{"id":33440,"date":"2018-11-13T12:20:31","date_gmt":"2018-11-13T17:20:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=33440"},"modified":"2022-01-09T09:35:32","modified_gmt":"2022-01-09T14:35:32","slug":"molly-tanzer-five-things-i-learned-writing-creatures-of-want-and-ruin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2018\/11\/13\/molly-tanzer-five-things-i-learned-writing-creatures-of-want-and-ruin\/","title":{"rendered":"Molly Tanzer: Five Things I Learned Writing Creatures of Want and Ruin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amityville baywoman Ellie West fishes by day and bootlegs moonshine by night. It\u2019s dangerous work under Prohibition\u2014independent operators like her are despised by federal agents and mobsters alike\u2014but Ellie\u2019s brother was accepted to college and Ellie\u2019s desperate to see him go. So desperate that when wealthy strangers ask her to procure libations for an extravagant party Ellie sells them everything she has, including some booze she acquired under unusual circumstances.<\/em><\/p>\n

What Ellie doesn\u2019t know is that this booze is special. Distilled from foul mushrooms by a cult of diabolists, those who drink it see terrible things\u2014like the destruction of Long Island in fire and flood. The cult is masquerading as a church promising salvation through temperance and a return to \u201cthe good old days,\u201d so it\u2019s hard for Ellie to take a stand against them, especially when her father joins, but Ellie loves Long Island, and she loves her family, and she\u2019ll do whatever it takes to ensure neither is torn apart.<\/em><\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

What We Read is Who We Are<\/h2>\n

Let me say first that this whole post is going be a little political, because my novel is a little political. Great<\/em>, you\u2019re probably thinking, as you\u2019ll be reading this a week after the election, and are more than likely over reading, talking, or thinking about politics. But you see, I\u2019m writing all this a little more than one week before the election\u2014so how could this post, this novel, fail to be anything but political? After all, I came up with the idea for Creatures of Want and Ruin<\/em> in the late summer before the 2016 election and started writing it in earnest a few weeks into November, after it was all over and America was trying to figure out what the heck had just happened. All I was thinking about at that time was politics\u2014well, that and my good friends had a baby four days after that fateful night. But even that joyous event was politicized for me. As I held their amazing, sweet child in my arms for the first time, not 48 hours after she was born, I remember whispering to her \u201cI will fix this for you, little girl.\u201d I haven\u2019t made good on that promise yet, but this novel is one the ways in which I am trying.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Creatures of Want and Ruin<\/em> is a book about a lot of things, including politics\u2014but it is also about reading. My co-tagonists (I just learned that word!) are very different people but they are both avid readers. Ellie West fishes and bootlegs to support her struggling family; Delphine \u201cFin\u201d Coulthead is a socialite who\u2019s lost her way, but they both take time to curl up with a book\u2014and because of that, they find some common ground; see their similarities instead of their differences. The enjoyment of the written word links them\u2014and even ends up saving them, after a fashion. We\u2019ve all had to take a harder look at what we\u2019re reading over the last two years, where it comes from, and if it is written in the spirit of truth or with the desire to spread lies. But I take comfort in the fact that even in times like these one may still find pleasure and hope within the pages of a book, still be refreshed and changed by the simple act of reading, so I wanted to honor that.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, You Have to Lose Your Way to Find Your Way<\/h2>\n

As I mentioned above, Creatures of Want and Ruin<\/em> has dual protagonists, Ellie and Fin. Ellie the baywoman and bootlegger was pretty easy for me to write, in part because she\u2019s a pulp reboot of my maternal grandmother and in part because while she is a complex character, Ellie a straightforward thinker who needs to grow in her understanding of the world, but starts and finishes the novel knowing who she is inside.<\/p>\n

Not so much the socialite Fin Coulthead. I had to wrestle with Fin the entire time I was writing the book. I felt like every time I tried to write her I was staring at a puzzle with no edge pieces. I knew who<\/em> she was, but not why<\/em>. I\u2019d gone too far down the path of writing a careless person in the vein of Daisy from The Great Gatsby<\/em>\u2026 but Daisy was no heroine, and Fin is supposed to be. It was only after I had a solid enough draft to show to my agent did I figure it out\u2026 after she told me she hated<\/em> Fin. And not the cool \u201cKatniss sure is hard to like!\u201d kind of hatred. Given how my agent has close to a 100% record of being right when it comes to problems with my drafts, I went back to Fin. I listened to what my agent disliked\u2014basically, Fin\u2019s absence of any interest in the world beyond herself\u2014and worked backwards from that. In the end, I\u2019m really happy with Fin, and I hope readers will be, too.<\/p>\n

You Can\u2019t Escape Yourself, And That\u2019s Okay<\/h2>\n

These days, I mostly write fantasy\u2026 but I got my start in horror. Lovecraftian horror, to be precise. My first collection, A Pretty Mouth<\/em>, is a series of interconnected Lovecraftian tales set in different time periods; the only story I\u2019ve ever had anthologized as a Best Of is \u201cThe Thing on the Cheerleading Squad,\u201d a riff on Lovecraft\u2019s \u201cThe Thing on the Doorstep,\u201d but set in 1990 at a high school. That said, I don\u2019t write so much cosmic horror these days, a decision that was both conscious and not. I wanted to explore different themes, different settings, different possibilities. And yet, one of the early reviews of Creatures of Will and Temper <\/em>(the first, but largely unrelated book in this series), described the demons as \u201cLovecraftian,\u201d which I found surprising as I hadn\u2019t thought of them that way. I mean, the reviewer liked that, so good\u2026<\/p>\n

