This week’s interview is with my colleague Meg Files about her process for writing The Third Law of Motion, her newest novel and the book’s impact on its audience. You can study with Meg at our April Writing It Real conference in Nashville or our June Centrum Creative weekend intensive in Port Townsend, WA.

Sheila
Your new novel, The Third Law of Motion, is described by the publisher this way:

Meg Files’ new novel is set in Michigan in the early 60s, when the worst thing a girl could do was get herself “in trouble,” when domestic violence remained hidden in silent basements. It tells the stories of Dulcie White, a bright, confused college girl distracted by sexual discoveries and the power of her boyfriend’s neediness, and track star Lonnie Saxbe, who is caught up in his own confusions and compulsions. The Third Law of Motion offers an intimate look at the subtleties and the complexities of the dynamics between a battered wife and a violent husband, where nothing is so simple as a fist punched through a wall.

In her review of the book, author Mary Sojourner emphasizes how the novel reminds us that in the 1950’s and 60’s, for middle class people in trouble, “There was nowhere to go. We were alone with what we believed were our choices. We didn’t yet know that there were few choices – and that all of them were part of the swamp that held us fast.”

What is the story behind the creation of your novel The Third Law of Motion?

Meg
The story is from the first novel I ever tried to write, soon after I graduated from college, back when I had no idea what I was doing. I think most writers have apprentice books. I continued on to write three more apprentice books (which, unlike the first, are unsalvageable).

Of course, we write our early works with great hopes for their publication—as we should, or we’d be half-hearted about the whole endeavor and the necessary learning wouldn’t happen. Nevertheless, my breakthrough came when I quit thinking of publication and just wrote the book I wanted to write (and to read), my “first” novel, Meridian 144.

Several books later, I revisited that first attempt at a novel and found that I still believed in it. I rewrote the book almost completely, but the story itself and the characters were there. It was a great pleasure, sitting beside my young learner-permit self and taking the wheel.

Sheila
When she meets her boyfriend’s mother, Dulcie reports: “His mother looked at me over her shoulder, her hands in the dishwater, looked at my white rolled-up-sleeve blouse and my pink-checked Bermudas and my sandals and then back up to my face.”

Dulcie describes her afternoon downtown with her college roommate this way: “The store was high ceilinged and dim and smelled just the same at the Woolworth’s at home, like sawdust and cheap cloth and hamsters. After our grilled cheese sandwiches and cherry Cokes, we looked for something to buy. Katie needed a new hairbrush. I got a black velvet ribbon.”

There are so many details that bring me back to my home town, Union, New Jersey, and to growing up in the years before the Vietnam War. Since the story takes place in the sixties, and it had been some time since you’d first written it, where did you go to get the details of time and place just right? And they are just right.

Meg
The story is set in Michigan in the sixties. And, okay, if you must know, I was there. Because I’d written the early version of the book not too far from that time, I’d archived lots of details. My younger students now think of the Sixties as the time of hippies and free love and psychedelic drugs and antiwar protests. But the mid-sixties in the Midwest were pretty much still the fifties.

Sheila
Yes, for us in the suburbs of New Jersey, too.

Meg
I revisited my high school yearbook (all that teased hair!). For a different view, I read the tenth anniversary issue of Playboy (1964), which includes pieces by Lenny Bruce, Shel Silverstein, Philip Roth, Pablo Picasso, Bertrand Russell, James Baldwin, and Ernest Hemingway. Oh, and an interview with Vladimir Nabokov. Oh, and a nice fold-out of Miss January. I found my college freshman dorm booklet, full of advice: “If you arrive in sneakers and Bermudas, have a dress or suit, hose and heels, or flats, near the top of the bundle so you can be looking like one the ‘1000’ as you step out to make your first impression” and “You have no idea how no lipstick and uncombed hair can squelch a young man’s budding interest.” I acquired the Department of Defense’s “Personal and Family Survival” manual from 1966, which includes more useful advice: In the event of a nuclear event, you “should move under or behind the nearest desk, table, sofa. . . The safest position to assume is lying down, curled up on one side with hands over the back of the neck, knees tucked against the chest.” (Good luck with that.) I read a very fine book edited by Gerald Howard: The Sixties: The Art, Attitudes, Politics, and Media of Our Most Explosive Decade.

Mostly, I think my book captures the sensibilities and mores of the time and place, at least as I knew them.

Sheila
Wow! Interesting documents about those years that still don’t quite feel like history if you lived them.

Meg
I know what you mean. Last time I did a reading from the book, I introduced it as “historical fiction,” and that got a laugh.

Sheila
Your novel spans many months. How do you see the structure?

