Naseem’s Comments (group member since Jan 27, 2011)

Naseem’s comments from the Q&A with Naseem Rakha group.

I should say, Jaz, that my research into the novel actually began in 1996, when I covered Oregon's first execution in over 34 years. I was a reporter for public radio, and I felt that I had cheated my listeners. I did not have a way to tell the type of story that needed to be told - how executions effect ALL the people involved. I wanted to do that sometime, and began doing as many interviews I could on the topic of capital punishment. This meant I spoke with several death row inmates, "Lifers", prison officials, and crime victims. I also got to interview men who had been exonerated after living on death row for my than a decade. I envisioned doing a radio story - perhaps something for This American Life. Then I thought that fiction may be a way to reach even more people.

Best of luck with your jouney, Julene. I do believe we all have gifts, and I hope you find a way to make yours grow and thrive.

naseem

Thank you Stacie,

It is so good to hear from readers like you. I have heard some incredible stories from people around the world about how The Crying Tree has impacted their lives. It has been incredibly rewarding. Thank you.

The idea for writing a novel about a mother forgiving the man who killed her child germinated when I took a novel writing class with a teacher in Eugene, Oregon named Elizabeth Engstrom. That was June, 2005. I had a first draft done about nine months later, then began outlining that draft in great detail, making sure each scene served the story. That is, it built tension, added or answered plot questions, built character, and was well paced. The outline took me 6 months, and ended up being 180 pages. While I outlined, I simultaneously re-wrote. By September of 2007 I had what I considered to be a readable novel. I passed it onto three astute readers, re-wrote a bit more. In December of 2007, I signed on with an agent, and the book was sold at auction in May of 2008. It came out in hardback in July 2009, and trade paperback i 2010. It has sold to about 10 other countries.

Thank you for sharing your list, Ellen. My fist thought to your question is that we have to be kind to one another. we have to let go of the idea that this writing gig is a competition. It can't be. As long as we see it that way, writing will not serve society or its author as much as be served.

We also have to build off of each other, prompt each other, encourage, help and hold each other. Writing is a difficult task because good, important writing, writing that makes you think and question, is difficult to do, and sometimes difficult to read, and very often difficult to get into the hands of readers. Writers need to create more forums for writer ans readers to interact.

Also, for me, writing is about truth telling. Trying to reflect the world for what it is, and then pointing us to other ways of being. I am a reader who loves books that not only make me feel, but compel me to ask questions and think. Writers have a long history of creating change though their words. Words are important, I think we should use them to help build, rather than break down.

Sand boxes -- I was at the Fetzer Institute last year and they had this big table top sandbox. It was divided into sections so that multiple people could play. They showed us the box, then they took us to this large storage room that was filled with anything thing you could imagine. From bottle tops to tiny dolls, to shells to acorns or yarns or sticks or gum wrappers or dice or fake eyeballs - just everything. They told us to come down there when and if we wanted, gather what ever spoke to us, then bring it up to the sandbox and play. The idea was to play with intention - a question in your mind, but not foremost in your mind. And then just see what you create in the sand. If your lucky, there may be an answer there.

Now, I wish I could tell you I had an epiphany in that sand box, and that I left wit all kinds of answers to all kinds of questions about my novel in progress. That didn't happen. Still I liked the idea, and it did help me focus my questions.

I love it when I go to restaurants that have butcher paper on the table and loads of colored pencils and crayons for everyone to use....

I didn't. The truth about my cover is that I had very little say so. The cover you like - the boy with the trumpet, was actually a second choice by Broadway Books. They had preferred a different cover, but the marketing people had problems with it. Thus, trumpet boy was born. I was surprised by it, given the title of the book, I had always thought there would be a tree on the cover. But I was basically told by my agent that unless I had HUGE issues with the cover my publishing team chose, then it was not worth fighting about.

