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Book Club meeting # 1
Jun. 7th, 2006 09:34 pmAs I suspected, Minnesota Nice ruled the day, and no one breathed a hint that they had any objection whatsoever to the book. I enjoyed a lovely evening and at the same time was deeply amused. Nancy said, though, that my opening remarks put to rest a number of the concerns that people might have had.
I find that people start seeing many more connections between the storylines if they have had a chance to reread, but in some groups I've visiting, maybe 40% of the readers do catch connections the first time through. In this group, virtually no one saw any of the major connections at all; i.e., no one saw what the 17th century equivalent of the bathhouse was (the graveyard) or what the 20th century equivalent of the nettle shirts was (the panels of the AIDS quilt). Very lowering--you want, after all, for the reader to make the connections without the author being there to explain--but they still seemed deeply interested in what I had to say. As I always do when I visit a book club discussing Swans, I brought a huge satchel of a large subset of the books I used for research. I think I brought out twenty or thirty of them or so, and passed them around, explaining how each was helpful. I showed some of my notes, my plot calendar (historical events in ink, fictional events in pencil), the photographs I'd collected of people that remined me of characters, and the artists sketches of possible covers. It is always a surprise to people how much work can be involved in writing a novel.
It will be interesting to compare how Friday's meeting goes.
I find that people start seeing many more connections between the storylines if they have had a chance to reread, but in some groups I've visiting, maybe 40% of the readers do catch connections the first time through. In this group, virtually no one saw any of the major connections at all; i.e., no one saw what the 17th century equivalent of the bathhouse was (the graveyard) or what the 20th century equivalent of the nettle shirts was (the panels of the AIDS quilt). Very lowering--you want, after all, for the reader to make the connections without the author being there to explain--but they still seemed deeply interested in what I had to say. As I always do when I visit a book club discussing Swans, I brought a huge satchel of a large subset of the books I used for research. I think I brought out twenty or thirty of them or so, and passed them around, explaining how each was helpful. I showed some of my notes, my plot calendar (historical events in ink, fictional events in pencil), the photographs I'd collected of people that remined me of characters, and the artists sketches of possible covers. It is always a surprise to people how much work can be involved in writing a novel.
It will be interesting to compare how Friday's meeting goes.