After the Solitary, the Social: Writing as Teamwork | Ginger Moran ...

?It was a long slog to publication for The Algebra of Snow. The book has been represented by an agent at the big literary agency ICM at the beginning of its career and later on by another wonderful agent in New York, Kay Kidde. During that phase of its existence it was nominated for a Pushcart Editor?s Choice Award by an editor at Doubleday who loved the book (?an interior life that is no less rich than that found in the best women?s literature.?) but recognized that it was not a commercial book.

??????????? Well, I might have told them that to begin with. I was under the impression at the time that literary fiction could achieve commercial publication. And I still have that impression, witness Anita Shreve or A.S. Byatt, or my friends Meg Waite Clayton and Brenda Rickman Vantrease among many others. But Algebra is a sort of literary fiction in extremis?the main character is virtually the only character in the book; she is a mathematician alone in the Adirondack Mountains in winter; she lost her mother when she was young, is separated from her hot-blooded, chronically unfaithful husband; and, in the course of the book, loses even more things of terrible importance to her. Worse, practically nothing happens?it?s winter, after all, and she is a nerdy academic not given to dramatic plot twists.

So almost the whole book is internal, solitary, a paean to independence and pain, a deep plunge into the past and alternate ways of knowing that I like to think are reminiscent of the great books of the 70s women?s movement like Margaret Atwood?s Surfacing and Doris Lessing?s The Golden Notebook. It does seem to me still that the personal is political?that it is very difficult to act authentically in the world until one knows oneself and has resolved some of the major disconnects of one?s past.

And yet one of the things I found out most profoundly in the writing and eventual publishing of the book was how seriously teamwork is needed to get a book out and in the world.

Writes and readers alike tend to think of the activity as solitary?like my character in Algebra. And it is?or at least part of it is. The actual writing, for me, remains a very solitary activity, a focus, a dive through the skin of an overburdened modern life to the realm of the imagination, to a scene and a set of characters who are playing out a story there for which I am witness and recorder.

But as soon as that part is done, I have discovered that it is essential to enter into partnership with an entire team.

For me, classmates and professors were early readers of the novel when it was my dissertation for a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. I had amazing readers and mentors, including a mathematics professor who checked my math metaphors (I?m so bad at math myself that it amounts to a disability). I had agents and editors read it. I had a husband who I think read it, but we were slightly competitive (and are not surprisingly now divorced) so I?m not sure he did.

And I had a couple of wonderful groups read it.

When I read Meg?s Wednesday Sisters I had a good time fantasizing that one of the characters might have borrowed characteristics from me or one of the other members of the our writing group in Nashville. It was a great group that evolved over time to being just three of us?me, Meg, and Brenda. We chose to keep on working together when the larger group dissolved because we were all intent on getting our novels done and published and we all had a level of success already that made us a compatible group. We met at restaurants for lunch and took on one or two chapters at a time. It was an extremely productive experience without which Algebra for sure wouldn?t have reached the level of professionalism it took to finally get it published.

I work with an amazing group of women who assist me in millions of ways and without whom Algebra would never have been ushered into print. They?re in the photo.

So, like my mathematical character, I found that the solitary leads inevitably to the social, to community. I may speak for all of us in the group and possibly for many writers that our intensely solitary work, even our introspection and desire to be left alone, in counterbalanced by our desire?our need, even?to reach our readers, to be read and understood.

It has certainly been a delightful experience to have the book out, to speak at festivals, give readings, and write guest blogs, all of which might have blown my character?s mind, but for me are deeply rewarding.

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Source: http://gingermoran.com/2012/08/14/after-the-solitary-the-social-writing-as-teamwork/

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