated, exquisitely-executed story about what happens when the girl you had a crush on when you were a kid comes back to town talking about not being into organized religion anymore and scandalizing all the adults around–and you're the preacher's son (oh, and she's also a preacher's kid). Here's Varian on the tough magic employed to create it.
(AND: The first three commenters on this post will win a free ARC!)
The writing process for Saving Maddie
First off, I’d like to thank Gwenda for hosting me today. Gwenda Bond is one of the smartest people I know (her VCFA thesis on the omniscient POV should be required reading for all authors), both her husband and mother are adorable, and she is a master Mafia player. (*Ed.)
Gwenda asked me to write a bit about my writing process, which would be easy to do, if I had a set process. The only constant in my process is that it takes me a really long time to write a novel (though I’m hoping to be a little quicker on my current work-in-progress). So for this post, I figured I’d focus on the process of writing Saving Maddie, which was just released yesterday.
There was only one thing I knew when I started working on this book—that it would be from a male’s POV. I had just spent the past three years working on My Life as a Rhombus, published by Flux in 2008. The novel, written from a seventeen-year-old girl’s point of view, touched on topics such as sex, pregnancy and abortion, and was emotionally exhausting. In order to keep somewhat sane, I swore I’d never write another girl first-person POV novel, and set off to write my version of a “boy book.”
Process-wise, I usually approach a manuscript thematically: I think about the big questions I am interested in exploring; I think about what I want to discover about the world and myself. Specifically, I found myself thinking a lot about the idea of “saving” someone, both from a religious and an emotional well-being point of view. Really, what does it mean to save someone? Who are we to determine who is or isn’t in need of being saved? And how to do you save someone that has no interest in being “rescued?”
…
::drumroll:: Varian Johnson, Everybody! Read More »
