A Marker to Measure Drift by Alexander Maksik: A Master Class in Craft

I picked up this novel with no expectations and no idea what it was about. By the time I got to the bottom of the first page, the book had me  by the throat and I finished it on the same day. I wish you could have the same experience, so if you trust me to recommend books, I'd say go and get it, read it, and then come back to read my interview with author Alexander Maksik, below.

Sometimes when I finish a novel that has really lit up my brain, I am restless with questions for the author. Why did you make that choice? What was going on here? This is exactly the type of novel I want to dissect, as if I can get to the bottom of it, find out what makes it so successful. A Marker to Measure Drift has some excellent lessons for writers.

Lesson #1: Everything is Personal. 

Maksik's main character is a young black woman from Liberia, and when the novel opens she is starving to death near a beach on a resort island in Greece. Maksik himself is a man, an American, and lives in New York. Yet one of the most arresting things about this book is how immediate and real Jacqueline's experience is, how unfalteringly close the prose brings us to her, physically and mentally, so I asked him...

LN: Your main character is a 24 year old African woman, and your novel is an antidote for that poisonous advice: "Write what you know." Your voice never felt contrived, Jacqueline's voice never felt artificial, and the relationship between her and her mother seemed to me to be particularly authentic. Did anyone ever tell you to write what you know, or imply that you couldn't properly write this character because you're a man?

AM: I don’t think there’s a writer alive who hasn’t heard that adage. The problem is that it’s often misunderstood as law, as a kind of strict limitation: you must only write about your immediate experience. It’s an absurd idea and it goes counter to the whole idea of fiction, the point of which is to fabricate, invent and imagine. On the other hand, what I know about relationships, about sorrow, about joy, about love, about lust, about loneliness, I know from experience. How can I not use what I know when I’m writing about these things? The adage should provide writers a sense of freedom rather than restriction. Writing fiction should be an act of deep empathy, a way to inhabit lives outside of our own, to imagine the experiences of others.

As for the rest, I believe strongly that it is the writing that must be evaluated. Not the writer.

Yes. Just because you're not in the demographic of the character doesn't mean you're not writing something sharply personal, something you "know" intimately, something from your own life.

Lesson #2: Memories Aren't Tidy

I'm always interested in the structure of novels and how these structures emerge -- whether they spring up fully formed in a first draft or whether they're the result of revision, rearranging. This book stays very tight to a short timeline, with flashbacks to earlier memories and scenes. However, the flashbacks aren't tidy and informative as flashbacks can sometimes be -- arriving just in time to provide a piece of information to a reader. The way Maksik handles his flashbacks, they're more glimpses or really "flashes" and the scattered way they came through seemed to mimic real memory and how haphazard and uncontrolled it can be. As a result, we don't really get "the whole story" wrapped up neatly, but we do get the whole story that's important to the character in the present. And I never felt like "Ah, I'm being filled in on the backstory."

LN: I found your choices regarding timeline fascinating -- there is a lot of the story that's left out, and yet we know enough, as readers, to follow the emotional arc of the character if not every little detail of her life. Did you write this book longer, and then cut? Or did you always know that this little piece of her story, with the past bleeding in in fragments, would be enough?

AM: I knew early on that this would be a short novel, and that it would be focused very precisely and intensely on Jacqueline’s immediate life. And I wanted as little separation as possible between Jacqueline and the reader, who would know only as much as she does. I like the idea of coming to understand a character through fragments, as you say. That’s the way we come to know people in life, isn’t it?

Whether or not it would be enough to be successful is another question entirely. I hoped so, but I certainly wasn’t sure. I’m still not.

Lesson #3: Follow Your Instinct, Not Your Rulebook. 

Another rule that Maksik violates, without drawing much attention to it at all, is the directive we've all heard to keep verb tense consistent within a novel. The end of the book moves to present tense. Switching verb tense is something close to my brain, since I've just finished going through revisions on a novel with some present tense sections, and it was a point of debate, whether that should be allowed to stand. When I asked Maksik about it, he didn't explain his choice or defend his scheme -- it seems he had no scheme and feels no explanation is necessary. He's just letting the material dictate how it needs to be told, and there's a narrative instinct at work there that he doesn't question. This answer was enormously satisfying for me to read, especially when he brought up another paragraph in present tense that I hadn't even noticed. I almost wanted to ask: "And your editor let you do that?" But the point is he knew it was there, and while it wasn't intentional it also wasn't an oversight. Somewhere between intention and oversight -- this must be where instinct lives.

LN: You switch to present tense in the final section. I feel it torques up the tension beautifully and almost invisibly draws us closer to Jacqueline as the book peaks. At what point in your process did you decide to do this, and why? Did you write other bits in present tense, and change?

AM: With that kind of thing, I really go by feel, by instinct. It wasn’t a conscious consideration, but I didn’t hesitate to do it. There’s another brief passage (p. 92) in the present tense. A single paragraph. I can’t say exactly why I made that choice. It hardly feels like a choice, really. It has something to do with that moment being a significant turning point in the novel. I could go on about it being a moment of tremendous relief for her, of change, of deep engagement. But that would suggest some serious intention and consideration, which if I’m to be honest really isn’t the case.

A Marker to Measure Drift is dense, foreign, and beautiful, but ultimately it is a very simple book. Here is a human, detached from humanity, in pain and need. The world swirls around, the past lingers, but this human is at the center, small and yet deep. Maksik's prose brilliantly delivers -- I think he has fully realized what this story could be, and has told it in the best way possible. An amazing accomplishment. Of course you should read this book, if you are a reader who is looking for a great story. But especially if you are a writer, this is one you should not miss.

(Find Alexander Maksik on Facebook and Twitter and you can preorder a signed edition here.)

Luminarium by Alex Shakar : A Master Class in Craft

Alex Shakar's August 2011 release, Luminarium, is a wildly cerebral novel about two twins: George, in a coma, and Fred, in a mad quest to awaken his twin. The quest takes him to eastern religion, virtual worlds, Manhattan and Disney World, and through a series of encounters with a god helmet. Apart from being an interesting, engaging, and original book, Luminarium presents some good lessons in craft for writers.

Lesson #1: Where to Begin and Where to End

Every character's real story begins with his birth and ends with his death. Lots of stuff happens in between in this life -- ups and downs, conflicts, and tragedies -- all potential centerpieces for the plot of a novel about this character. The job of the writer is to determine where exactly to begin, and where to end. This is a huge, tricky, and monumentally important question, and Shakar navigates it perfectly in this book. Fred Brounian, the main character, is a man whose situation is already bad at the beginning of the book, and gets rapidly worse as the book progresses. But there were plenty of conflict-ridden, interesting, plot-filled bits that Shakar could have included, instead of starting it where he did. He could have started when Fred's twin got his cancer diagnosis, or when their virtual reality company was taken over by a military software company. He could have started when Fred's marriage went down the toilet, or he could have started before any of that happened, when life was good and Fred and George were on top of the world.

By choosing to frame the story with Fred's first experience in the clinical trial of a god helmet, and ending -- well, I won't tell you, but it'll make sense when you get there, Shakar puts a very logical box around a set of material that is basically an giant octopus on crack, in terms of scope and manageability. With material this weird and chaotic, there's no need to make the timeline strange. So by starting with session one, and using the recurring test sessions as a scaffolding, he's helping himself and the reader get a handle on it. Not only is this decision structurally sound, but it's thematically perfect, because the real nadir of Fred's experience is there, in the sessions, and what subsequently happens to his brain.

Lesson #2: It's Got To Bleed

Dear Male Writers of the World,

If you want me to love a book, you have to make me love a character. I think it's awesome that you have ideas and stuff, and that you are willing to put your characters through hell, but here's a clue: I don't care what you put your characters through if they're little machines created to illustrate your idea, and nothing more.

Love,
LYDIA

Luminarium is a complex, cerebral book that takes on eastern mysticism, neuropsychology, the ethos of virtual worlds, and the nature of the human self. However, true to form, in writing this brainy book of ideas, Alex Shakar has also managed to hit that most elusive target of all: a fresh and believable depiction of true love that is neither romantic or ironic. It's heartbreaking -- viscerally, not just conceptually. And it's palpable, the love that Fred has for George, the connection between them, the frustrations between them, and by extension the love/connection/frustration that Fred has with himself, with the city of New York.

