a Yaddo Fellowship, a California Arts Council Fellowship in Literature, two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships, and a finalist for the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Fiction Award.
Bledsoe's new novel is Tell the Rest.
My Q&A with the author:
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Lucy Jane Bledsoe's website.
My novel is about two survivors of a conversion therapy camp, and how friendship, community, and creative expression are the roads to healing. I love the title Tell the Rest because it comes from an emotionally poignant moment in the novel. I usually find titles excruciatingly difficult to write. I was calling this novel Champion for a while, in a kind of ironic use of the word, but in the end it sounded too much like the title of a Young Adult novel. I was also—briefly—calling the novel The New Fugitives, but that was far too weighty and it emphasized the trauma when I wanted to emphasize the survivor aspects of my characters’ story. Tell the Rest opens up the question about what is not said, what secrets are being harbored, and even more importantly, states that the “rest,” the unspoken, will soon be revealed.
What's in a name?
Naming characters is a tricky and important part of writing novels. I want my characters’ names to fit them, to carry some meaning, and at the same time I don’t want the names to be heavy-handed. My two main characters in Tell the Rest are Ernest and Delia. These are straightforward names, but not too common, and they suit my characters. As a poet, Ernest is committed to telling, and caring about, the truth. The name Delia sounds like a flower to me, something beautiful, something that blooms, but not necessarily flamboyantly. A secondary character named Robin is friendly and kind and an expert in “happiness studies.” Pastor Quade has a name that is as opaque and hard and cold as he is. The trick is to find names that evoke the characters without hitting the readers over the head with symbolism.
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?
I don’t think my teenage self would be very surprised by my novel! Which is another way, perhaps, of saying that I haven’t changed much? So much of what I cared about then, I care about now: the beauty of Oregon, the intensity, both negative and positive, of community, and a strong belief in redemption. The triumph of the underdog is also something I would have cared about a lot at sixteen, and still enjoy delivering today. I think what would have surprised me is that I pulled off publishing my novel!
Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?
Beginnings are definitely more difficult for me than endings. I usually have a pretty good idea of where I want to go, with my story and characters, but rarely know how I’ll get there. I’m a messy and organic writer. I can’t do outlines. I have to write scenes to figure out the story. And I do a lot of rewriting. Often I drastically rewrite the beginning near the end of the writing process, after I’ve already done several drafts. I always want my novel beginnings to hold a composite of the whole book, a way to take the reader right into the world. More often than not, I end up cutting a bunch of pages from the beginning of a late draft. The ending of a novel, on the other hand, often comes to me whole cloth, early in the writing process. I’m particularly fond of the ending to Tell the Rest.
Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?
In general, I write from my imagination more than many writers do. I wouldn’t say, as some writers do, that my characters represent different parts of myself. Mycharacters are more interesting than I am! It’s true that they do often have some of my passions. And of course lots of my personal experiences are attributed to my characters. But the gestalt, the way those details and experiences come together on the page, are rarely autobiographical. I come to love my characters in the way I love my friends. That said, readers who know me personally often think they know who I’ve modeled certain characters after and no amount of denial convinces them otherwise!
What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?
I’m deeply moved by settings, especially beautiful ones. So the environment is very important to my stories. I like to show how very specific settings, whether urban or wilderness or something in between, change and motivate my characters. I think of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion as a grandfather book to my new novel, Tell the Rest, and I love the way he uses the Oregon rain as a character. I also think I’m inspired by a lot of film. I’m a very visual writer, so I think of my stories in a filmlike way, the scenes and characters and dialogue flowing cinematically through my brain.
--Marshal Zeringue