Meg
The story covers about 18 months, I think, enough time for Dulcie to spend two semesters in college, get pregnant, get married, have her baby, and fall out of love (if ever she was in love). The scenes progress chronologically, with flashbacks to both Dulcie’s and her husband Lonnie’s pasts.

Sheila
Speaking of the two characters, I have a question about point of view in your novel. You have alternated points of view: Some chapters are in Dulcie’s point of view and written in first person and the others are in Lonnie’s point of view in third person limited. It seems to me that the two points of view emphasize the third law of motion theme–to have an action and a reaction going throughout the book. Do you see it this way? How did you explore your use of alternating point of view?

Meg
What an insightful reader you are. I hadn’t consciously thought about the points of view demonstrating the third law of motion theme, but the approach does have that effect. I’d like to think that on an intuitive level, I knew what I was doing. Often the critic knows more than the writer!

My original attempt at this story had both points of view in first person. One of the main problems was that I didn’t know the sound of Lonnie’s voice. I really struggled to hear it, but he wasn’t speaking to me. Reading All the Pretty Horses helped me catch the voice—not that I imitated Cormac McCarthy, but somehow the sound of his third-person narration revealed or released Lonnie, and I knew it had to be in third person to suggest his lack of self-awareness and his dissociation.

Sheila
I always enjoy learning how authors learn from other authors’ work and then apply the lesson the were after. Thanks for letting us in on how you broke through to Lonnie’s voice.

I’ve wanted to ask you what the most attractive part for you was of writing this novel and what the hardest part was.

Meg
The answers are the same. I relished getting intimately close to both characters, but the proximity was sometimes disturbing. I wanted to explore the dynamics of domestic abuse, but I didn’t want Lonnie to be a cardboard villain nor did I want Dulcie to be just a victim. Perhaps what we are most passionate about, in our stories, is exactly what gives us the most trouble.

Sheila
How would you phrase what you are most passionate about?

Meg
The exploration itself. In writing, I am after truth (lower-case truth, not The Truth). And truth is almost always complicated.

Sheila
How did you manage to make Lonnie well-rounded rather than two dimensional? What was key for you in doing that?

Meg
It was easy for me to identify and sympathize with Dulcie, though sometimes she frustrated the heck out of me—Look at yourself, I wanted to tell her, save yourself while you still can! But Lonnie was a different story. When I came to understand him, deeply, though he doesn’t understand himself, I came to care about him, and that made all the difference.

Sheila
And what are you most proud of about this book?

Meg
In my early version of the novel, I had the right idea, of alternating the points of view, chapter by chapter, between Dulcie and Lonnie, both in their separate ways naïve. The problem was that they both sounded the same, when they are about as mismatched as they could possibly be. Over my years of teaching and writing, I have come to believe in the power of voice. In my rewrite of the book, I like to think that I caught and rendered not only Dulcie’s voice but bad-boy Lonnie’s voice.

Sheila
I would say you did this very well. Let me give our readers a sample of Lonnie talking:

“I’d just like to sit here. I worked hard today. I must’ve shoved a couple hundred pair of shoes onto people’s rotten feet. I’m tired.”

Dulcie had left the dishes and he dried the good plates his mother had given them for their wedding. then he turned out the lights and put on Katie’s record to play and sat in the dusk. He closed his eyes and saw these glowing hands. Four glowing purple hands playing a piano. Up and down and faster and faster. Like it was one of those player pianos and the hands were trying to keep up with the jumping keys.

Katie was queer for his wife and Dulcie was too blind to see it. He saw them once put their arms around each other. In the dark it was their hands on each other’s back hot and glowing. His sisters used to give each other backrubs. First it would be Suzie face down on the bed and Marie’s hands rubbing her, and him sitting there, and then they’d switch.

How different the way Dulcie describes piano playing with her roommate Katie:

Every day, two hours before dinner, we walked through the snow to the music building where we found two unoccupied practice rooms. We wheeled the piano from one room into the other, closed the glass door, and set up our music. We worked on the Tchaikovsky first piano concerto, Katie playing the piano part and I an arrangement of the orchestral score. By graduation, we figured, we’d be perfect. We decided we would play it on two grand pianos in Stinton Chapel for the entire school. In the meanwhile we had the immensity of two pianos and Tchaikovsky closed up in the little room with us.

Having Dulcie’s chapters in first person and Lonnie’s in third definitely invites the reader into experiencing the differences in their thoughts, obsessions and phrasing.

On to another question: Why do you think you tackled this particular novel at this point in your career?

