In 2018-2019, I was lucky to be part of the first cohort of the yearlong Novel Generator class at Catapult, led by the amazing
. In the class, over the course of that year, twelve novels were made. The books were steadily improved by the many craft lessons we learned from Lynn about how to write a novel; we watched our own and each other’s novels take on different shapes and forms. My debut novel, Beyond That, the Sea, was largely written over the course of that year. I had been thinking and working on it since at least 2009, but I didn’t write it in the form that it is in now—eight points-of-view and three distinct time periods—until I took the class.One of the most valuable lessons that Lynn taught us was that determining the novel’s container—the thing that holds the story—is one of the most important decisions a writer can make. This is true, of course, for short stories as well as novels, but the container for a short story is often more self-evident—the form is necessarily constraining. But with a novel, the options are endless; a defined structure is necessary to hold the thing you are making.
Deciding on the beginning and ending of a novel—when to go in, when to get out—can determine the length. But it’s equally important to think about the width and depth. Should the chapters be long or short? How many points-of-views? A lot of interiority or very little? What should be shown, what should be told? Past tense or present? The answers to these questions and others will help to construct a three-dimensional container that is the right size to contain the story that needs to be told.
Over time, I have started to think of these containers as boats. (Something I know almost nothing about, by the way, so please bear with me.) Some novels feel like ships, though, enormous seafaring vessels: multi-layered, complex, hefty. Think War and Peace, Ulysses, Pachinko. Others resemble tall ships: elegant, complicated, graceful. The Namesake, Hamnet, and Matrix are good examples of these. And then there are the small wooden boats—I’m picturing a mid-century Chris-Craft. Beautiful raw materials, classic, compact. Mrs. Dalloway, Giovanni’s Room, Small Things Like These.
Lynn’s novels—Hold Still, Want, and Flight (just out!)—are perfect examples of this type of container, too. Robust, charged, full of the stuff of life. With each subsequent novel, Lynn has shortened her book’s length—not necessarily the number of pages but the time that elapses between the beginning and the end. In Flight, the novel unfurls over just a few days. Three siblings, their partners, and their children come together to celebrate Christmas in an old house in upstate New York. Their mother has recently died; there are decisions to be made about their childhood home. The tension and conflict is there right from the start, because of the choices that Lynn made about her container: the short span of time, the house holding everyone inside, multiple viewpoints, close interiority. Other, lesser writers might have been tempted to stretch this story out: to settle in, to provide backstory and flashbacks, to start earlier, to end later. To puff up the size of the container. But by keeping the container small and precise, Flight ends up soaring, with an ending that does just that: the characters gather together for a moment, hope and beauty in their collective gaze.
I hope you get a chance to read all of Lynn’s work, including Flight. Here are links to her novels and also a smattering of her voluminous, and always excellent, critical work and personal essays:
Hold Still (2017)
Want (2020)
Flight (2022)
She Was Sort of Crazy: On Women Artists, The Paris Review
Claire-Louise Bennett Digresses, The New Republic
How Novelist Yiyun Li Learned to Capture Shadows, LA Times
The Unbearable Envy of the Published Author, New York Times
See you in two weeks!
Mwanner, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons