Interview with Chuck Rosenthal, Author of Awake For Ever in a Sweet Unrest

Today we have a real treat--a conversation with Chuck Rosenthal, author of Awake For Ever in a Sweet Unrest. While not specifically a YA, it does feature a young character and it would definitely be of interest for teachers of literature for young people.

 

Thanks for stopping by YA Outside The Lines, Chuck. Please tell us a bit about Awake For Ever in a Sweet Unrest.

Beatriz is a high school dropout who takes a non-paying internship at the poetry center Beyond Baroque in Venice Beach, California.  Her job is to explore a recently discovered underground library and make a record of its contents.  The problem is that nothing electronic works in the basement, no phones, no computers, no radios, no flash lights.  Nothing.  That’s the job for her!  Armed with a legal pad and a pencil, she descends.  And then encounters a young woman who introduces herself as Mary Shelley. 

Guided through the rows of books by John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, Beatriz, who has never read their work, now falls into each of their lives.  These are not stodgy old men, but wild, young artists, barely older than her, filling her with their dreams, their adventures, their loves, and their poetry.  “Are you a ghost from the past?” she asks John Keats.  He replies, “Are you a ghost from the future?”  Every time she enters the library she encounters her guide, Mary Shelley, the enigmatic teen age author of Frankenstein.  Time and again, Beatriz is transformed.     

I have to admit, an area where electronics fail and literary masters are alive sounds like heaven. Where did the idea come from?

Where do any ideas come from?  I like to say, “From outer space,” but that’s not a very helpful answer.  Though I’m well educated, I didn’t really know much about the Romantic poets.  But being a Romantic writer, maybe I could write about them.  If I knew something.  Research gets complicated, because you find out too much to write a good story. I’m a story-teller, not a biographer.  But I did research.  I read biographies of each of these “characters,” as well as Wordsworth and Coleridge, and others.  Then I read their poetry.  Lots and lots of it.  And Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, of course.  Now what?  My life partner is an LA poet, so I’ve spent a lot of time at Beyond Baroque.  I needed a basement.  I needed ghosts.  And a young woman in a dark basement is an old Hollywood trope.  And the more she knew, the worse.  Once I got her in there with Mary Shelley, things just took off.  So it wasn’t just one idea.  It was something that slowly came together.  But I knew a lot of stuff heading in.  Thinking about a novel is a lot of fun.  

As a writer, I really appreciated the metaphor--how we become "friends" with the greats in order to learn our craft and then break away from it to find our own way. When did you truly feel you’d begun to make your own way as a writer? Do you remember a specific piece? A time you felt you could truly hear your voice on the page?

When I left philosophy grad school I decided I wanted to write poetry or fiction, so I read a whole lot of both  Turns out I was a lousy poet.  When I began writing fiction I didn’t really know who I was, as a person or a writer.  I liked Jack Kerouac, but I couldn’t turn that into my voice.  I’d written three novels that weren’t bad, but I couldn’t find an agent or a publisher.  Then Gabriel Garcia Marquez, particularly One Hundred Years of Solitude, really turned my head.  I’d just met a fantastical poet and on a cold December night in 1982, in Salt Lake City, I got a phone call from that poet who was at a party, and with the party noise erupting behind her she recited, obviously from memory, a poem about a very tiny sideshow cow with only three legs.  The next morning I sat down and wrote about my father’s next door neighbor, Karl Marxman.  “Karl kept one cannon on the front porch one on the back.”  It was true.  That was the opening line of my first published novel, Loop’s Progress.  That was the moment I found my voice.  Four years later I married that poet.  

It’s so rare to come across concise reads anymore–maybe because word processing has made it so much harder to kill our darlings. I have to ask–what are your own tools of the trade? Do you write by hand? Retype? (I’m a big proponent of retyping manuscripts.) 