Meg
One of my students, a young woman from another country, came to my office all black and blue. She told me her husband had beaten her up. Again. Her family was on the other side of the planet, she didn’t really know people here, and she was scared. We all know domestic violence didn’t end in the last century, but I was reminded, terribly reminded, of what it is to be cut off and helpless. And it seems that the shame hasn’t vanished, either. I rewrote my first novel in the belief that it is relevant still, even in our “enlightened” times.

Sheila
Oh. And yes it goes on here as well as all over the world, and Dulcie’s courage at the end of your book is a beacon. I noted that Mary Sojourner felt the book should be part of women’s studies classes. Has that happened that you know of?

Meg
Some readers have posted comments to reviews of the book online to say how helpful it was in dealing with their own experiences with domestic abuse. As far as I know, though, the book hasn’t been taken up by any women’s studies programs. I’d like to think it could offer not a case study but an exploration of the individuality and complexity of an abusive relationship.

Sheila
What are the key lessons you learned in the journey to completing this book?

Meg
I think writing this book solidified (and deepened) the lessons I try to teach my fiction-writing students: (1) tell the emotional and psychological truths of your characters’ lives, (2) limit the point of view, getting close to one character at a time, capturing the character’s voice, and (3) be brave enough (or fake the courage) to write the hard scenes.

Sheila
Can you identify the scene that was hardest for you to write and how you got the courage to keep going?

Meg
I must say, the whole book was full of hard scenes. So often I wanted to ease things for those poor kids, to help them out, to make things not so twisted and terrible for them (or sometimes just not so downright embarrassing). Perhaps the toughest part to write was near the end, when Dulcie has the chance to be saved, only to be slammed with the knowledge that her parents had their own problems with abuse. In the wake of that shock, she has the chance to be saved by her beloved college roommate, but in all her shame and grief at her lost life, she turns on her and thrusts her away. I still get choked up, reading that part where Dulcie gives up.

Write the scene, I had to keep reminding myself when I wanted to skip it and move on to something more tender. Write it now. Take it all the way. I’ve said all this in classes and workshops, but I can tell you, it’s not easy to practice what I preach. I kept reminding myself that I could always change or remove a scene later, and that mindset helped me to go forward.

Sheila
Have readers told you about the way this book affected them? What have they said that is important to you as the author?

Meg
I am so very pleased with the blurbs by authors I greatly respect. And I was pleased, too, that the book was recently named one of the ten Best of the Southwest Books for 2012 by the Arizona Daily Star.

Many people have said they hoped it was cathartic to write the story. I guess that means the story seems authentic.

I also heard from several of my high school classmates (yeah, Facebook) about the book. They told me I got it right.

Joanne Greenberg (I Never Promised You a Rose Garden) told me that I should have seen a bump in sales recently because she ordered copies for her friends. She wrote: “I love the fairness of it—her acknowledgment of her complicity. My rage at Lonnie had to be modified by his wish that he had been a better human being. You got all that so right.”

Sheila
As writers, though, we write because we want to find the story in our hearts and experiences, and when we do this right what’s in our hearts and experience turns out to be other people’s stories as well. I am so pleased that you have gotten this wonderful response to a book that wouldn’t let you not write it.

What advice do you have for novel writers on how to approach stories?

Meg

1. Remember that a novel is an exploration. A novel is asking questions. A novel is not a hot plot idea. A novel is the story of human beings caught up in trouble and finally coming to some understanding.
2. Each story, each book needs new rules. Just when I think I know what I’m doing, the new story shows me otherwise.
3. Limit the point of view. Let your characters speak, in their own voices. One at a time. Unless you’re Michael Chabon.
4. Write the parts you want to skip writing. And do it at the time. It doesn’t work to fill it in later. Trust me.
5. Put it all in. Whatever shows up, put it in. (You can always take it out later if it’s irrelevant, misleading, or gratuitously harmful to others.)
6. Write with no one looking over your shoulder: writers’ group, class, Mom, editor, agent. Write the book for its own sake, without thinking of who’s going to read it or publish it. You can think of all that later. First just write the best, the truest book you can. Don’t play it safe. Write your risky book.

Sheila
Oh, I like that. Risky writing allows us to help our characters articulate and often to resolve situations. This offers readers models and hope, not from lectures and proselytizing, but out of the lives of characters that seem real, that seem like most of us.

I read recently that stories are what help us learn how to live through disappointments and failures and to see what comes next; they help us learn that there are ways out and there are ways to grow. We need stories to help us! Thank you, Meg, for your novel and for your words to writers in this interview.

Next week, we will post a chapter from The Third Law of Motion,and I am really looking forward to sharing a part of your novel and your craft.