This spring, thrilled to be reading a new novel by Molly Best Tinsley, both a teaching colleague and Writing It Real contributor, I was even more thrilled to have found a novel that I could not put down from the moment I began reading to the moment I read the very last word on the very last page. And even after reading the book, my thoughts went back to the novel’s main character and to her idiosyncrasies, her desire to live in solitude, the solitude interrupted, the strangeness and comfort of her deceased husband come to talk with her after years as she faces the biggest challenge of her life.

Molly’s Things Too Big to Name perhaps could not have been written without the kind of soul searching that she did when challenges came into her own life. It is with great pleasure that I introduce you to Molly’s newest novel by way of the following excerpt and Q&A between Molly and myself about writing the story.

Much of what Molly says will ring a bell and her way of articulating the process of novel writing will open doors in your own writing projects. The voice of her main character Margaret will engage you and thinking about why will prove instructive for your own writing.

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First, with permission from the author, here’s much of Chapter Six, a selected excerpt from Things Too Big to Name.

Where I Choose to Begin

On the evening of December 13, I was not speeding, and alcohol was not involved. It never is with me. Counter to all those studies promoting red wine for heart health, I’ve got anecdotal proof that it suppresses the immune system. A glass of pinot noir one day, a sore throat the next. What used to get me through unhappy hour was exercise…

…I was heading back to my cabin from the YMCA in Pine Springs. I assume you’re familiar with the town, in the foothills of the Siskiyous—a pretty little grid of craftsman bungalows, all refurbished with clashy combinations of paint. For some time now, it’s been a sort of mecca for retired Californians with financial security and utopian tendencies. Thinking I didn’t belong there because I had neither, I settled on a wooded acre off a road leading into the mountains.

I won’t go into that now. I suspect I’m already far afield, and I’m sorry if I stepped onto my Life Path at a point that might seem frivolous to you. But killing is complicated. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that. It deserves all the background it can get…

…That evening the dusk outside, a gray limbo, had spread to my brain. I was close to believing the sensation was contentment. In my new, sparsely populated world of early retirement, no responsibilities loomed on the horizon. Wasn’t it a good thing to have nothing I had to do?

Then out of nowhere, mass and movement blotted the headlights.

As a novice at country life, I’d been instructed never to swerve for deer; the consequences can be much worse than ramming straight into one. So I gripped the wheel hard and didn’t swerve. I did hit the brake, but too gently, thinking that if I stomped on it, the car might skid, skidding being very close to swerving, which I was determined not to do.

Neither swerving nor braking with conviction, I heard a sound like the universe clearing its throat, and a creature took shape, huge and glowing with branching antlers, a regal profile, and single wild eye. Followed by a blank. A gap of nonthought. I knew I’d been in it only when I popped out the other side on a flood of questions.

What was that? I asked aloud, because whatever it was had disappeared. 5:09, answered the digital clock on the dash. Had I been knocked unconscious? Or did the animal take only a split second, a true eye blink, to vanish, leaving me sitting there, belted in? Did that mean the creature was unharmed? Not likely: though the airbag remained dormant, the hood of my car had buckled into two crests. I tried to imagine the impact and cringed.

My clothing brands me petite, and though I loathe the word, my size is a fact, a figment of fate, passed down from my mother. (The matter of strength has been mine to control.) I had to straighten and stretch and still could barely see over the crumpled steel. The road ahead was empty. On either side, dark walls of brush and trees.

I drove on, hot with shame (a reaction I seem to be more vulnerable to than most)—an old(er) woman in a mangled Subaru, behind her somewhere, a badly injured

animal, the two of them pathetically linked by a moment of random chance. The two drivers I passed were laughing at me, I was sure, but a reality check said no, night was falling over everything except headlights—and one of mine had been knocked out. Darkness would have hidden the ruptured hood, the clouds of steam billowing from it, and no one could have heard the clunking and grinding from the engine or seen me inside, wrestling the wheel, which was freezing up as fast as the power steering fluid was trickling out on the road…

…I hit the stretch the realtor warned me to travel slowly at night, where for months I’ve obediently stared so hard into the shadows for the threat of a wandering wild thing that the admonition Keep your eyes peeled felt literal. I was worrying about the fate of the animal— wondering if its quick disappearance was a good sign— it had been able to run off. It didn’t deserve this unlucky convergence any more than I did. Why had this happened so close to town where my guard was down? And at the moment when dusk was about to cave to darkness. Headlights are at their worst then. Murk shrouded that buck until he was smack in front of me.

I left the car disgorging steam at the edge of my property and in a burst of adrenalin, ran for my life, in case something was about to explode. I thundered up the wooden porch, poked blindly with the key, and once inside, couldn’t stop trembling. I told myself this was normal. Muscles always do that a little after they’ve been pushed past their comfort zone, which is what you have to do for weight-bearing exercise to build up your bones.

