THE NOVEL I BURIED THREE TIMES

Jonathan Evison and I share the same publisher, Algonquin Books, and the same editor: Chuck Adams. But more than that, we’re friends who always talk to each other about writing. We’ve both achieved a degree of success, after years of failure, but that doesn’t mean everything we produce from now on will be golden. Sometimes, no matter what we do, or what our editor does, a novel just doesn’t work. But how do you know what to do about it? Do you junk the whole novel, and if so, when? Can you save parts of it? Can you rewrite, and if so, how many times? Or is it just time to move on and give the novel a final resting place in the ground, in a body of water, or in a drawer?

Both Johnny and I have failed novels. Mine was the terribly titled—I’m embarrassed to even reveal it—“Second Chances,” which I wrote in 1996, under the tutelage of Michael Dorris, who was married to Louise Erdrich at the time. I had a story line about two teens who fall violently in love, and when their concerned single parents try to break them up, her mother and his father fall in love themselves and get married. So these two kids are thrown together into a house, now stepbrother and stepsister instead of lovers, and I was interested to see what would happen over the generations. Ha! Guess what. Nothing and everything did. The center never held.

“For me, what makes a novel is the unfolding of a question that haunts me, that I have to explore—and that I hope, in digging deep, will answer that question for myself and for my readers.”

It just didn’t work. I never really could figure out what the novel was about, what the deeper meaning was. “It will reveal itself,” Dorris kept telling me. I didn’t know or use story structure back then. I had no idea what a character arc was, or a moral choice, reveals, reversals. None of it. I was floundering. And when Dorris sent the book out to publishers, acting as my agent, they didn’t see a narrative line either. It was too convoluted, editors said, spinning off in too many directions. The story line wasn’t driving, and the characters weren’t changing. I kept taking the novel apart and trying to put it together in new ways, adding and subtracting characters, forcing them to act, but still it didn’t add up. “It will,” Dorris insisted, and then shortly after, his life shattered, his marriage broke up, and in 1997 he committed suicide.

I shelved that book, feeling scorched. I was too heartbroken to look at it ever again. Or so I thought.

With Johnny, it was “The Dreamlife of Huntington Sales,” the story of a group of teens who vanish, a shadowy figure who may or may not be the devil, a