But it gave me pause just the same, and that\u2019s when I realized I was writing a novel in which foul mushrooms sprout from the earth as masked, mysterious cultists terrorize the night, lighting fires and demanding a return to \u201cthe old ways\u201d\u2026 even if the old ways they\u2019re talking about are backwards, para-religious sentiments like keeping women at home and marginalized communities as marginalized as possible. Ah well! We all have our muses that we follow, consciously or otherwise.<\/p>\n

America Is Hungrier Than We Knew For Hatred and Lies<\/h2>\n

In taking a \u201cbreak\u201d from writing this essay I clicked over to Facebook and saw that Florida\u2019s agriculture secretary, Donny Purdue, described the Florida gubernatorial race as \u201cso cotton-pickin\u2019 important\u201d at a GOP rally. As noted above, by the time you\u2019re reading this we shall have seen the power of such rhetoric\u2014whether it has rallied more to the Trumpist cause, or driven people away from it. Regardless, the last two years have been an alarming wake-up call for many as to the divided state of American ideas on race, class, gender, sexuality\u2026 even the need for a government at all.<\/p>\n

When I began Creatures of Want and Ruin<\/em> Trump was the GOP nominee; all the statisticians predicted a win for Hillary Clinton. And yet, Trump\u2019s rhetoric, his presence, had begun to cause ripples in the ponds of my friends\u2019 lives. We didn\u2019t know then that those ripples would become a tsunami\u2014we just knew that the summer of 2016 was a period in which many of us became vastly more uneasy around our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins and family friends, whether we were at family gatherings like barbecues and pool parties, or on Facebook.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m one of the lucky ones; I don\u2019t have to watch my tongue or risk a goodwill apocalypse around my family, but many of my friends have not been so fortunate. Perhaps it seems odd to talk about all this in a \u201cFive Things I Learned Writing\u2026\u201d essay, but this hunger I saw on the news, heard about in my friends\u2019 stories, saw on social media\u2014it informed a crucial family dynamic as I was outlining Creatures of Want and Ruin<\/em>. I wanted to write a story with a protagonist struggling with tensions similar to what so many of my friends were dealing with, because seeing them standing up to those closest to them when the stakes were so high was one of the most heroic things I\u2019ve ever witnessed. I wanted to write something to them, and for them, because of that.<\/p>\n

America Is Starving For Love and Truth and Justice<\/h2>\n

While it\u2019s true that I wrote Creatures of Want and Ruin<\/em> while in a dark place, it is still a novel of strength and of hope. Yes, during this essay I\u2019ve foregrounded a lot of the pain I\u2019ve felt post-2016, for my friends and my country, but now I\u2019ll talk about why I had the novel end in a decidedly non-Lovecraftian way, with the promise of the possibility of positive change.<\/p>\n

Why? I\u2019ll tell you: Because I attended the Women\u2019s March last year and this year, where had the honor of walking beside thousands upon thousands of dissenters in Denver\u2014and five million worldwide. Because my small rural city held a Charlottesville vigil, a Pride march that was better attended than the one held by a certain notoriously liberal city to our southwest, and our own Families Belong Together rally. Because I\u2019ve seen friends standing tall by creating art, running for public office (and winning!), volunteering until they\u2019re dog tired, reaching out in amazing ways to friends and strangers, and really just resisting in any and every way they can.\u00a0 They take their kids to rallies, host dance parties against Trump, moderate debates between local candidates. \u00a0They aren\u2019t backing down, so why would my characters, when faced with similar (if admittedly more supernatural) turmoil in their communities? I couldn\u2019t dishonor the love and passion and determination I\u2019ve seen over the last two years with a dour tale of defeat. Instead, I wanted to praise it with a pot-boiler about bootlegging liquor, kissing who you want, and fighting tyranny. It\u2019s a novel about the power of freedom\u2014the real kind, \u201cfreedom to,\u201d not \u201cfreedom from,\u201d as the all too prophetic Margaret Atwood would put it in The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em>. It\u2019s a book meant to be as inspirational as it is cautionary, but it is up to you to decide if I succeeded.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

MOLLY TANZER is the Sydney J. Bounds and Wonderland Book Award\u2013nominated author of\u00a0Vermilion\u00a0<\/i>(an NPR and\u00a0io9<\/i>\u00a0Best Book of 2015),\u00a0A Pretty Mouth,<\/i>\u00a0the historical crime novel\u00a0The Pleasure Merchant,<\/i>\u00a0and other works. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.<\/p>\n

Molly Tanzer<\/strong>: Website<\/a> | Twitter<\/a><\/p>\n

Creatures of Want and Ruin<\/strong>: Print<\/a> | eBook<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amityville baywoman Ellie West fishes by day and bootlegs moonshine by night. It\u2019s dangerous work under Prohibition\u2014independent operators like her are despised by federal agents and mobsters alike\u2014but Ellie\u2019s brother was accepted to college and Ellie\u2019s desperate to see him go. So desperate that when wealthy strangers ask her to procure libations for an extravagant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-33440","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-8Hm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33440"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33443,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33440\/revisions\/33443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}