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Guest Post by Michael Baron: Writing Fiction

Writing fiction isn’t like competing in the Olympics in terribly many ways. This is, for the most part, a good thing, as my training regimen falls a tiny bit short of Olympic standards (actually, it’s just this side of couch potato standards). One way in which they’re similar, though, is that, like many Olympic participants, writers get extra credit for degree of difficulty.

I’ve always shot for a certain degree of difficulty with my novels. In When You Went Away, I tried to express an entire father-daughter relationship through journal entries. In Crossing the Bridge, I created a major character that readers don’t see speak until one of the last chapters of the novel. In The Journey Home, I doubled down on degree of difficulty (do I get extra points for alliteration?) by having one viewpoint character with dementia and another with amnesia. Now, in my new novel, Spinning, I tried writing a romantic story where the protagonist falls in love twice.

Writing friends advised me that this was a risky move. There are certain conventions to love stories, they told me. One of these is that you can’t ask readers to invest in two relationships involving the same guy. Come on, I thought, is that really tougher than landing a triple axel/double salchow combination in figure skating? Since I can barely stand up on skates, I can’t answer that question, but I do know that it was tougher than I expected. The novel begins with Dylan, our protagonist, opening the door of his apartment in the middle of the night to find Diane, an old lover, and her three-year-old daughter on the other side. Over the first portion of the novel, they rekindle their relationship and truly fall in love this time. But soon tragedy strikes and Diane is gone. Then, somewhere around the middle of the novel, Dylan falls in love with a close friend, leading to all kinds of complications.

When I laid out this plot, I figured I’d have no problem with the two-love-affair issue. It all worked out rather neatly on the Excel spreadsheet I use to storyboard novels. When I started writing Dylan and Diane’s relationship, however, I really liked the way they were together. I wanted to see them make it. If I wanted to see them make it, were readers going to want to see them make it as well? How were they going to feel about the fact that they don’t make it? How were they going to feel about Dylan when he lets himself fall in love again so quickly? Would readers give their hearts to this new relationship if I broke their hearts over the previous one?

This required quite a bit of finessing. In the end, I think I found a way to make both relationships work. Did I get enough rotation on my turns, though? Did I stick the landing? Did I enter the pool with the minimal amount of splash? That’s up to readers to decide, but I hope they’ll give me at least a bit of extra credit for degree of difficulty.

Interview with Michael Baron

Q: When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?

I’ve been making up stories since I was a little kid, but I think the moment I realized I really wanted to do this was when I was thirteen and decided to write a novel. It was a dreadful, mawkish love story, but I found the experience extremely satisfying. From that point forward, writing became very important to me.

Q: You write both fiction and non-fiction. Why did you decide to write both?

Well, I actually didn’t decide to write fiction professionally for a long time. I wrote a novel right out of college, tried to get it published, and collected enough rejections to heat the house for a week. After that, I walked away from fiction for a long time – walked away from book-length writing completely for a period. I got on with my day job and then a nonfiction writing opportunity presented itself. This turned into a rather steady career. A couple of years ago, though, I realized that I really missed writing fiction. I felt that there were all kinds of things I wanted to say, especially about relationships between people, that I couldn’t ever address in my nonfiction. Fortunately, my fiction writing skills had been quietly improving in the background all these years. My first published novel, When You Went Away is just a tiny bit better than that novel I wrote in college (which will never come out of the trunk).

Q: What do you want readers to take about from your books?

What I’m hoping they get is some level of reflection. Each of my novels have come about because I wanted to do two things: I wanted to explore how people connect with one another and I wanted to ruminate on a particular thing. In When You Went Away, it was parenthood. In Crossing the Bridge it was family, specifically brothers. These are obviously tremendously common experiences, and I’m hoping the novels give people a reason to think about their own lives.

Q: I am about to start reading your third novel, The Journey Home. Where did the inspiration for these characters come from?

The inspiration for The Journey Home was particularly strong: my mother and father’s romance. They had been married for more than fifty years when my father died (I was born after they’d been married quite a while and I’m last in the birth order – more on that in another novel) and they were the most important people in each other’s lives for every one of those years. One of the important viewpoint characters in the novel is an elderly woman whose husband died five years earlier and who has decided to live in her head so she can re-live the time they had together. Some of this is the direct result of conversations I had with my mother after my father passed.

Q: What is your favorite part of the writing process?

I love creating and learning about the characters. I spend a great deal of time thinking about them and getting to know them. My goal is to be so familiar with them that I don’t have to think about how they would react when I’m in the middle of a scene, that it all just comes naturally to me. I also love writing dialogue. I have a tremendous amount of fun playing out the conversations in my head. One day, I’d like to write entire novella in dialogue.

Q: I read that you were previously a teacher. How were you able to break into the writing industry?

Lucky break, really. Someone needed a co-author for a book and I happened to have the right skillset for the job. I connected with that person’s agent and things have been very steady since.

Q: I also read you worked in retail (as have I). Do you have any customer horror or hilarious tales?

(You know, I really don’t have a great one. It was a while ago, and I think I blocked a lot of it out. Probably best if we just skipped this question.)

Q: If you were stranded on an island and had to have on celebrity with you, who would choose and why?

That’s a huge challenge for me. If you were going to spend a huge amount of time with another person, you’d want that person to be genuinely interesting rather than simply a personality. I admire many celebrities for their craft, but I’m not sure they’d be all that much fun to hang out with once we got past the starstruck stage. I’d probably say Bruce Springsteen because I not only love his work, but I admire his passion and the causes he supports. I would imagine we’d have a number of fascinating conversations, though I doubt I’d be able to hold up my end of them.

Q: What is your best advice for aspiring writers?

Write what you love and write it as passionately and honestly as you possibly can. Also, never do it because you think you’re going to be a star. If that happens, great, but it’s unlikely to happen if this is your only reason for doing it.

Q: Where would be your dream vacation?

It would be a week each in all of the dining capitals of the world. And since we’re taking “dream,” I’d get to eat like a true gourmand and not gain a single pound.