Tools:  Focus.  Stay focused.  There are a number of stories in Awake For Ever, but they are inside one story.  I soon realized that though there were magnificent, exciting characters in the novel, it was really Beatriz’ story.  Some novels lend themselves to the speed and agility of a computer.  But yes, Awake was originally written by pencil in a notebook.  And you’re right, when you turn to the keyboard, you’re not copying, but rewriting.  And now the computer is handy for developing scenes, and moving things around.  And you’re right again, Holly, if you don’t kill your darlings, then they’ll kill you.  Tell the story.  Don’t explain.  Especially don’t have your characters explain.  

Though Awake is the shortest novel I’ve written, it took me the longest time to write it.  Hemingway said you should never walk away from your writing after you’ve finished a chapter or scene, always start another.  When you come back, you’ll be in the middle of something.  I practice this.  But you can get stuck in the middle of a scene, too.  Then be calm.  Wait.  I Let my characters do the thinking.  They’ll think of something.  And most of it I’ll forget or not be able to use.  It’s a fine thing to be writing a long story and spending time there with my characters.    

What were your plotting techniques for writing such a short, compact piece–keeping the entire read under 100 pages? 

After reading hundreds of books and writing twenty, plotting is instinctive to me now; it’s second nature.  To paraphrase Henry James, things don’t happen to characters, characters happen to things.  Though sometimes I ask myself, what would Toni Morrison do here?  What would Virginia Woolf do?  Or Mark Twain?  Kurt Vonnegut?  Each of them are magical writers.  When I finished writing the first draft of Awake I had a couple notebooks filled with longhand pencil.  As I reread it, I discovered, well, this has to happen before that.  She wouldn’t say this.  This scene would be more affective someplace else, etc.  After I did those things on the computer, I was stunned how short the novel was.  Things happened fast.  Let it be.

As a professor, you must have met so many talented young writers–is Beatriz inspired by one? Or is she an amalgam? Is the book your advice to young writers?

My daughter dropped out of high school.  And having parents who read and wrote, she didn’t want to do either.  She picked up the guitar.  Joined a rock band.  She turned out fine.  Eventually got a Master’s degree in performance art.  Many of my students inspired me, but not to write about them.  In fact, when I began Awake For Ever I didn’t know Beatriz very well.  She became someone who knew Mary Shelley, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron very intimately, more intimately than anyone.  That’s as close as I can come to understanding Beatriz.  Aristotle said that the purpose of art was to teach and entertain, and that the highest human pleasure was learning.  If that’s true, then Beatriz lives in ecstasy.  And so, I hope, would any young reader or writer who reads Awake For Ever in a Sweet Unrest.  You can do anything on the page.  Anything at all.  Learning how to do that will give you tremendous pleasure and allow you to give it to others.

Was it hard or intimidating putting words in the mouths of the greats? 

I wasn’t intimidated at all by these great poets. Like Beatriz, I got to know them really well.  Beatriz had the advantage of not knowing how great they were, at least at first.  For my part, a lot of what they say in the story is based on what they themselves said in their poems.  I read so much and so constantly that I found myself thinking like them.  I’m also very confident in my dialogue and characterization skills.  But I didn’t have to make these people up.  There they were.

Beatriz is a young reader–like the reader of many of our novels. What do you want those young readers to take from Awake For Ever, more than anything? 

We have to remember that Beatriz wasn’t a reader when she started her adventures, she became one.  I am a Romantic writer.  The imagination and the heart.  Live there.  A number of people who have read Awake see it as a metaphor for opening a book and entering its reality.  There is not one reality.  There are thousands.  Enter them, my friends.  Enter.

What's next?

I am researching the life of George Sand (who wrote eighty novels, yipes!), who lived with Chopin for nine years, then spent eight years in intimacy with Flaubert, among others.  I’m just going to get to know them really well and see what happens.

~

Chuck Rosenthal is a writer living in Topanga Canyon, California. He is the author of Awake For Ever in a Sweet Unrest as well as fourteen other novels and five other books. He is a Romantic writer. Keep up with him at chuckrosenthal.com 

 

Snag your own copy of Awake For Ever in a Sweet Unrest from Beyond Baroque Bookstore via Bookshop.