We are all united by our need to find meaning – Carolyn R Russell

Carolyn R Russell writes flash fiction, short stories, poetry and YA fiction. At the heart of her work is a constant curiosity about meaning in life and how we find it through navigating everyday troubles. In October she’s releasing a collection of flash fiction and short stories – Death and Other Survival Strategies. She says its overarching theme is how we surmount and survive what we must in order to move on.

Some pieces orbit an existential threat, some revel in the tricks of the brain we deploy to stay sane, some suggest that sanity is not always the best defence against the vagaries of fate, some are joyous tributes about rising to everyday challenges.

I didn’t set out to explore this theme; rather, the book is a collection of stories written over the last few years, and when I studied them as a group, I realized they all pointed in some fashion to the idea. Overcoming what we must and finding some sort of resolution is central to the human condition, and that’s the work of art for me: to reinforce that we are all in this together in our need to find meaning in this life.

Some of my characters are diabolical and that reinforces this notion; they may have heinously warped ideas, but they are striving nevertheless, no matter what the cost.

The book contains a wide variety of genres, including literary fiction, magic realism and sci fi. There’s even a surreal Western. A writing buddy described the collection as Twilight Zone meets O. Henry meets Chicken Soup for the Soul.

You also have two novels, both for the YA audience, In the Fullness of Time and Q & A. Why do you write for that age group and about that time of life?

Adolescence is such a formative period. So much goes on that will continue to reverberate throughout our lives; the good, the bad, and the wish-it-never-happened ugly. Like the protagonist of Q & A, my own teen years were leavened by my family’s love, support and humorous approach to life’s challenges.

Books were also an important lifeline during those years, in terms of learning to pay attention to a world of choices outside of my lived experience. I read voraciously, across all genres. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle thrilled me when I was in grade school and set the stage for my lifetime love of science fiction. Ray Bradbury, Issac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, and Ursula K Le Guin were my favourites when I was a teen.  

I loved classics like Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Catcher in the Rye, Treasure Island, To Kill a Mockingbird and anything by Edith Wharton and Shirley Jackson. I could go on and on. I didn’t know at the time how famous a lot of it was. My mom was a devoted reader and guided a lot of my choices. Her suggestions were good ones.

Fairy tales also had a huge impact on my burgeoning sense of identity. It occurs to me only now how much. I think it’s called ‘positive illusionism’ by psychologists; the idea that everything will work out for the best in the end. Those fantastical stories of survival taught me about human nature and our collective wish to find paths forward no matter what the circumstances.

 I wanted to give my readers a similar extension of their realities.

I see a strong streak of eco-concern in the settings of both your novels.

I’m interested in ecosystems of all kinds. Concern for the health and viability of our planet is represented in very different ways in each book. In the Fullness of Time is a dystopian novel that takes place during the aftermath of a human-instigated ecological disaster, while Q & A is a humorous mystery wherein environmental concerns are the book’s catalyst for a disparate group of characters to engage.

And family is also an ecosystem, isn’t it? That’s a great concept to explore at the YA stage of life. We only have one family ourselves, and close experience of maybe a few more, but we can taste many others through books.

Both books share a strong focus on family ecosystems. Our families, those we’re born into and those we choose, have a huge impact on our ways of being in the world, and how we respond to its everyday chaos.  Both of my YA novels concern these central relationships in our lives. And in both books, family is an ultimately positive and sustaining force.

There are lots of books for teens that validate how difficult it can be to be part of a family; I wanted to put something positive out there, so the troubles and crises of each novel are ultimately resolved in great part to the crazy glue that bonds a family together. I hope the books present a possible alternative model for kids who are struggling within their own.

You’ve also had personal essays and poetry published. How do you decide when an idea deserves a full-length treatment or a fragment? Or a part of a novel?

This is going to sound weird, but I wait for an ineffable click to happen. Then I know it’s done, finished, whether it’s six words or 60k. If I never hear the click, it’s in a file somewhere to one day be cannibalised.

I see you’ve written a book on The Films of Joel and Ethan Coen. Tell me why you’re such a Coen devotee.

After teaching high school language and writing-based subjects in my 20s, I went to graduate school in my early 30s and studied film criticism. Although I have a couple of unproduced film scripts in a drawer, my emphasis was on writing about film. A revised, more mainstream version of my grad thesis on the early work of the Coen brothers was picked up by McFarland & Company; I delivered two children and the book within the same three-year period. Then I rediscovered the joys of other kinds of writing, and I was hooked.

The Coens like to break reality, which I notice in some of your own work.

I think my love for the Coens’ work says something about the sensibility I bring to my writing. Their playfulness with form and genre, their humour and their visual style are, in my opinion, unmatched in terms of their contribution to independent filmmaking. Best of all is their respect for their audiences; we are always in on the joke, which is often film historical. The Coens trust us to understand their references.

How have you ended up on such a creative life path?

My family of origin is very creative – musicians, artists, and writers galore. I started writing at a young age, but never dreamed of publication until much later because I was focused on singing, acting and teaching. My husband is a singer-songwriter (that’s how we met) who plays a bunch of instruments and gigs out a lot with his band. And my daughters are both creative. So I’ve been very lucky.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m working on a pilot for a TV series with a bi-coastal writing team, a tech thriller.

Quick-fire questions –

What’s on your desk?

