Virginia Lee Wood’s terrific excerpt, “A Geology” was published on Monday as the 3rd place finalist in the 2023 Novel Excerpt Contest, chosen by Matthew Salesses. The excerpt “collapses and expands time like an accordion finding its tune,” Salesses writes in his introduction. Be sure to read Wood’s excerpt and then check out our interview with the winner below.
Perhaps the most interesting technical element of this excerpt, and certainly in the first section, is the use of tense: Both the moment in the past and the moment in the future where Sungmi/Judith’s story is being told are written in present tense. Could you talk through that strategy a bit, and what led you to it?
At its core, the novel is a reckoning with the process of loss and grieving. During times of grief, memory has a way of reminding you how the past is part of the present in everything. It felt correct to me to write about the past in the present tense because there is a sense that the past is always happening, being written and rewritten as the present pushes us to remember it again and in new lights. The working title of the novel A Geology also reflects this process of the present being made of the layers of the past, and how reckoning in the present often reveals the past in new ways by force.
I’m always fascinated by setting in stories. This piece felt like it utilized its places incredibly well; we never stopped to build the world for paragraphs on end, but at the same time there were plenty of things that felt clearly distinct to each exact place and time. I’m curious how, especially in an excerpt, you think about that process of creating those worlds: You don’t exactly have time to create everything for the reader, and much of that work has probably been done in other pages that we’re not privy to, but the responsibility to bring the reader in still exists in these standalone pages as well.
As a writer, place is at the forefront of my writing process, sometimes even more than character. How place shapes people, memory, and how we either experience the moment or become numb to it. I have been given to think about how in times of depression or paradigm shifts, the places I’ve lived become different through my shifted perspective. During the process of grief over the loss of my father which the novel draws heavily from, I often found myself sitting alone and worrying that without him the trees will seem different, that everything would feel obscure without him there to know all of the names and show me the beautiful things (he was a Doctor of the natural sciences). So it was important to me in the story to capture place as alive in memory as well as in the present, knowing that all of the little things that change along the way are as important to building world and character perspective as anything else. A creek gets filled in. A forest gets cut down. A snake finds itself in unnatural environment and seeks a place to hide. A character realizes that rather than fewer trees, there seem to be so many more than before.
I’m curious how you chose this particular section of the larger book to excerpt, and whether you had to do anything to make it work as a standalone? Was the idea of building an excerpt, of these pages needing to be a self-contained piece, part of your thought process at all as you were writing or editing these pages for submission, or did you simply find a piece of your larger work that seemed like it would already stand on its own?
These two excerpts are directly from the beginning of the novel. Each chapter of the novel works as a self-contained thought which forms the whole as things go along. So in terms of standing alone, I think they work as a self-contained work because there has been work in completing the thought in each one. In the first chapter, “who is Sungmi and what is she coming from mentally and physically?” and in the second, the same question for Jungmin. Answering these questions first forms a foundation from which the characters can grow and move (mentally and physically) and reveal more as the novel evolves.
A lot of my questions have circled around the idea of writing this as an excerpt of something, so I might as well just ask straight-up: what do you view as the responsibility of an excerpt? What does it need to do to successfully function as a piece of literature on its own (or, I suppose, does it?)?
I have spent a lot of time writing short stories… sometimes against my will, haha. So when I think of excerpting in a satisfying way, I think a good excerpt will do what a short story will do in brief, which is introduce characters, set place meaningfully, and show some movement in character (in terms of reckoning). Of course these are the full responsibility of a short story, but an excerpt should at least demonstrate how character movement will be possible down the line if not done within the excerpt itself. This is how I think of it; maybe others think differently. As a writer, those are the things I like to do in terms of craft, so I like to show an excerpt that at least does those things well. Even if I don’t win anything or nothing comes of the excerpt in an application or contest, at least I will know I showed what I’m proud of doing as a writer.
I’m that annoying guy at the reading that always wants to ask the two super-cliché questions, so apologies in advance. First, can you tell us a bit about your writing routine? (Mornings with coffee pecking at the keys; ten hours in front of a keyboard every day; chunks when inspiration strikes, et cetera?)
For me, writing is often hard going. I find more and more that I have to carve myself out of my own life in order to do it well i.e. get away from my routine, my work life, and friends. It’s not easy to do, but if at least I have a length of time away from my responsibilities then I can focus. I’ve always been a writer who has to feel immersed in order to do the work well. Much of this novel has been written in month-long stretches of focused time in Seoul, South Korea, which is just enough home and just enough isolated to facilitate the work nicely. Mostly, the answer is that I have to be able to turn my phone off, be isolated, and be able to focus on the work without any distractions or having to talk to anyone. I like to be in a condition to write where I can be quietly thinking about the work all the time, all day, and write when the thought part gets quiet and the “seeing” part, the writing part, gets free. I envy writers who can work in a group or in coffee shops.
Second, beyond writing routine, what about your writing process? Are you a seventeen drafts before your first reader sees it kind of writer, or does it all flow brilliantly to fountain pen on first thought (someone someday will reply yes to that, I’m sure), or do you write a single sentence a million times until it’s perfect, or…?
I write through lamination, yes. It’s less about getting the sentences right than the sense/feeling right. First to get something raw and rough down on paper from the feelings and experiences of the moment, let it marinate, do another draft, another draft, another draft. To not get professional or start thinking about the market until the raw and rough part feels a little healed. It always takes me time to be able to sit and reflect. Somewhere in the middle, reflect on the little details and important moments in place and nature that impact character and the mood of the work. Add in people’s little quirks of movement and their faces later. A couple drafts for clean up and clarity. A last draft with the market in mind. This novel began as the raw and rough diary of a loss. Every time it goes through drafting, re-visiting, re-forming, it also reminds me of that thing I was talking about earlier, of how the present and the past are accordioned up and always happening and influencing each other all the time. Editing and revision is like revisiting the writing, the time, the place where the writing happened; observing how the reckoning and questions in the work have changed over time and what that does to the novel. The novel is still a diary of loss. Now it is becoming something full and rich in new ways as well as time and the writing move forward.
This excerpt is so much fun to read, and certainly does great work in whetting my appetite for the full work; obviously avoiding spoilers, what can you tell us about the novel?
The novel is currently in a finished “second” draft i.e. that it is complete in its material and ready for a third (and final, please) draft to polish and enliven it further. As the novel moves forward from this beginning, it will continue to intercut between Sungmi and Jungmin, moving between past as present. Sungmi’s chapters demonstrate how she grew up in the wake of her father’s death, moving to Seoul, meeting Greg, and a difficult life in the US. Jungmin’s sections are far more in the present, reflecting how she has taken charge of the concerns of the present moment (dealing with hospice, social concerns, and increasing financial and personal pressure) but there is also the revelation that as a child she and her twin sister were abused by their older brother, and how the silence around this complicates the grief growing around Greg’s Alzheimer’s and eventual passing. This silence and grief brings Sungmi and Jungmin into both uneasy but necessary closeness and conflict. You can expect more focus on nature, ghosts both in the past and the present, a web of stories which cut the present into a thousand facets, and an increasing fracturing and shifting of character voice and perspective as the novel goes on. A joke I’ve heard about my work is that it’s “snakes, ghosts, and trees”. Yeah. So you can expect snakes, ghosts, and trees ahead. Thank you!
Interviewed by Brandon Williams