Gone With the Wind: Part Two

GW2 Day Three: Ellen is dead! Bullets in battle cut down the Tarlton twins! Doc Meade’s shoeless son Phil was killed, too. Am I really subjecting myself to this literary assault? After offering up a complex female lead and submerging her in the wiles of war, Margaret Mitchell is holding my head in the pages of her book and not letting me come up for air. Only four hundred pages in and I feel as if she’s hijacked my imagination. Mitchell’s success (so far) in GW2 resides in a six-syllable word that supports the best stories. It’s one of my favorite pompous writing words: verisimilitude. By training her eye on the details of the Civil War, and by moving her characters against the backdrop of battles, Mitchell has painted a realistic world on the tapestry of her story. To be sure, she may have taken literary license with life on the plantation or with regional dialects, but my interest doesn’t stumble on the fiction as it is so closely woven into the fact. I’ve become a part of the story, and I cannot seem to help it. In my mind, there was no way Scarlett would make it through the wagon road back to Tara after Rhett dropped her off. But when she proves me wrong, her reward is a demented father, a dead mother and a decimated house. Of course it has to be this way—verisimilitude in a time of war requires it—but I ache in seeing her expectations dashed against the rocky shores of war. I willingly started down this primrose path this week, and it has led to that delicious literary heartache and disappointment that great fiction can provide. Can Scarlett rally to revive Tara? I certainly hope so, or else Margaret Mitchell has a lot of explaining to do. (To be fair, she has 600 more pages to do it.) GW2 Day Four: She shot the damn Yankee in the face! Are you kidding me? “Like lightening, she shoved her weapon over the banister and into the startled bearded face. Before he could even fumble at his belt, she pulled the trigger.…Yes, he was dead. Undoubtably. She had killed a man.” It took me a moment to digest that passage. I didn’t see it coming. But I should have. Great stories seem to make readers squirm with character threats, plot twists, and unmet expectations. The...
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Gone With the Wind: Part One

The more I read, and the more I write, the more I’m convinced that good writing transcends genre. A well-paced work of non-fiction can clip along as well as any Vince Flynn thriller just as a beautifully crafted novel can transport readers to a world as vivid as any historical tale of David McCullough’s. In much the same way, good story telling should transcend the editorial peculiarities of a give age. And yet it’s hard to read a Russian masterpiece like War and Peace or a universally acclaimed novel like Moby Dick and not think of Elmore Leonard’s admonishment to “try [and] leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” So it was with some trepidation that I cracked the spine of Margaret Mitchell’s epic tale, Gone With the Wind, in June 2014 to see what the fuss was all about. Surely a novel that had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (1937) and had sold more than 30 million copies since its publication has something going for it. My aim that week was to understand what made the novel work. Commentary on her one-and-only novel undoubtably runs deeper and wider than my personal reading and writing experiences. Like all readers, though, I know what I like. As with many writers, I know what seems to work in effective story telling. I’ve spent a lifetime, it seems, hearing references to Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, but I had never read GW2 and had never seen the movie. So with a near virginal approach to this masterwork, I dove in this past summer. What follows are my daily impressions as I read the novel. Here’s what happened:   GW2 Day One: Successful stories have captivating first pages and gripping opening chapters. Reportedly, after ten years writing the novel Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell spent an additional six months massaging the words of her initial scene. She ultimately settled on the stark and prophetic first line: “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm…” So far, she has delivered on that promise. As the opening scene unfolds in the lazy April afternoon of the antebellum south,  Mitchell reinforces the charm of Scarlett even as she shows her petulant side. Layers of Scarlett’s personality are painted on with a combination of bold actions and rich backstory. In lesser hands, such detail could be...
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The Road to Publication

There was a time in my childhood when my tongue was saddled with a speech impediment. Not an irreparable delay nor a lifelong concern, but a lip-twisting malady that likely made adults smile as my ‘R’s and ‘W’s came out with similar sounds. For a boy whose middle named started with a ‘W’ and whose last name started with a ‘R’, it did not seem like a funny condition. My dad, whose own double-‘R’d name also gave him fits as a child, later told me that he had endured the same problem growing up. “There was a time as an emcee of an elementary school program,” he once said, “when I started the event by saying, ‘ “Pawents and fwiends, we gweet you.’ ” He turned the once-embarrassing story into a humorous yarn since his southern speech is now smooth as buttermilk. For most of my adult life, I’ve also moved passed the temporary speech delay. Still, both the long ‘I’s of a muted southern accent and the misplaced ‘W’s of yesteryear tend to creep back into my speech when I’m tired or excited. Such was the situation I found myself in this past month, when (both tired and excited) I answered a question at a local book signing. Several friends and family members came to support Blood Money, wishing me well and buying some books. When one colleague asked about the road to publication, I found myself excitedly responding that, “this had been a busy writing week in the Wussell house.” The delivery notwithstanding, there is truth in those words. For the past year, my road to publication has been long and winding but rarely busy. A publication path more backroads than Autoban, which suits me just fine. One year ago this week, I pulled out of the gravel driveway of my rough drafts, steering past the potholes and weeds of abandoned manuscripts, and onto a road paved by my publisher. I knew from the signed contract that this road would lead to three books published in two years, but the road that spooled out in front of me appeared only wide enough for one book at a time. For most of the last year, the one-book road has kept me busy enough. Since one manuscript was already polished and ready for the fast-lane, I had left it in the garage while I worked on the other two...
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