I steadied my gimpy arms by grabbing Brutus by the neck and ruffling his fur. The dog (Rottweiler mix) cocked his head and fixed a moist gaze on me. I’d never ruffled his fur before. I’m not a dog-person, as they call themselves; I’d never had a pet in my life. But I’d never lived alone in the country either. I went to the animal shelter looking for a low-tech security system. When the attendant pointed a tattooed arm at a mountain of dark fur in the far corner of one cage, I mumbled a no thanks. The dog was too big, too scruffy. I couldn’t imagine learning to trust him. Then the guy said, “Too bad. He’s in line for euthanizing on Monday.”

I know, he’s probably trained to say that about every dog, true or not—but how could I walk away from that sorry, imperiled creature now? I adopted Brutus, we took a class in obedience, and we were learning to respect and take good care of each other. If I haven’t joined the ranks of adoring dog-people, maybe it’s because adoration isn’t really in me. Not anymore. And even when it was, I draped it in pragmatism and irony. Kept its bright force to myself.

I’d chosen a solitary life, and Brutus seemed ready to commit to it. I didn’t have to teach him to look fierce and bark warnings when other humans approached the house. He growled provisionally at the UPS man; he bared his teeth and snarled at a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses, or maybe they were Mormons. (Maybe piety has a smell.) So even though he fell down on the job when it really counted, I miss his solid company and sincerely hope his new living arrangements content him.

There is a point to this, Alec: if nothing else, it says something about the nature of shock, how it prevents you from realizing you’re in it. You keep on going, thinking nothing has changed. Then, though not heretofore psychotic, you might begin, after a period of holding things together, to behave in odd ways. I reheated the pot of lentil soup and smeared a rice cake with almond butter. I dropped the knife in the process, and some soup spilled when I ladled it into the bowl. My arms were vibrating like tuning forks.

It took me forever to push 9-1-1, then another forever to explain my situation to the voice on the line. I could tell from its reaction that I wasn’t making sense, so I hung up. And that’s when I heard a second voice, hollowed by space and time but so familiar that it whacked that main nerve that begins with a V—the one that keeps you upright. “Hello, Midge,” is all it said, deep and intimate as a cello, and in turning around, I wound up on the floor.

Brutus was there for me, panting his canine halitosis. I eased his muzzle away from my face, gave it a little pat, and he trotted over to his water bowl, nails nicking the bare wood. There he slurped intently, as if the center of the room were not shimmering—a mirage in the desert—making my heart pump hard and cold.

“Midge?” I heard again.

After about an hour, I whispered, “Margaret. I go by Margaret now.”

In the following silence, I heard reprimand: Why in the world would you want to do that?

But then the voice said, “Margaret. Rhymes with consequential.” Its tone was playful. The ripple in the air was anchored to one of the two remaining chairs at the kitchen table. Its borders got a little sharper.

I did think, I’ve hurt my brain, knocked it crazy. Still, “I’m not myself,” I said aloud then repeated what I’d told the 9-1-1 voice: “There’s been a bad accident. Maybe a fatal one. There was nothing I could do. A deer ran into my car.”

“So you’re on the rebound.”

There was no question the voice was Ben’s, my late husband, and I decided I shouldn’t cower on the floor but do as he would do: embrace the experience. I pushed myself to my feet and hung onto the kitchen counter, turned my face to the not-quite-empty chair.

“Are you injured?” The voice sounded concerned.

“I think maybe my balance is off.”

The voice gave an amused hah!

I let the rice cake slide off my plate for Brutus and set the soup bowl in the sink. The dog crunched and snuffled as if nothing were out of the ordinary. I wondered, was this, whatever it was, happening because I’d kept that extra chair? I had no plans to invite a guest to my cabin. So why didn’t I donate it with the other two to benefit the Syrian refugees? If I had, would I be eating lentil soup at this moment a bit shaken up, maybe, but all alone? I took a step back, shook my head, blinked. Concussion? The rise of a guilty conscience? Or an actual ghost? I didn’t bother to ask myself the last question, the answer seemed so obvious. Over the next week, though, I began to wonder that too.

I cleared my throat. “Why now?”

A flurry of laughter. “It’s all now.”

“I don’t think so. Time runs out. Why I quit my job.”

“What I mean is I’m always here.”

It’s the type of comment you hear a lot in Pine Springs, where before the invasion of AARP liberals, the long-time, back-to-the-land residents crafted their New Age mantras for every occasion, comforting but incapable of proof. “That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“Because you always keep busy.”

“Not anymore.”

“Exactly. You’re ready.”

Ready, ready. The word tolled like a challenge. I didn’t want to accept it, but my heartbeat caught the rhythm. “I’ve run away from it all, Ben. The world’s turned brutal and stupid.”

“Terrible combination.”

A longing swept reason aside. “My God, I miss you.” Words I haven’t let myself even think for years.

“And here I am.”

