I should explain that the structure is fairly complicated: ten sections that alternate between an omniscient narrator and four first-person narrators and also between the past and the present. Today, as I sit and write this short essay on the writer’s craft, I’m remembering a day fairly early in the process, some time shortly after the idea for the structure came to me. I remember the moment (Oh, the relief!), but I’ve already forgotten what it was like before I saw the novel’s form laid out before me. My relationship with the book will change, and I will find it harder and harder to remember individual moments in the writing: the day, for example, when I hit on the structure via a lightning-bolt idea. I’ll start thinking about the book in new ways: as a story to tell (“How did you come up with the idea for this book?”), as a text to analyze (“Why do you think you had the youngest brother do what he does?”), and of course as a product to sell. And while I wait for the next project to make itself known, I will gear up for this book’s publication. My book took a lot out of me given the emptiness I now feel it seems that it took everything out of me, that all I am is a container for what goes into my fiction. I’ve recently finished a novel-truly finished, as in it’s departed copyediting and headed for page proofs-and I find myself in a familiar no-man’s-land, the space between books that surprises me every time with its overlarge helpings of exhaustion and despair.
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