Author Guest Post - Michael Baron (& Giveaway)

Readers, please join me welcoming Michael Baron, author of When You Went Away, who will be guest blogging here today! In this book, drama springs from finding the courage to put one foot in front of the other each day and, for protagonist Gerry Rubato, the alternate universe is one he can only imagine—one in which his wife, the mother of their infant son, is still alive and his teenage daughter has not abandoned them.

In a Sentimental Mood

Many years ago, I read an article that John Irving had written for the New York Times Book Review. In it, he defended the novelist’s use of sentimental passages if they were intrinsic to the story and not contrived purely to generate an emotional response from the reader. His argument, if I’m remembering it correctly, was that these events do in fact come up in our real lives. Therefore, a writer should be able to reflect this reality on the page. Sentimental experiences can tell us as much about ourselves as tragic experiences, traumatic experiences, or disillusioning experiences. They are therefore no less “literary,” as long as the writer employs them honestly.

I found this piece extremely liberating. For years, I had gravitated toward novelists whose work had a certain heart-on-the-sleeve element. Someone like Pat Conroy, who can range from brutal to deeply sentimental in a matter of paragraphs. Or Barbara Kingsolver, whose characters so often express such deep care for one another. Or Luanne Rice, whose novels often teem with sentiment without ever becoming mawkish. Having been raised by proper literary mentors, I felt a certain amount of guilt over enjoying these writers so much. Real novels were supposed to be darker, their lessons more sobering. John Irving freed me from this thinking, and I am deeply appreciative of this.

For the longest time, this article only influenced me as a reader. I focused the first portion of my writing career on works of nonfiction and sentimentality was never a factor. Then I decided that I wanted to write fiction. Fiction about relationships. Fiction where people had an impact on each other. That meant I needed to make a decision. I could write an emotion-driven story influenced by the writers that most inspired me. Or I could write an intellectually driven story influenced by the still prevalent conventions about what made a novel relevant. I chose the former and set out to do everything I could to make the sentiment in my work feel real.

I did not make this easy on myself. I wanted to write about fatherhood and about the redemptive qualities of love. So I set up a situation that threw these themes into relief – in a way that could easily be interpreted as maudlin. I made my protagonist a man in his early forties whose wife had died only two months after giving birth to their second child. I had the first child – a teenager – run away from home, unaware of her mother’s fate. I had a woman come into my protagonist’s life in the midst of his grief and confusion. I did all of these things because they allowed me to write about issues that meant a great deal to me. But I realized that I was always one sentence away from descending into melodrama.

To address this, I strove to make every situation as honest as I possibly could (while understanding that there are some inherent contradictions between fiction and honesty). I wanted the reader to accept the sentimental passages in the novel (and there are many) because they felt natural to the characters and the situation. I wanted to live up to the standard that John Irving set in my mind when he put that article out into the world.

Did I succeed? Only readers can say. But I embraced the challenge so much that it has become my model for writing novels.

Thank you for that insightful post, dear author. Yes, honesty works for me most of the time, whatever form it might take. What about you, readers?

GIVEAWAY

The Prize

A copy of this book will go to one lucky reader.

To Enter

• Tell me about a book that has influenced you as a reader and how.
  
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Deadline   Midnight CST of December 2, 2009.

Eligibility  US & Can only.

Please read the Disclaimer. Good luck!

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