If the Shoe Fits
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"If I don't sell this novel, I'll open a shoe store."
That's what I told my husband, and I meant it. Shoes were easy and fun -- I quested for them on an intuitive level only a shoe lover would understand -- whereas my career as a novelist, another passion, had been a struggle. My first two novels, published by a small press, had lasted a few weeks in bookstores before vanishing into the backlist. I was a published author but still had to do office work to survive. Then my publisher died and I couldn't find a home for my newest novel. My career was a bust before it really began. A dozen years, a marriage and two kids later, I was eager to dig into work again. The question was, do what?
Like many mothers who temporarily detour out of the workforce to care for their families, I found that going back to work meant making choices. I did not want to be in a full-time job that kept me away from my children, and I didn't want to write another novel that wouldn't sell.
Outside motherhood, there were four things I was good at: typing, teaching, novel-writing, and knowing a good shoe when I saw one. Typing for a living was definitely a last resort, avoidable so long as my husband had work. I was already teaching fiction writing as an adjunct, and had been since my first baby was ten months old; it was satisfying work, but paid poorly. Novel writing was what I felt fired-up to do. It's an esoteric skill, relegating you to long hours alone, inventing characters and worlds that you manipulate to your liking; you might say it's on par with insanity. You churn out hundreds upon hundreds of pages, which you then discard and rewrite, revise, polish, and change some more. After all that, there may be a very slim possibility you'll sell the thing -- probably for less than a secretary's starting salary. Then, when it finally gets published, the usual reaction is that nothing much happens . . . and then it disappears.
I decided to take one more stab at it, but this time I would make it commercial, hopefully improving its chances of getting published. A writer with many unpublished manuscripts lining my closet shelves, I undertook my last attempt as a novelist with as much reservation as determination. I really meant it when I said this would be the last novel I ever wrote if it didn't sell. And I kind-of secretly wanted to open that shoe store.
It would be a special place where owner and customer would recognize each other's inexplicable desire for the perfect shoe. I could see them perched on narrow, tilted shelves: soft suede, gleaming patent leather, rounded toes, square toes, pointed toes. High heels, low heels. Buckles, straps and beads. Boots, sandals, autumn loafers. They glittered and gleamed in my imagination, which would be free to lay down the burdens of invention; I would be an impresario of fine footwear, a mother, a wife and a reader. It sounded kind of nice.
I turned my mind to the new novel, figuring I'd go down in glory with my sinking ship -- no one could say I didn't try before giving up my dream -- and then I would go shoe shopping.
Suspense was a fictional element I felt I had never mastered, so I decided to try it. In the past, I'd tackled plot, character, voice, linear versus abstract narrative structures, multiple point of view, single point of view, interwoven stories, humor, mystery, young adult, children's stories . . . each with a novel devoted to its understanding and mastery. (I was insane.) I enrolled in a one day how-to-write-suspense course, hoping to jump-start the learning process.
That Saturday morning, my son woke up with a fever, my husband had had insomnia and slept not a wink, and it was pouring rain. I couldn't leave my delirious husband to drag our baby daughter and her feverish brother through the deluge to the pediatrician's office, so I stayed home. The conspiracy of deterrents seemed fraught with warning: What made me think I could undertake this project, or any project, when I had small children? A few days later, I realized that I could probably learn from a book everything the class would have taught me, plus I could read a book at home. I went to the bookstore and bought Writing the Thriller by T. Macdonald Skillman.
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