My First Time: Sarah Yaw

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands.  Today’s guest is Sarah Yaw.  Sarah’s novel You Are Free To Go (Engine Books, 2014) was selected by Robin Black as the winner of the 2013 Engine Books Novel Prize.  Michelle Wildgen, author of Bread and Butter, had this to say about You Are Free To Go: “A trio of faltering young women, each still tethered to the local prison, an inmate rapidly approaching his end—all live inside these pages with haunting, visceral persuasiveness.  Dreamlike and startling, You Are Free to Go is poised between the imagined ether and bloody reality, but Sarah Yaw never flinches.”  Sarah received an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College, and is an assistant professor at Cayuga Community College.  She lives and writes in central New York.  Click here to visit her website.  You can also find Sarah and her novel on Facebook and Twitter.

The First Time I Declared My Novel Finished

When I tell my husband, Doug, “I’m done” with whatever I’m working on, he looks at me with suspicion.  He’s fallen for that before.  He has learned that while “done” sounds final, sounds like time to celebrate, it is really a fluid concept for writers.

The first time I finished my novel, You Are Free To Go, I shouted from the rooftops that my six-year process was over; I had conquered a beast of a book.  I sent it out to my first round of agents, and then (you know where this is going), I got some of those nice “the writing is really good” courtesy rejections and knew I had brought the book out too soon.

Here’s what I had finished: a narrative that clung tightly to an idea.  I think back now and I really should have known better, but I had tried so hard to make the conceit work.  Nevertheless, it wasn’t going anywhere and something inside me (the part that always knows the truth) got that it was fatally flawed.  A friend of mine hooked me up with a terrific editor, Natalie Danford.  Instead of sending the book out to more agents, I did an about-face and sent it to her instead.

Natalie got the book completely and cared about the prison scenes, having taught in a woman’s prison for years.  She also understood the structure and was equally interested in narratives with shifting points of view with minimal connective tissue, so I trusted her take on the book.  Then, she laid this on me: Take out the central conceit.  Actually, I think her exact words were, “Take the training wheels off.”  It took me about two hours to see that I had spent six years creating worlds and characters and plot that were authentic and organic to the world of the book, but they lay submerged and undiscovered under a blinding idea that I had forced everything else to serve.

Yes, removing it was scary as hell.

I took it out and lost twenty or so pages, which says a lot.  Without doing anything else to it (did I mention I also had two-year-old twins and was working full time?), I sent the book to two excellent writer friends, who, for good reason, were both really annoyed with me for having made them read such garbage.  The book was just body with no bones.  One lovingly suggested I start working on another book.  The other asked me a series of simple questions.  I’m sharing them here, in brief, so you can see just how lost I was seven years into the writing of this book:
     •  I’d love to have some hook, some unanswered question or problem that makes me wonder what happens next.  What secrets remain to be looked at and resolved?
     •  Maybe some defining moment in the friendship that they all have to forgive and/or atone for?
     •  Beyond an education, what does he want?

An unanswered question, a defining moment, and a basic want.  Good grief!  This was Fiction 101.  Yet, these back-to-basics questions were exactly what I needed.  I answered each one and turned on the drama that lay hidden inside the book.  It was ridiculously simple and so much fun.  Removing the initial conceit got me, my giant authorial intent, out of the way and let me see the real story.  You Are Free To Go ended up much closer, thematically, to the original story I set out to tell.

I declared the book finished, once again, and sent it out.  Doug was ready to party.  It won the 2013 Engine Books Novel Prize, so we did!  But there was more work to do.  “You’re kidding.  It’s still not done?” he asked.  “Nope,” I said.  I had won the great privilege of continuing to work on it with Engine Books’ Victoria Barrett, who is such a brilliant editor.  So now, nine years later, despite Doug’s nervous, sideways glances when I say it, that book is finished!  The next time I see it, it will be bound, covered in beautiful blurbs, and ready for a bookstore.

Friday Freebie: Afghan Post by Adrian Bonenberger, Friday Was the Bomb by Nathan Deuel, and Seriously Not All Right by Ron Capps

Congratulations to Sarah Yaw, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Orion's Daughters by Courtney Elizabeth Mauk.

