Guest blog: Richard Chiappone on The Next Big Thing

I'm continuing to participate in the Internet chain letter, The Next Big Thing, where writers discuss their works in progress. This post is a guest blog by the writer Richard Chiappone. Richard is a colleague in the low-residency MFA in writing program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. He's the author of Water of an Undetermined Depth, a collection of short fiction published by Stackpole Books (2003). Opening Days, a newer collection of short fiction and essays on outdoor sports was published in 2010.

                                                       Richard Chiappone

Here's Richard's blog:

What is your working title of your book (or story)?

Mister Almost and The Enemy of Fun, a novel.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

When I was a kid in the fifties, there was a terrible apartment fire in our town, Niagara Falls, New York. Some very poor African American people died in the fire, and the landlord of the apartments, the father of a neighborhood friend, was charged with building code violations in relation to those deaths. I never forgot how embarrassed and mortified my friend was.  I’ve always tried to imagine what it would be like to be the kid whose father was in prison for a major felony like that. An apartment fire in a fictional poor black neighborhood is the central event in the novel.  

What genre does your book fall under?

It’s a character-driven novel about a working class family. I guess booksellers will call it “upmarket” or “literary” fiction.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? 

There are several young boys in the story, and I don’t know the names of actors in that age bracket. But, for the key adult roles, I picture Claire Danes as the mother and titular Enemy of Fun. And I like Joseph Gordon-Levitt for the father.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

When a fatal fire results in the jailing of a boy’s father, the boy and his mother must set aside their contentious power struggles and work together to salvage as much of the family as they can.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It’s currently in the hands of Sam Hyate, at The Rights Factory.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I wrote the major events as a short story in 1992. At some point over the years of revision, I realized the story was too big for the short form. The first complete draft of the novel version was finished in 2009. So, I guess the answer is, seventeen years.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Well, it’s set in 1960, and racial issues are a big part of it, and justice and the legal system are part of it too; so, that subject matter hopefully makes it a little less presumptuous to associate it with the venerable To Kill a Mockingbird. And it’s a coming of age story about a young man growing up on a big river (The Niagara) so, I’d love to be even more presumptuous and say The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But, of course, beyond those facile similarities, it’s nothing like either one. If I could find any justification at all, I’d include The Bible, and all of Shakespeare’s plays as comps too.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My childhood friend whose father went to jail; my mother, who always wanted to move up socially; my father, who wanted only to live a quiet, peaceful life; my brothers and sisters and all the kids in the neighborhood who were, and still are, my tribe, my clan, my family; growing up in the industrial, ravaged, and polluted natural world along the Niagara River—which I believed to be a paradise; but, most of all, having come of age myself in the tumultuous, unforgettable 1960s.

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

Mister Almost and the Enemy of Fun is about family, race, religion, friendship, first sexual attractions, fear of death, crime and punishment, frogs and snakes, and the magical way that childhood is illuminated by a young person’s imagination.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 2

Another consideration for writers who want to sustain a career, is not to put all your eggs in one basket, to coin a phrase. If you focus your entire creative effort on one book, and invest years of your life in that book, it better be an incredibly good idea that you are the right person to carry out—and a book you can finish. But even if it’s the greatest idea on planet Earth, and you are the one person in the universe to write it, and you finish it, it may still not be the book that gets you published for the first time. Even if it is published, it may not be the work that finds the audience you’re seeking.

So I would advise you to work on multiple projects. Don’t count on that first book being the one that gets you in the publisher’s door. Write a second book, and after that, a third book, even if you haven’t gotten the first manuscript published yet. Especially if you haven’t gotten the first manuscript published yet.

The nineteenth century French writer George Sand wrote more than 100 books or plays. Here’s a portrait of George Sand by the great French painter Eugène Delacroix:

Sand was famous for staying up all night to write, burning many candles. Then every morning she slept in, and entertained her children and friends all afternoon and evening. There is a story that she once finished a novel halfway through the night, and instead of going to bed, she started writing another book. We could all emulate that drive. 
Of course, there are writers who write just one great book. The classic example is Harper Lee:

 Born in 1926, she has written just one book in her lifetime. That book happens to be To Kill a Mockingbird. In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize and selling more than 30 million copies, the book has changed the lives of countless people who’ve read it. If you’re Harper Lee, fine, just write that one book. No complaints. But most of us are not that sort of writer. We’ve got to keep trying, throwing out more than we keep of our writing, getting better at certain aspects of this crazy job as we go along.

I’m going to make up a person who is a composite of several different creative writing students I’ve encountered. This student is terrifically talented. Not only does she write, but she’s also an accomplished professional. In short, a person with lots of skills, including excellent people skills.

She’s been done with her MFA now for about seven years, and she hasn’t published a book yet.

Why? She’s invested years in finishing the book she started as her MFA thesis. The book is a novel with a very challenging structure. It’s a work of fiction, but based solely on nonfiction stories from her own family history. That’s a tall order to fill, since in a case like that you feel you can’t change the story, even when it doesn’t work for the reader, because it’s based on fact. The manuscript also has several main characters who live in different centuries.

It could be a fascinating structure for a novel, but maybe too challenging to pull off for a first book. It’s the kind of project that might be better to work on later in life, when the mechanics of writing a good plot and having a polished style are almost second nature. 
So I would suggest that you don’t put all your chips on one number, and play that number over and over. The odds are, you will run out of chips before that number comes up. Keep working on different projects, and increase your odds of finding the readers you seek.

 
Other recent posts about writing topics:

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer