The Beginning
I wrote Absolute Value as my thesis in an MFA program. It was my first novel, and I was fortunate to have the advice of my writing professors and the encouragement of my peers. The fact that the novel was my thesis was liberating, in a way—the primary goal wasn’t publication but to earn my master’s degree. I wasn’t thinking about next steps.
Early in 2005, around the time I was getting ready to enter the thesis stage of my program, I happened to read Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels. (Chevalier is also the author of Girl with the Pearl Earring.) The novel takes place in London in the early 1900s, and the story is told with multiple first-person narrators. One of them was an upper-class woman who goes through a difficult illegal abortion, becomes depressed, and then discovers new vitality in joining the suffragette movement.
That book got me thinking. I knew I didn’t want to attempt historical fiction for a first novel, but what about a contemporary young adult story about abortion? Or would that be too ordinary? I did a little research and soon realized that there wasn’t a lot of teen literature that dealt with abortion as a central theme. If abortion was in a story at all, it was a small part of a larger story.
This absence of literature was startling to me. One of our expectations of fiction—at least some of the time—is that it reflects our lives back to us; it helps us see who we are, what sort of culture we’re living in, what aspects of history have shaped us. I think that’s especially true of young adult fiction. Difficult topics abound—suicide, drug and alcohol addictions, mental illness, physical abuse, sexual abuse, racism, poverty, and so on. And yet I could find next to nothing on abortion. Why? Were writers and publishers afraid that a book with a central theme of abortion would be interpreted as encouraging abortion? Was abortion an untouchable topic due to the frightening tactics of the right wing?
Yet these were the statistics at that time: Every year, more than 1.5 million women in this country chose to end their pregnancies; 250,000 of them were teens. I felt strongly that the lack of teen literature about abortion was, simply, wrong.
I had my topic.
The Framework
Several decisions quickly followed. I knew that I wanted the story to take place in a short time frame. I wanted to really linger over the difficult emotions. I wanted to take a close look at the decision-making process and break it down into the smallest units. I knew that I wanted the girl to be pregnant already, and in a good relationship with a decent guy. I also knew that I wanted to give the guy’s perspective, which meant writing in alternating points of view. I chose third person, limited omniscient, because I felt it would work best with the alternating chapters. I hoped it would minimize the risk of having one character dominate the story. I also wanted to have a little extra control, to have the ability both to observe them and to zero in on their thoughts. (Also, to be honest, I was a little annoyed by the expectation in the publishing industry that YA stories be told in first person.)
So—I had good kids, a good relationship, a short time frame, and alternating third-person points of view. The next decision was that the boy would be from a conservative Christian, pro-life family. Again, it was a decision made purely to up the tension in the book, to provide a unique angle to the story. And then I asked, what if those pro-life parents are sympathetic characters as well? What happens if they are good people completely sincere in their beliefs? All of these early decisions formed the basis of the story.
At first I was worried about the way I’d gone about this. It seemed too calculating. I imagined that a “real writer” would start out with a feeling for the characters, or a setting or situation. I was concerned that my characters would seem like props, flat, and that the story would be about the issue rather than the characters. But when I started writing, the characters pretty quickly seemed real to me. It’s the magic of fiction—when you feel that you are not a creator, necessarily, but an explorer. A particular truth is out there and it’s your job to find it and portray it to the best of your ability. It’s a truth that exists beyond you. And most of the time, it isn’t what you expect to find.
This format—the two-month time frame and the alternating points of view—had an enormous impact on how I wrote the manuscript. Certain things had to happen in each character’s chapter. In addition, the chapters had to be approximately the same length. Nate does get one more chapter than Gabrielle, mostly to bookend the story and also because his conflict was more complex. As I wrote, though, I was very aware of maintaining a balance between the two points of view. I worked closely with an outline and a calendar in which every event was dated.
I found that I totally enjoyed writing from two points of view. I liked looking at the story from different angles, and even though I spent less time with each character, I felt I understood them better: not only was I seeing things from inside their own minds, but I was seeing how they appeared to each other—and, less directly, how they appeared to other characters in the story as well. In each chapter I tried to include a small reference to something that had happened in the previous chapter, to provide a bit of overlap.
However, I quickly learned that with two points of view, I actually was dealing with two separate stories, and as a result, some areas of development were more limited than I would have liked. If I’d written strictly from Gabrielle’s point of view, for instance, I would have included much more about her dad, her friends (Sarah and Trudy as well as others), her schoolwork, her saxophone playing and other activities, her feelings and expectations about college, her extended family. I would have provided more physical details about the pregnancy and the immediate aftermath of the abortion. Possibly I would have described the beginning of her sexual relationship with Nate. And there’s a whole list of topics I would have covered if I’d been telling this from Nate’s point of view, as well. But overall my instinct was that this story—or rather, these two stories—needed to be centered on the relationships these teenagers had with each other and with their parents, and how the pregnancy and Gabrielle’s decision to have an abortion affected those relationships.
A Few Words about Family
I’m aware that Absolute Value is an outlier in its treatment of family—usually parents and family don’t play such a major role in teen fiction. This age group wants to read about kids making their own decisions, living their own lives. That’s only natural. But it’s also true that our families of origin have an enormous impact on the people we become and the choices we make. The two families portrayed aren’t perfect; neither are they dysfunctional. They are different in many ways, but also share many of the same values. I would hope that even those who oppose abortion would acknowledge that, for any woman at any age, the decision to have an abortion isn’t made in a void. Family matters.
I’d also like to point out that this book, while treating a controversial topic, is actually quite discreet. The abortion itself isn’t depicted, and there’s no explicit sex. I tried to keep the focus on the characters’ emotional lives and on the events that were important to the story.
About Those Chapter Openers
When I wrote an early draft of the first chapter, in class, I included a scene in which Nate does a Google search for the word dread. It’s sort of a game with him, to look up individual words just to see what comes up. It gives him a sense for the hidden connections between things. I decided to use internet word searches as his chapter openers. I liked the idea of openers, to provide a more structured transition between the two points of view. I didn’t want them to be too overt—they were only supposed to suggest the theme, the dominant emotion, in the upcoming chapter, not imply that Nate actually sat down and did that particular search.
But if I had chapter openers for Nate, I needed to have something similar for Gabrielle. She was into math and numbers, and I knew I wanted her openers to have something to do with that, but I didn’t know what. I dug up some interesting math facts, but they didn’t set the right tone. I found some math poetry, and while some of it was beautiful, I felt it was too dominant—the voice was too strong, and it had nothing to do with Gabrielle. Plus it would be very cumbersome (and likely expensive) to find just the right poems and then have to get permission to use them. Then I discovered a website devoted to the etymology of math terms, and it seemed like the perfect fit. Here, too, I intended openers to be only suggestions of what lay ahead in the chapter—just something that Gabrielle might think, not that she actually did.
It’s likely that some readers won’t get the openers, or won’t enjoy them, but I hoped that even if that was the case, their effect would be neutral—readers could always skip them without losing track of the actual story. For me, figuring out the openers was the most purely enjoyable part of putting together this manuscript. The internet word searches gave me a subtle way of providing more cultural context to the book, and I was always able to find one phrase to end with that had an exceptionally good ring to it or that related more directly to the story. And with the math etymology, I was frequently amazed at how well these short definitions of basic math terms described what was happening in Gabrielle’s chapter. For me, anyway, the openers elevated the story and provided a reminder that seemingly disparate ideas are often, in fact, related, and that the world is always a little more mysterious, more poetic, than we think.
Chapter 14
Another decision I made was how to treat the chapter in which the abortion takes place. I knew I didn’t want to describe the abortion itself—even though I had interviewed a staff member at the Midwest Women’s Center in Minneapolis and probably could have pieced together a convincing scene. I didn’t want anyone to read this chapter as a “What to Expect at the Clinic” sort of piece. I wanted to stay focused on the emotional impact of what Gabrielle was doing. I started writing in a present-tense, stream-of-consciousness style, and the chapter flowed so easily that I felt like someone else was giving me the words. The rest of the book had a here-and-now, realistic feel, but I thought that Gabrielle would have experienced that particular day in a sort of dreamlike state, and that’s what I wanted to convey.
The Epilogue
While writing the main text I often felt like a sadist—I kept stripping things away from these characters, making their conflicts deeper and deeper and not giving them any respite. In their last chapters, however, they finally hit bottom and start coming back up. Gabrielle crawls into bed with her little sister, feeling that she can get some rest there; Nate hears his father say “you’re our son, you belong here.” I knew that I didn’t want to take the main story past that point. But I found that I myself needed a little more comfort, and I imagined that readers would feel the same way.
My earliest exploratory drafts had included a prologue and epilogue in Gabrielle’s voice, taking place on New Year’s Day—the prologue when she was just starting to notice Nate, and the epilogue a year later when she was reflecting on her decision and the breakup. I’d discarded that material much earlier, but thought it could still work to include a New Year’s epilogue that lets the reader see that some healing has, in fact, taken place. When we leave these characters, we know that Nate and Gabrielle did truly love each other. We know that they will be okay.
Why Write Fiction?
My experience with Absolute Value taught me that writing long fiction is a tremendous risk. We work in the smallest of units—words, punctuation, and breaks. These are the individual pixels we wrestle with, on a day-to-day basis. But these pixels have to add up to a much larger picture. With a novel, or any work with a sustained narrative, it’s not enough to write some good sentences, or some good paragraphs, or even some good chapters. Working in pixels, we strive to carve Crazy Horse out of the mountain.
But striving doesn’t make it so. It is entirely possible that these beautiful pixels we struggle with will never amount to anything, in the end; they won’t join together to form a satisfying whole. Even if every chapter is successful on its own, the chapters might not coalesce into the shape the writer intends, or maybe the larger pattern turns out to be lackluster and dull. The warrior and his magnificent horse never emerge.
I don’t think there are a lot of pursuits that demand so much time and focus and determination, with the end result being so precarious. Even if a novel does succeed, the odds of it actually getting published are dismally low. The odds of it making enough money to live on are even lower.
So why do it? The success or failure of a particular book might just be irrelevant. We can work hard, aim high, and hope for the best, but it’s essential that we take our pleasure in the process of writing. That has to be reason enough.
When I was writing Absolute Value, I often felt like I was building a house in my head. I drew up the blueprint, put up the studs and the sheetrock, installed the pipes and electrical, laid the carpeting. Sometimes I had to rip out walls or put in windows—it wasn’t a very efficient process. But it was an amazing feeling, to carry with me at all times this alternate world. If I woke up in the middle of the night—which happened very frequently while I was writing—I could wander around this house, going from room to room, admiring a picture on the wall or trying to fix a leaky faucet.
I loved the complete freedom of fiction, coupled with the sense of purpose—to sit down each day with a problem to solve that is entirely of my own making. I loved being startled at odd moments by sudden revelations: that a passage belongs in this chapter and not that one; that a character would be feeling a different emotion in a certain scene; that a section would be stronger if I cut this paragraph. I did truly feel that I was tapping into a mysterious source of knowledge.
But the best moments were the ones in which my characters felt the most real: when I saw an outfit in a store that I knew Gabrielle would like; when I was on the treadmill and suddenly felt my breath catch in my throat, the way it did for Nate’s mother when she found out about the abortion; when I was walking in a school parking lot at night and had the sense that Nate was nearby. When, just the other night, in a dream, Nate handed me a small package—and then I woke up, thrilled by his presence and yet disappointed, because I hadn’t seen his face.
The Beginning
I wrote Absolute Value as my thesis in an MFA program. It was my first novel, and I was fortunate to have the advice of my writing professors and the encouragement of my peers. The fact that the novel was my thesis was liberating, in a way—the primary goal wasn’t publication but to earn my master’s degree. I wasn’t thinking about next steps.
Early in 2005, around the time I was getting ready to enter the thesis stage of my program, I happened to read Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels. (Chevalier is also the author of Girl with the Pearl Earring.) The novel takes place in London in the early 1900s, and the story is told with multiple first-person narrators. One of them was an upper-class woman who goes through a difficult illegal abortion, becomes depressed, and then discovers new vitality in joining the suffragette movement.