The title also was something that was changed by my publisher. My original title was Resting Place. Which they thought (quite rightly) was too quiet. They wanted an enigmatic image from the book, so I suggested The Crying Tree - an image that comes up quite early in the story.

The cover and title together were created by my publisher to do one thing - trip people's curiosity. They wanted people to wonder what a little boy with a trumpet had to do with a crying tree.

These are things I had never considered - which is why I am not in marketing. Basically the lesson is, hope you have a good team working for you and then trust that they know what they are doing....

Thank you Lori for your comment about feeling "invested in the lives" of the characters in The Crying Tree. You can not know how much that means to me. I too love character driven novels - but novels must also have a solid plot. For me, that means creating characters that fall into the plot in surprising yet plausible ways.

My process for creating characters is kind of like the process of painting. It takes layering. At first I have a vague idea. In The Crying Tree I wanted a rural family. I wanted them to be attached to place, to land and community. I wanted the mother, Irene Stanley, to be shattered by the loss of her son. That is all I knew when I started writing. But as I wrote, and re-wrote, the the sketch began to fill in: the food she would make for her family, the type of church she attended and how often, what her house looked like, her garden, her clothes, her eyes. Gradually, color began to fall into the story. I began to see fragments of backstory, the nuances of character that make them real to a reader.

The surprising character, for me, was Tab Mason, the Superintendent of the Oregon State Penitentiary. I did not plan his appearance in my story, yet he became absolutely integral to the entire book. His emergence came about 6 months into the writing process. I had developed a different point of contact for the prison - a Selma Orleans - who was the PR person for the Penitentiary. One day, while writing, Selma walked into her boss's office. It was an immaculate room, lit by the gray light of a window, and one incandescent lamp which sat on a beautiful mahogany desk. On the desk was a container of twelve perfectly sharpened pencils. Behind this desk and its needle sharp pencils sat a handsome african american man (think Denzel Washington) with a "cleanly shaved skull," and one "strangely almost grotesquely white hand."

I had no plans for this man. I had already written many chapters with Selma. But soon as I sat down and read what I had written, I knew - this was the character that would give me an executioner's point of view.

I guess what this says about my process is that planning does not necessarily lead me to characters. Only the act of writing leads me to characters. And that sometimes it takes one character to introduce me to another, even more important character.

For me, writer's block comes when I start to feel afraid of the ambiguity of writing. The not knowing what comes next, and then the not believing that I will figure it out. When this happens my left brain quickly tries to fill in for my addled creativity, but it is a ineffective and stagnating substitute. Story, I believe, takes magic. It takes the blending of scene, structure, plot and character in ways that the logical, deterministic, and highly judgmental left brain would never put together. It simply does not have either the flexibility or the access to the inner wells from which the right brain draws. Unfortunately, the more we allow the left brain to lasso in our writing, the less and less magic those words will posess, causing many to either give up, or fall into such a miserable state they suffer significant paralysis.

How do I deal with writer's block? I have pen and paper wherever I go, and I use it. If I hear an interesting bit of dialogue in the waiting room at my son's dentist, I write it down. If I see a person wearing clothes I would never think of putting together, I write it down. I write down my thoughts, the sounds, the smells, anything and everything that I want with one goal only in my mind. NO EXPECTATIONS ALLOWED.

No, I tell my left brain, you can not help. I don't care if my spelling sucks. I don't give a rats ass about grammar, or proper word usage, or whether Kennedy died in 63 or 64. Nothing matters but words on a page. Unedited. Unmolested. Uninterrupted, and wholly inspired from that blissful space between our ears where memory and experience blend in ways we can never ever anticipate.

Expectations are toxic. Hemmingway considered it a good day if he wrote a single good sentence. In other words, keep expectations low, and tell your left brain to shut up.

Ask me your questions about the life of a writer.

Let's talk about the story here--your questions, your reactions, your thoughts.

Welcome to this Q&A session. Feel free to tell me a bit about yourself, your reading list, your writing, your dreams for the world. Let's get to know one another!