My Blog
Posted: April 15, 2011
Certain principles inform my writing. For example--and this is just an example: never forget the madeleines and the rosebuds, these metaphors in Proust and Welles that carry so much with them--the craving for love, the fear of never obtaining it, the anxiety of losing it, the rage for having lost it or been denied it, the compulsive pursuit of it. These emotions are forces that drive all of my characters, that frequently overwhelm their judgement and compel them to make irrational and sometimes self-destructive decisions, or to believe things that are patently untrue. The plot reveals these forces as they play out in time through the characters' actions. Plot is an effect, a consequence, perhaps just a symptom.
Posted: April 6, 2011
After completing the first draft of "Every Tom, Dick, and Harry" (ETDH) in July of 2010, I decided to reverse the order of Part I and Part II (the novel has four parts, each of which contains several chapters). I had to write some new material to make that reversal work. By the end of this month, I will have completed all of the new writing and will begin focusing again on rewriting the text, layering the characters, cutting and condensing. I am still on schedule to have a draft of about 450 pages ready to market to agents and publishers by June of 2012. I have a long list of readers who are awaiting the publication of ETDH. I cannot let them down.
Posted: July 27, 2010
I completed the first draft of "Every Tom, Dick, and Harry" Monday afternoon, July 26, 2010, during a vacation on the North Shore, just outside Tofte, Minnesota. Tip a glass for me!
Now that I have finished this draft, I can focus my revisions on layering the characters--adding time and depth.
Tallying the awards: Whiteout won the Independent Publisher Association's Gold Medal for Midwestern Fiction and the Reader Views Reviewers Choice Award for Midwestern Literature; it finished a finalist in judging for the National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Fiction. Judges reviewing entries for the Ben Franklin Award for Popular Fiction ranked Whiteout fourth. The novel finished a finalist in judging for the Midwest Independent Publishing Association's Midwest BooK Award for two- and three-color cover design.
Posted: March 21, 2010
Whiteout won the Reader Views 2010 Reviewers Choice Award for Midwestern Literature. (See http://readerviews.com/Awards2009Winners.html.) The 2010 Reader Views awards recognize outstanding books published in 2009. I thank the reviewers for recognizing the quality of Whiteout.
I also want to thank my readers for inviting me to their book-club meetings and including me in their discussions of Whiteout. I have found you to be smart, perceptive, and funny. (I will never forget the reader who took Whiteout to a session with her psychiatrist and, opening the book to specific passages, said, it's all right here in the book!) The tenacity with which you have focused on significant issues in the book has deeply moved me and reminded me that novels should always take readers on a voyage and never bring them back to the point of departure.
Posted: January 17, 2010
I have heard that some readers and editors disapprove of the use of dreams in literature. The complaint seems to be that dreams are just a gimmick for advancing the plot.
I use a few dreams in Whiteout, primarily to lengthen Paul's shadow in time and/or to represent an underlying emotional state.
The second chapter in Whiteout includes Paul's dream of a boy walking on a plane of snow to the crest of a hill, peering down into a deep, long valley, and then having the sensation of flying above the surface of the snow. The dream haunts Paul, casts its shadow across the entire book, and foreshadows discoveries that Paul will make. It also lengthens his shadow in time, suggests (with much ambiguity) his complex emotional state, and contributes to his depth.
I would love to know what my readers think of the use of dreams in Whiteout. Are the dreams just gimmicks, or do they work? Send me an email at brian@brianduren.com.
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I occasionally receive emails from readers telling me how much they loved Whiteout. One of those emails, in which the author talks about the experience of reading my novel bringing her back to look at her childhood again, reminded me that as writers we are trying to do much more than just entertain.
Posted: December 7, 2009 (Pearl Harbor Day!)
When we talk about depth, I think we are using space as a metaphor for time. The history of literature is full of examples of writers who have used spatial metaphors to talk about time. (Proust and Freud come to mind.) A character can have depth only if he or she has time. One of the writer's challenges is to find imaginative ways of imbuing his characters with time.
I cannot recall anyone ever talking about child characters having depth. If they have somehow experience that goes beyond their years, then they are weird, like the children in The Turn of the Screw, or perhaps "preternatural," the adjective that the narrator in Moby Dick uses to describe Pip.
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