Where did you get the idea for Bridge of Sand?Read the complete Q & A.
A novel idea always comes from many directions, and in fact the way I know it’s a novel is that some unexpected connection occurs in my mind, and then other images, ideas, characters seem to gather andattach there. When the conglomeration is unbearably heavy I have to get rid of it by writing it down.
If I had to pick one source for Bridge of Sand it would be this: twenty years ago I toured a paper mill and I was blown away (almost literally) by the massive power of it – especially by contrast with the flimsy little sheet of white paper that I face every day, and which has a different kind of intimidating power. I decided to write a novel about a poet, a man who leaves his family for a sabbatical and inadvertently rents a cottage in a paper mill town. He sits in front of the blank page while tons of the stuff pours off the rollers behind him – and can’t write, of course. Then his wife comes South to patch up their marriage and instead falls in love with a black mill hand.
I had it all worked out. It seemed a good idea. I spent four years on the novel, which was to be called Paper, and every day of the work was dreary, forced, like the worst kind of dead-end paper-pushing. My editor read a hundred and fifty pages and asked me, “What do you love about this book?” It turned out the only thing I loved was the little store that had appeared quite incidentally. I loved that, and the character of Solly, who’d also shown up out of the blue. I scrapped the novel, wrote three plays and a book of essays, and thought about the little store. I gave up the writer as hero. It’s always a good idea to give up the writer as hero.
The Page 69 Test: Bridge of Sand.
--Marshal Zeringue