Lots of pocket-sized notebooks, stacks of paper, my laptop, and my pup’s chin right now; she sits on my lap while I type.

Favourite time of day?

Early evening.

Books you wish you’d written

A Wrinkle in Time

The Poisonwood Bible

And everything by Ian McEwan

Find Carolyn on Facebook and on her website    http://carolynrrussell.com/        . Find Q & A here

Preorder Death And Other Survival Strategies here

There’s a lot more about writing in my Nail Your Novel books – find them here. If you’re curious about my own work, find novels here and my travel memoir here. And if you’re curious about what’s going on at my own writing desk, here’s my latest newsletter. You can subscribe to future updates here.

Your first pages – 5 more book openings critiqued by a literary agent (and me!) at @Litopia

Last Sunday I guested again at Litopia, an online writers’ colony and community. Every week they have a YouTube show, Pop-Up Submissions, where five manuscripts are read and critiqued live on air by literary agent Peter Cox @agentpete and a guest, or sometimes two (this time we had PR agent Kaylie Finn @kaylie_finn ).

The format is simple. Five manuscripts, each with a short blurb. We hear the opening pages, then talk about how they’re working – exactly as an agent would think about a manuscript that crossed their desk. This time we had YA post-apocalyptic fiction, a World War II spy thriller, a farce set in the world of British TV, a literary post-apocalyptic adult novel and a Cold War memoir. Issues we discussed included introducing a world and characters, stylised language, versatility of tone, orientating the reader so you don’t lose their attention, introducing a character with a peculiar problem, writing comedy, believability of a story concept, what makes a YA novel YA, ingredients for a historical novel, and how to get a toehold in the very competitive market for special forces memoirs.

Fascinating stuff – as ever, I talked loads, and I also learned loads from the responses of Peter and Kaylie. (That’s Kaylie and Peter in the preview pic.)

Enjoy! And if you’ve got a manuscript you’d like critiqued, apply here.

And meanwhile, here’s what’s happening to my own much-edited manuscript, plus a few other writerly tales

‘The planes, the explosions, the dust, the calm’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Kerry Drewery

My guest this week specialises in YA novels set in war zones. With just two novels under her belt, she’s already much-decorated with awards and award nominations. Her music selection is small in number, but it helped her keep the intensity of the environments she was writing about, and connect with the characters’ emotions. Indeed, she has scored a first among Undercover Soundtrackers, because one of her choices was to help her decompress after working with such harrowing material. She is Kerry Drewery and she’s on the Red Blog with her Undercover Soundtrack.

How to add jeopardy to your story before the main conflict starts

Jeopardy is a sense of instability – and a powerful way to hook the reader.

Often, writers are gearing up to reveal a big threat in the meat of the story, but fail to give us enough in the early chapters. Instead they show the characters living their lives, surrounded by their important folk. They may show us back story, and what the characters don’t want to lose. This is all useful groundwork – but they are in a state of stability.

What’s missing is the sense that the character is venturing onto a tightrope. The unknown knocking at the door. The trampoline on the balcony.

Genre and generalisations

How obvious you make this instability depends on your readership. Children’s and YA novels have to be pretty literal, while literary novels for adults might create pressures of agonising subtlety. Passages that would be aimless cogitation in a thriller might be enthralling dissonance in another genre.

But whatever you are writing, you still need jeopardy. So if your characters are looking too comfortable, what can you do?

Cut the throat-clearing
The simplest answer is to ditch the throat-clearing and get to the main threat sooner, then generate some complications to spin out afterwards.

Foreshadow with mysterious symptoms

But you might be better to keep your main conflict where it is. In that case, you need a build-up – but one that isn’t aimless.

Start from your main conflict and spin it out backwards, creating less severe problems that will lead to the flashpoint. Like mysterious symptoms that warn of a medical catastrophe, these can give that tingling sense that the character’s world is becoming irretrievably unstable.

Is there any normal activity that they start to find more difficult? Is there a tricky choice they might have to make early on? And could the character handle these in a way that makes everything more precarious? Could they think they’ve sorted it out but find they’ve made it worse?

Beware of timebombs

Sometimes writers try to add jeopardy with a deadline. The gangsters are coming. Or the bomb will detonate. That can be effective if introduced late, but plot timebombs have a short shelf life. If you start them ticking too early and never escalate the problems in another way, the reader can get numbed.

Other characters
Other characters are a terrific source of instability. Is there something your main character has to do that puts them at odds with other people who are important to them?

When I fixed Life Form 3, I looked closely at the other characters. I found:

• relationships where there was tension, and I made more of it
• ways for characters to spoil things for each other
• a way to give an early warning of the main threat, by making a diluted version afflict another character

I also looked for where this new, more desperate situation might lead to alliances. This gave one character a much stronger role, and became a catalyst for other tensions that richocheted through the story. He emerged with some strong beliefs that made him a far bigger player than he was originally designed to be.

Stories need a sense of instability to tweak the reader’s curiosity. If you need to add more, you can often find the roots in your main conflict and characters.

Thanks for the canned unease pic Ministryofstories.

Have you had to add jeopardy to a story – and how did you do it? Let’s talk in the comments!

If you found this post useful, you might like the follow-up to my book Nail Your Novel. It’s currently in edits and I’m still debating the title, but it will be stuffed with craft advice. If you’d like updates about this and Life Form 3, sign up to my newsletter