What Can Writers Learn from Tom Lake?
I held the inaugural meeting of my Book Club for Writers last night, where Ann Patchett’s latest, Tom Lake, was under discussion. Our goal for this book club is to read and discuss books through the lens of narrative form, and our meeting last night did not disappoint!
It’s not possible to recap the conversation—it’s truly one of those “you had to be there” situations—but a few interesting points bubbled up that I can share here. This, by the way, ties directly to the previous post where I talked about what makes a book “good”—and what makes a more literary work “good,” too.
Some of the things that came up:
What were the stakes? The main character in the novel, Lara, wasn’t up against anything. She didn’t have an enemy or anything to win or prove. In her interview with Bianca Marais, Ann Patchett states that having a character desire something isn’t always necessary. Sacrilege? You decide.
The tricky thing about dual timelines - We agreed that overall Ann pulled this off masterfully, though sometimes we did catch ourselves calculating where we were in time. One participant who reads a lot of dual timeline books disagreed with Ann’s assertion (also in the Marais interview) that readers are usually bored with one timeline, itching to get back to the other timeline.
Caveat: For an experienced novelist dual timelines shouldn’t be a problem, but the focus really has to be on making both timelines equally intriguing to the reader.
The narrative chain - One member, Lori, pointed out that there is a very clear writing lesson in the book that helps answer how to order chapters, scenes, even sentences. Emily says (p 61), “Everything leads to the next thing,” when her mom is explaining why the story is unfolding a certain way. Maisie says, “That’s called narrative.” It’s another way of looking at cause and effect, so essential to telling a good tale.
Much later in the book (p 267) Nell tells her mother to start with “A sentence … Start small. See where it takes you.” Which seems as fine a piece of writing advice as any.
Our next book is The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett. With an omniscient POV and non-sequential plot line, this book will have plenty to teach us about the writing craft.
