Fictionaut Five: Jane Bradley

Jane Bradley is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Toledo where she teaches fiction workshops and screenwriting.  You Believers is her fifth book and has received numerous rave reviews including a Starred Review in Booklist. She has published a novella, a screenwriting text, and two collections of fiction.  Her collection Power Lines was listed as an  “Editor’s Choice” by The New York Times Book Review. She has received both NEA and Ohio Arts Council Fellowships for her work as well as three grants from the Arts Commission of Greater Toledo.  She is currently at work on a new novel, The Snow Queen of Atlanta. Originally from the hills of Tennessee, she is still trying to make sense of the funny accents and the multitude of parking lots all around her in Toledo.  Check out her webpage at www.janebradley.net.

What is your feeling about having mentors as a writer? Talk about mentor relationships if you will, its importance to a writer?

I’d suppose my first mentors were the fine writers I read. It began with the very grim and elaborate fairy tales. Then in high school the transcendentalist ideology became something like a religion to me. I so ached to have the intelligence and craft and wisdom of Emerson. In college it was Chekhov and Flaubert and Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.

What do you do when you feel stuck or uninspired and does it work to trick the brain in into working?

Rule #1 Walk away from the computer. Really. When stuck I go sit in a comfy chair with a legal pad or one of those black and white notebooks with the lined paper. And I sort of doodle. And I write things like, “I want to write about….” I’m trying to tell a story about…. and I ask a lot of questions like: “She wants this because…” or “He has an urge to kill because…. ” or “She can resist drinking, or stealing, or sleeping around because….” This sort of non-committal writing often will lead me into writing a story, sometimes actual scenes and even dialogue. I call this process, “sneaking up on my story,” as if my story can feel it when I’m after it and it hides. If I sort of ignore that fact that I’m really trying to write a story, if I set myself to doodling and meandering, the story comes out of its hiding place.

Are there favorite writing exercises you give students that you can share?

Yes, I have one called the oscillation exercise that forces students to accomplish that difficult task on interweaving internal and external worlds. In life we are constantly doing this — noting the world around us and thinking, feeling about it. New students have trouble with this. So I have them put their main character in a scene and notice the scenery/setting then think or feel about it. Then notice a person or group of people thing/feel something about it. Notice a part of their body: toenails that need a pedi, muscles, belly, hair, whatever, and think feel something about it. Somewhere in all this the character must reflect a bit on whatever is driving him: job, love interest, money worry, whatever suits the character. And finally the character has to act, to move, do something. This exercise just about always results in a scene or at the least the student, knows his or her character a bit, or a lot, better.

Can you offer suggestions for making characters live? Do you know who they are before you write or do you find
out who they are in the writing?

Some characters some to me fully formed. I might have dwelled about the type for a time and then I wake up one morning and there they are talking and walking around in my head. This was true for my main character Are We Lucky Yet? It was based on a real story of a Mother’s Day brawl at a Golden Corral in Town. A black woman had punched a white woman for screaming at her baby, and a brawl ensued. The local media vilified the black woman horribly. Yet I wanted to know what her life was like that pressed her into doing such a thing. I wanted to make her sympathetic. I was lots. And one morning I woke up and heard in my heard a woman saying, “I wanted it to be nice.” It was a poor white woman who’d had a horrible childhood and three kids and no husband. Her name is Vicky and she wrote the story pretty much for me. Other times you sort of meet your characters and simply have to get to know them the way you do friends. We sort of have a conversation as I write and then they go off and say and do what they want. This is how the characters in my novel worked. My agent also had a hand in the revision and had me tweak up or tone down some characters.

But sometimes my characters aren’t so helpful. That’s when I get a legal pad and write down loads of questions to and about them. Loads of questions. When I run out of questions, I start answering whatever I can. That’s when the characters often tell me what’s what.

What do you, as a novelist, hope to achieve before setting out. Where does your urgency toward creating the novel come from?

I can’t speak for other novelists, but perhaps they are after something similar. No matter what I write I’m always looking for answers to questions. For example in my You Believers, I researched the true story of the murder of Peggy Carr and of course founds lots of unanswered questions. How and why can a man be so well-mannered, yet, casually, brutally savage. What drove him to kill? He was a sweet little boy once. What happened? I also wondered how the woman allowed this situation to develop and why she drive 45 minutes with this man, knowing what he intended. I also wondered how the mom could possibly bear such pain and maintain her faith in God and the world. And then I was fascinated by the searcher, how and why a woman can make it her life’s mission to do that awful task of seeking out the missing and comforting, guiding the grieving, panicked families. How does this woman do this again and again, and keep smiling, keep love in her heart when she sees so mud god-awful horror. It goes back to that old Flannery O’Connor comments, that she what just to show what some people will do.

Novelists, I think, are chronic snoops in some way, and maybe pathologically curious.

What are some good habits for a writer?

Exercise. The body is more than a vehicle for toting your brain around. I’m not saying go be a jock, but remember that a healthy body contributes to a sharper mind, read in the Orlando Weekly about this supplement to make your body healthier.

Read. Read. Read everything. Read the good stuff twice if you can find the time. And hand with other writers. We are an odd bunch. It’s a comfort to have others around who are so driven to make up stuff.

What is the best advice as a writer you were ever given?

This from my ex-husband and dear friend, Ed Falco: When you feel stuck blocked, lazy, just write to your lowest standard. Get any, as many as you can, words on the page — or monitor. This works. Often I’ll just keep scrawling out awful stuff, and then in the process, suddenly hit gold. This bit of advice has gotten me through many a tough day. I could not have written the last two books without this, especially You Believers. That was a beast to write. And writing to my lowest standard first, gave me some ground to stand on so I could work to make it better.

What is next for you?

Currently at work on a new novel called The Snow Queen of Atlanta. It draws on the old fairy tale which I think is a metaphor for the power of intoxication. In it a boy is swept off by the Snow Queen to languish to near death in her ice palace — he is somehow drugged by the beauty of her and the stunning ice and snow. His dear friend, using the magical help of nature manages to rescue him. My book tells of two sisters, one who succumbs to the seductive power of cocaine, and one who does not. Of course my tale is to be a darker one — hey that’s what I do.out from Press 53. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.