About writing Beyond the Boneyard
“You can fix anything but a blank page.” Nora Ephron
The idea for Beyond the Boneyard began at a post graduate conference in Vermont. My workshop leader, novelist Lee Martin, had us write one page about something happening in a building. I wrote about an old tobacco curing barn where a body was found. I have explored such a barn but found no body, yet the seed of a story grew from that exercise. Why the story led to writing a family saga on a farm—
I mulled over their words for months and decided to rewrite Beyond the Boneyard from Ben’s point of view. The story became more dramatic. I finished two revisions of that draft and then edited it line-by-line three times. Writing in Ben’s voice gave the story depth and me a strong and steady daily writing habit.
If you look back in these blogs, you’ll see the draft that starts with Flora as the point of view, until the most recent post with Ben’s pov in 1940, which I have since edited. You’ll see the shift in tone and how the central character can affect change with quiet caution and become beloved in the process.
Time has come for me to secure an agent to guide me through the publishing process. My hope is that an agent and publisher will sing its praises in the way a fellow writer in my critique group recently did when he called the story and the writing ‘Faulknerian.’ His words threw me back to a college course called Faulkner and Hemingway. I don’t recall much of Hemingway’s yet Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury stayed with me because of rich descriptions and deep exploration into the human heart. Perhaps his story, Barn Burning, rose up from my subconscious when I wrote one page about something happening in a building.
BUILDING, that’s what we writers do day-after-day, build lives and hope and joy through our stories. That’s my goal.
Stay tuned: I’ll let you know how that agent search works out. It may be a while. Securing an agent takes time and patience. Meanwhile, I have outlined and researched the next novel set in the 1500s. Tomorrow I plan to draft the first chapter.