This week's book contest is a trio of must-read war memoirs: Afghan Post by Adrian Bonenberger, Friday Was the Bomb by Nathan Deuel, and Seriously Not All Right by Ron Capps.  One lucky reader will win a copy of all three.  Afghan Post and Friday Was the Bomb are softcovers and Seriously Not All Right is a hardcover (and signed by the author).  Here's a little more about the books...

Apart from several entertaining glossaries of military terms, Afghan Post is told entirely through letters and emails Adrian Bonenberger wrote to family, friends, and fellow soldiers.  The book begins when Adrian is a young adult teaching in Japan and feeling a little adrift in his life.  After 9/11, he answers an inner call to duty by signing up for the Army.  He's sent to officer basic training and we follow him through the course of his education and subsequent deployments to Afghanistan (twice).  What begins as gung-ho slowly and inevitably fragments and disintegrates into a deep questioning of a military system frustrated by the follies of foreign policy.  Of the three Friday Freebies, it's the one I've read (the others are in my To-Be-Read pile) and I whole-heartedly endorse it for anyone who wants to know how a military officer is built, from the boots up.  Here's what Anthony Swofford (Jarhead) had to say about it: "Afghan Post is a deeply felt and poetically resonant epistolary memoir.  I love the form and the way that Bonenberger is able to inhabit the multiple and fractured selves that emerge from the experience of combat.  This is a book that will bring the madness and beauty of combat right down into your shaking hands."

At once a meditation on fatherhood, an unusual memoir of a war correspondent's spouse, and a first-hand account from the front lines of the most historic events of recent days--the Arab Spring, the end of the Iraq war, and the unrest in Syria--Friday Was The Bomb is a searing collection of timely and absorbing essays.  In 2008, Nathan Deuel, a former editor at Rolling Stone and The Village Voice, and his wife, a National Public Radio foreign correspondent, moved to the deeply Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to see for themselves what was happening in the Middle East.  There they had a daughter, and later, while his wife filed reports from Baghdad and Syria, car bombs erupted and one night a firefight raged outside the family's apartment in Beirut.  Their marriage strained, and they struggled with the decision to stay or go home.  "Nathan Deuel is alive to the myriad contradictions of being a sentient being at this moment in history—the painful, necessary awareness that ones presence carries an entire empire in its shadow.  Friday was the Bomb is about the tension between how much we want and how small we are—some will make war, the world will makes storm, and the rest of us will try to hold onto some fragile connection with each other.  This is a book for the rest of us." (Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City)

Subtitled "Five Wars in Ten Years," Ron Capps' Seriously Not All Right is a gut-level honest account of the toll war can take on one person.  I've had the privilege meeting Ron and hearing him talk about the book and I can tell you he is the Real Deal.  He's got a great story to tell and I can't wait to read it soon.  In the meantime, here's the publisher's jacket copy for the book: For more than a decade, Ron Capps, serving as both a senior military intelligence officer and as a Foreign Service officer for the U.S. Department of State, was witness to war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.  From government atrocities in Kosovo, to the brutal cruelties perpetrated in several conflicts in central Africa, the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and culminating in genocide in Darfur, Ron acted as an intelligence collector and reporter but was diplomatically restrained from taking preventative action in these conflicts.  The cumulative effect of these experiences, combined with the helplessness of his role as an observer, propelled him into a deep depression and a long bout with PTSD, which nearly caused him to take his own life.  Seriously Not All Right is a memoir that provides a unique perspective of a professional military officer and diplomat who suffered (and continues to suffer) from PTSD.  His story, and that of his recovery and his newfound role as founder and teacher of the Veterans Writing Project, is an inspiration and a sobering reminder of the cost of all wars, particularly those that appeared in the media and to the general public as merely sidelines in the unfolding drama of world events.  Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about it: "This searing memoir recounts the horrors Capps encountered and their devastating effects on his psyche and soul.  Capps’s telling of his story of war and bearing witness is vitally important for the 99% of Americans who sat out the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."

If you’d like a chance at winning a copy of Afghan Post, Friday Was the Bomb, and Seriously Not All Right, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on May 1, at which time I’ll draw the winning name.  I’ll announce the lucky reader on May 2.  If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.