The Hero of This Book

Craft Lessons

Elizabeth McCracken’s most recent novel, The Hero of This Book, is a thing of wonder. The present moment of the novel is a single day in London, the narrator wandering, alone, through the city. But her memories of her mother—who died ten months prior—occupy her thoughts. The novel is slim, well under 200 pages, but it contains worlds. It is a novel about grief, but it is also a novel about many other things, including mothers and daughters, memory, love, the line between fiction and non-fiction, and craft.

McCracken is a beloved teacher, as well as a writer, and the craft lessons in this book are wonderful. There are lessons to be learned simply by reading this book—or any of McCracken’s books—because she is a writer whose sentences sparkle. You can feel the attention she pays to each word, each sentence, each paragraph. But here, she also imparts such wisdom about the craft of writing; the line between the narrator and the author is porous, and reading this book must in some small way capture what it is to be a student of McCracken’s. Here are a few lessons that caught my eye.

1.     "Perhaps you fear writing a memoir, reasonably. Invent a single man and call your book a novel. The freedom one fictional man grants you is immeasurable."

I love the idea that imagination is freedom, a way to untether one's story from the known. In the classes I teach for beginning writers, I often give them an exercise that encourages just this: write about something that happened to you, but then change one thing about it. Change the setting. Change the age of the character. Change the year. The end result is fiction that starts in a place of fact and therefore contains that kernel of truth. I’ve always liked this exercise because it shows how fiction can develop from lived experience but slowly rolls away to become something entirely its own.

2.     "I came around the corner and there was the cathedral, as startling as an elk in the road."

McCracken's language always surprises and delights. You can feel her joy as she writes, as she describes something in an unfamiliar way, yet in a way that always seems just right. I don’t think many writers would think to equate a cathedral with an elk. The metaphor surprises, in the same way that the cathedral (and the elk!) surprises the narrator. So you feel this on multiple levels—in the craft of the sentence and in the experience of the narrator.

3.     "If you know what a character is doing with her hands, you might know what she's doing with her head. If you know her feet, you may know her soul."

The body is a focal point of this novel—in part because the body the narrator is remembering is no longer alive and writing about her and her body is a way to preserve her on the page—but often the best characters are written from the body. One of my best writing teachers used to say, “boots on the ground,” and I try to remind myself of that when I write. Interiority is great and all, but get inside your characters. Know how it feels to be them, understand how they move through the world. Think about their hands, and, indeed, their feet. Isn’t our goal as writers to try to understand our characters’ souls?

4.     "I moved from counter to counter, appliance to cupboard. (Cup board: This is where the cups board.)"

How McCracken delights in language; you feel her attentiveness to every word. And there's such playfulness here, too, and she shares that with the reader. This definition has stayed with me—every time that I reach for a mug, I imagine a rooming house full of chatty mugs, complaining about this and that, rejoicing about being back together after a hot night in the dishwasher, and I smile. McCracken’s joy has become mine.

5.     "Write every day, say some people, but not me, because I don't, and never have...Any way you get work done is a good way to work."

Throughout this book, McCracken provides good, practical writing advice that makes sense for whatever kind of writer you are. So often, it seems, craft books are full of advice that seems useful in the abstract but tends to be too proscriptive and grand for the writer who must fit in writing around the edges of life. I love her honesty and her understanding here—just get the writing done, she says. However it works for you.

6.     “Plot is what occurs and what the characters feel, with real plot the attraction and repulsion between event and emotion.”

I have struggled with the idea of plot as I write—the word frightens me, in fact. I don’t like orchestrated plots, ones where you can see the wheels turning, where things seem overwrought, and somehow when I try to plot something, that’s exactly what happens. (In my debut novel, Beyond That, the Sea, there isn’t really a plot. Plot equals time. Characters live their lives.) So I am always trying to understand plot, trying to figure out a definition that works for me. And I love this one—that real plot is what happens between what characters do and what characters feel.

7.     "Then a few things did befall me, and I understood plot in a different way: I discovered that a single event could alter the course of a life."

And here’s another thought about plot from McCracken: that a single event changes the way a life (or a book) moves forward. I love this—in fact, this is exactly how my novel works: a decision is made, before the book even begins, that changes the lives of two families, and the novel follows those changed lives. I feel seen and understood, somehow, and so very appreciative of McCracken’s deep understanding of craft. The hero of this book is the mother, of course, but for me, the hero is Elizabeth McCracken, who has written a gem of a book, one that I will revisit again and again.

If you haven’t read much of McCracken, Yiyun Li wrote a wonderful article for Harper’s earlier this fall about McCracken and her work that nicely analyzes and summarizes her writing. And here are her books. Pick up one or perhaps all—you won’t be disappointed.

Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry?
The Giant’s House
Niagara Falls All Over Again
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
Thunderstruck
Bowlaway
The Souvenir Museum
The Hero of This Book

See you in two weeks!