Call me crazy, Alec, I am not making this up. There I was hanging onto the counter, asking an empty room: “Have you come for a reckoning, some sort of closure?”

“Ah, those things are illusion,” said the voice, as if passing judgment on its own shimmer, which had begun to blur and blend into everything else. “Rooted always in error.”

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Molly Tinsley answers questions especially for those of us aspiring to write our own best work.

Which parts of Things Too Big to Name are inspired by your own life events?

The incident that started the whole project really happened: I was driving home at twilight, minding my own business, when a stag with impressive antlers jumped out of the woods and hit my car. The animal disappeared, and my car was totaled, though I managed to drive it the rest of the way home without power steering.

The event left me shaken and whiplashed and feeling terrible that somewhere in the woods on the other side of the road, a large, stately creature was dying a slow death. I turned to writing about the event as a way of managing its traumatic effect. The main character would be the car’s driver, who like me, would be a retired English professor living in the Oregon mountains. I thought I was writing a short story based loosely on life, but it just wouldn’t settle into the confines of that genre.

For instance, during one writing session, Margaret Torrens, my protagonist, staggered into her kitchen after the accident to find the ghost of her deceased husband waiting to engage her in conversation. Neither I nor Margaret believes in ghosts. But for some reason, we both realized we should accept this one.

Later, I would flesh out her past as an academic with my own anecdotes. And I understand her cultural despair and her craving for solitude. But as the story began to grow, Margaret became more and more autonomous.

Tell us a bit about the plot and characters.

As the story opens, Margaret is locked in a cell and her sanity is under evaluation by a psychologist, a man in his late 30’s. An act of violence has been committed, and a charge of murder is in the air. The week before, the solitude of her mountain retreat had been breached by Jane, a former student, still beautiful in middle age, who had with her a strange, mute little girl. And two days later, Victor barges in to lay claim to both woman and child.

Now as Margaret works in her sessions with the psychologist to control the story of the previous week, she is waylaid by secrets from her distant past, borne by the ghost of a husband whose early death she has never confronted or grieved.

How do you think writing this novel was different for you than writing your previous books?

When I’m counseling student writers, I always emphasize the importance of letting go of control to allow characters and action to emerge with a robust life of their own. I don’t always follow my own advice. I like to know where I’m going when I write … at least some of the time. In this book, I really feel that I was driving blind, with all the doubt and anxiety that process entails. The world I was crafting seemed a study in moral ambiguity; I kept having to change my mind about who the good guys were.

Things Too Big to Name was also a stretch technically. It became a broken narrative, a braid of three different strands, one from the distant past, one from the recent past, and one in time present. Let’s just say it was a challenge to keep the time frames separate and sorted, with much rereading and rewriting to make sure the information shaping each one was appropriate and consistent. I’m also indebted to my book designer, Ray Rhamey, on that score for coming up with the perfect visual means to signal each shift.

Can you tell us about the magic realism that flavors this novel and what it allowed you to do?

I’m actually pretty cautious around magic realism because it allows so much freedom to an author creating a fictional world. Tight spots, whether physical or political, are too easily escaped by magical means. But there was something about the ghost of Margaret’s husband that seemed very much to belong in this novel, and I think it has to do with a message Margaret receives, near the end, from her own heart: “Trust in things too big to name.”

I’d wound up calling forth all sorts of “big names” in this story and finding they didn’t come close to capturing reality. Words like soul and death, love and evil, fidelity, justice, sacrifice–these are crude simplifications of the agonies and ecstasies life puts us through. Magic realism allows us to penetrate the simplistic surfaces named by our words and embody ineffable truths.

As a longtime coach for aspiring writers, what lessons did you learn in writing this book that you’d most like to share?

One day when I felt lost in the muddled middle of the novel, I reread everything I had so far and noticed I was hearing it inflected in my head. In other words, it had a voice. When further analysis actually identified three voices, I had the glimmer of order I needed to see the novel through.

By the time I had a zero draft, it had become a braid of three different stories, each “told” by the same person, Margaret, yet each resonating with a different voice. What distinguished the voices was the fact that Margaret was directing the stories to different audiences, and as her audience varied, so did her purpose in breaking silence. The psychologist is a threatening stranger, tasked with judging her and perhaps catching her in a lie; thus her threatened self needs the outlet of journal entries to keep track of her predicament. With the ghost of her husband, she must wrestle with the repressed memories of a lover whose death she’d never grieved.

What I learned repeatedly in Things Too Big to Name is that story-telling is an action in itself. Words not only say something, they are doing all sorts of things too–praise, rationalize, mock, confess, plead, mourn, you name it. Once you have an early draft of a story, it’s time to consider its voice. Imagine the motives of your narrator and her audience, and allow these variables to inflect your voice.

Thank you for this lesson from your experience writing this most satisfying novel with its deep look into Margaret’s (and our own) human nature.