Booksquare

[BS: Yes, kids, another guest post. Must be the Internets way of celebrating Spring. This week, we are delighted to bring you Lucia Nevai, an award-winning author whose novel Salvation is due out from Tin House Books within weeks. Lucia, who delighted us with her line “when we all agreed that Salvation was the book it wanted to be…”, shares her experience with her editor, her agent, and her choice of point-of-view>]

From three-page short story to 550-page novel

My new novel, Salvation, began as a three-page short story, “Cannibals,” published in a literary quarterly a few years back. My agent and I were putting together a collection of stories, and this one didn’t fit. But she was smitten with the voice of this story and wondered if it could be longer. I had no idea if it could or couldn’t. I gave it a shot. And a three-page-long episode became a five-hundred-and-fifty-page life story.

My Agent

My agent, Denise Shannon, has her own agency, representing a variety of fine authors including Francine Prose, Gary Shteyngart, Karen Russell, Aryn Kyle, Samuel H. Huntingon, Ehud Havazelet, Kevin Canty, Mark Slouka, and many others. She has a lot of experience and a great sense of the marketplace. Her hunches regarding my work in the past have been proven 100 percent correct. And she loved this book.

What is Salvation about?

Salvation is set in rural Iowa in the 1950s. In a nutshell, the story is a funny/sad survival fable in the Ugly Duckling mode. The book traces the journey of Crane Cavanaugh, beginning with disfiguration in the womb as the result of an attempted abortion and ending with celebration in the world as an award-winning science genius.

Crane and her two half-siblings grow up illiterate, ignored, and unfed by the three adults of the household, all depraved, former gospel circuit practitioners who are now squatters living under the civic radar in a dilapidated shack.

When Crane’s prostitute-mother runs away from home to join the Iowa Sate Fair as a stripper, the authorities intervene. The cabin is condemned and the kids are sent to separate institutions to live. Crane is assigned to convent life. Here, her long-sought education begins, but it goes too fast and well—she’s too smart. Science is taught from the book of Genesis in the Bible. Crane rebels. The nuns give up and put her up for adoption.

Crane is reborn as Princess Hopkins by an adoring middle-class adoptive mother who takes Crane home to live in a ranch house a stone’s throw from the condemned shack where she was born. Loved to pieces at home, mentored happily at school, yet haunted daily by her grim past, Princess/Crane inhabits parallel worlds. She learns to use her scientific precocity and formidable intellect to make her mark—and if more than the usual number of social blunders and sexual humiliations follow in her wake, she somehow retains an inner continuity that keeps her unfazed, cheerful, and forgiving.

Note to Self: Never Use the Omniscient First Person in a Long Work

The point of view of the story was what I’ll call omniscient first person: a candid, sincere, trustworthy narrator describes the world around her—and her precarious place in it—in a way that includes details she couldn’t possibly observe firsthand. Never do that in a novel. It is too hard to consistently maintain the same, precise cognitive scope of omniscience over hundreds of pages and scores of episodes with dozens of sub-characters floating in and out.

Why I Didn’t Change the Voice

The voice was what made Salvation different. Salvation possessed a coming-of-age plot. The Midwestern setting was sturdy and unexotic. There were many original details in this character’s journey—such as an intuitive precocity in tracking the feeding and mating habits of competing ant clans—but the overall theme of a character surviving a deprived childhood and finding her rightful place in the world—that was anything but new. It was the voice that made the whole book feel fresh. The candid, forgiving, cheerful way this character tells you the particulars of her story are what make her memorable.

The Submission Process

My agent was determined to find an editor who would fall in love with the book as she had. There were several rounds of submissions as she tweaked her list of candidates at publishing houses of all sizes, looking for someone with the means and the interest to take a risk on Crane Cavanaugh. It was from the great, young editors at the small literary presses that we got the response we were looking for. We went with Tin House Books. Editorial Director Lee Montgomery bought the manuscript—with the proviso that it would need substantial revision.

Small Presses: People Not Just Policies

Tin House is based in Portland, Oregon, in—yes—a tin house. They have enjoyed an outstanding reputation as a literary quarterly since their first issue came out in 1999. A few years back, they expanded into publishing books. Lee Montgomery is a wonderful writer, whose memoir, The Things Between Us, was published by Free Press and won the Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Lee’s short fiction collection, Whose World Is this? won the John Simmons Iowa Short Fiction Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press. To work with me on the revision, Lee assigned Senior Editor Michelle Wildgen, herself an extraordinary fiction writer who won Prairie Schooner’s Virginia Faulkner Award with a story that became her novel, You’re Not You, published by St. Martin’s.

More Focus on Fewer Titles

At every stage of the publishing process, my agent and I were dealing with people, not just policies. My agent has this to say about the advantages of publishing with a small press: “Small presses provide more focus on fewer titles… and everyone throughout the process really knows (and has read!) your book.” We were asked for input on the cover and our input was taken seriously. We were asked for input on the publicity and our suggestions were incorporated. But before the publicity or the cover, there was that little matter of the revision.

Really Revising

My editor had made extensive notes on the novel. My agent had her own list of questions. And I had some thoughts of my own as to what wasn’t working for me. The more soberly I addressed all of the feedback, the more certain I became that the omniscient first person was an unsuitable point of view through which to tell the account of an entire life. (Anyone who knows of a successful example out there, please tell me!)

As hard as we had all worked on every page of the manuscript, I put three hundred and fifty pages of my character’s life story in the wastebasket. I ended the book with the character on the verge of the first major success that will propel her (with plenty of ups and downs) through the decades to come. During this process, my editor combed through the book six or seven times. She was available via e-mail days, nights, and weekends.

Flexibility in Scheduling Publication

When we all agreed that Salvation was the book it wanted to be, Tin House was able to schedule publication within a matter of months. Cover designers, type designers, copy editors, proofreaders, and publicists all worked on compressed turnaround schedules to meet the deadline.

My Editor’s Experience

My editor has this to say about her experience: “I felt a writer as talented and lauded as Lucia could only help us grow the reputation of the book press, and that while we did a lot of work on Salvation, just looking at the original draft, it was clear to me she was certainly skilled enough and serious enough about her writing to find the right path. You could just see the intelligence and the care in the book, and this amazing prose throughout, that told you it was worth pursuing.”

The Ugly Duckling

When I think back to that three-page sketch, I am in awe of both the inner processes and the professional collaboration that helped bring Salvation into being, then coached it assertively into finding its rightful place in the world. Kinda like my character. Talk about the Ugly Duckling!

###
You can buy Salvation right here and learn more about the book here.