This is what a reader wants: real beauty. Real horror. Real loss and real elation. Detachment and intellectual games are ultimately forgettable. Love is not.

Writing this way is risky for an author, but Shakar wins the gamble.

Maybe the secret to his compelling originality is that the love story is not between a boyfriend and girlfriend, or husband and wife, but between a man and his twin, therefore between a man and himself. The plot arc that begins with abject self-loathing ends in a place so simultaneously inevitable and also satisfyingly unpredictable, you have to read it (to the end) to understand. There are so many layers to this love story -- the love of an author for a wounded city, the love of a man for his brother, for a woman...

This book hits a lot of my buttons -- machine sentience, god in the grid, the split self, etc. So I was kind of wired, if you will, to enjoy it. However, I respect Shakar independently of his willingness to write books I want to read. He is not one of these male writers who thinks of an idea and then makes characters like paper dolls to march around illustrating it, so that at the end you've got the idea and maybe some truth, but no sense of real pain, or loss, or beauty. These books think, but they don't bleed. Ironically, Shakar's book about avatars and virtual worlds, imagined gods and projected love, is ultimately entirely human. It laughs, it bleeds, it delivers: emotion without sentimentality, ideas without dogma, tangible love.

Water for Elephants: a Master Class in Craft

Water for Elephants was a runaway bestseller, a breakout book for author Sara Gruen, and a book club darling. The comments you hear in reaction to this book range from "Loved it" to "It blew my mind, changed my life, and I chewed my own wrists open when it was over." Not everyone likes every book, but I have to say that this one has met with universal approval from readers of every stripe. Writers, take heed. Water for Elephants is more than a good story; it's a seminar in technique from which aspiring writers could definitely benefit.

Lesson #1: Milieu. Choose to write in a world that people want to read about. Gruen set her book in a traveling circus during the depression. I wanted to read it before I had any idea what the plot might be like just because of where it was. For this book, you could almost write the pitch just based on the setting: the time, the place, the freaks, the violence, the hidden world, the desperation... it is automatically interesting just because of where and when it is. Want to write another book about someone who lives in an apartment in a trendy neighborhood in a modern city? Good for you. Have fun tweaking that one. Sure, Gruen had to research the hell out of her book, but she wisely chose a deep deep deposit of fuel in which to sink her well.

Lesson #2: Pacing. Water for Elephants has no down time. There is no break in the plot, no difficult middle section, no long period of rising action and building complication. The story goes from peak to peak, escalating constantly from the day the main character sets foot on that train to the very end. Gruen provides relief from the action by switching from the main plot in the past to the framing story in the present, but she never gives us a slow chapter in the circus plot. Looking at the structure and pacing of WFE, you realize that the thing about writing a novel is, you really don't have time for those slow chapters. Are you sitting on a middle section that kinda drags, just because things are "developing"? Are you happy with a plateau in the center of your book? Don't be lazy. Ratchet up the slope of that line that takes you from low start to high finish. Steeper is better. Don't waste time on low energy chapters.

Lesson #3: Transparency. In this book, there are no distractions from the characters, the story, and the world that Gruen is revealing to us. Her prose is not glamorous; it's not fancy. It is effective because it disappears. It's the kind of book you forget you're reading. You think you're listening, and not listening to some pretentious twat rhapsodizing just to hear herself talk, but listening to a story urgently told, every detail important. Instead of witnessing the construction of a narrative, it's like we're seeing a curtain pulled back. The focus is only the story, only the work, and it's so clearly rendered it's like a pane of glass. Any imperfection and you know you're looking through a window. So when you're writing away and you're falling in love with a turn of the phrase, a bit of something you think will be called "lyrical" or whatever, think carefully about whether what you're adding in there is going to show up in that pane of glass, or whether it's going to work to make the view more clear.

Writers, if you're waiting to read Water for Elephants, don't wait any longer. There are more than a few ways to tell a story, but here is a very successful formula for you: 1. Write in an interesting world. 2. Write without pause, relentlessly, every scene amplified and alive. 3. Write transparently. You're not the focus, the words aren't the focus, but the story is the focus.