That book got me thinking. I knew I didn’t want to attempt historical fiction for a first novel, but what about a contemporary young adult story about abortion? Or would that be too ordinary? I did a little research and soon realized that there wasn’t a lot of teen literature that dealt with abortion as a central theme. If abortion was in a story at all, it was a small part of a larger story.
This absence of literature was startling to me. One of our expectations of fiction—at least some of the time—is that it reflects our lives back to us; it helps us see who we are, what sort of culture we’re living in, what aspects of history have shaped us. I think that’s especially true of young adult fiction. Difficult topics abound—suicide, drug and alcohol addictions, mental illness, physical abuse, sexual abuse, racism, poverty, and so on. And yet I could find next to nothing on abortion. Why? Were writers and publishers afraid that a book with a central theme of abortion would be interpreted as encouraging abortion? Was abortion an untouchable topic due to the frightening tactics of the right wing?
Yet these were the statistics at that time: Every year, more than 1.5 million women in this country chose to end their pregnancies; 250,000 of them were teens. I felt strongly that the lack of teen literature about abortion was, simply, wrong.
I had my topic.
The Framework
Several decisions quickly followed. I knew that I wanted the story to take place in a short time frame. I wanted to really linger over the difficult emotions. I wanted to take a close look at the decision-making process and break it down into the smallest units. I knew that I wanted the girl to be pregnant already, and in a good relationship with a decent guy. I also knew that I wanted to give the guy’s perspective, which meant writing in alternating points of view. I chose third person, limited omniscient, because I felt it would work best with the alternating chapters. I hoped it would minimize the risk of having one character dominate the story. I also wanted to have a little extra control, to have the ability both to observe them and to zero in on their thoughts. (Also, to be honest, I was a little annoyed by the expectation in the publishing industry that YA stories be told in first person.)
So—I had good kids, a good relationship, a short time frame, and alternating third-person points of view. The next decision was that the boy would be from a conservative Christian, pro-life family. Again, it was a decision made purely to up the tension in the book, to provide a unique angle to the story. And then I asked, what if those pro-life parents are sympathetic characters as well? What happens if they are good people completely sincere in their beliefs? All of these early decisions formed the basis of the story.
At first I was worried about the way I’d gone about this. It seemed too calculating. I imagined that a “real writer” would start out with a feeling for the characters, or a setting or situation. I was concerned that my characters would seem like props, flat, and that the story would be about the issue rather than the characters. But when I started writing, the characters pretty quickly seemed real to me. It’s the magic of fiction—when you feel that you are not a creator, necessarily, but an explorer. A particular truth is out there and it’s your job to find it and portray it to the best of your ability. It’s a truth that exists beyond you. And most of the time, it isn’t what you expect to find.
This format—the two-month time frame and the alternating points of view—had an enormous impact on how I wrote the manuscript. Certain things had to happen in each character’s chapter. In addition, the chapters had to be approximately the same length. Nate does get one more chapter than Gabrielle, mostly to bookend the story and also because his conflict was more complex. As I wrote, though, I was very aware of maintaining a balance between the two points of view. I worked closely with an outline and a calendar in which every event was dated.
I found that I totally enjoyed writing from two points of view. I liked looking at the story from different angles, and even though I spent less time with each character, I felt I understood them better: not only was I seeing things from inside their own minds, but I was seeing how they appeared to each other—and, less directly, how they appeared to other characters in the story as well. In each chapter I tried to include a small reference to something that had happened in the previous chapter, to provide a bit of overlap.
However, I quickly learned that with two points of view, I actually was dealing with two separate stories, and as a result, some areas of development were more limited than I would have liked. If I’d written strictly from Gabrielle’s point of view, for instance, I would have included much more about her dad, her friends (Sarah and Trudy as well as others), her schoolwork, her saxophone playing and other activities, her feelings and expectations about college, her extended family. I would have provided more physical details about the pregnancy and the immediate aftermath of the abortion. Possibly I would have described the beginning of her sexual relationship with Nate. And there’s a whole list of topics I would have covered if I’d been telling this from Nate’s point of view, as well. But overall my instinct was that this story—or rather, these two stories—needed to be centered on the relationships these teenagers had with each other and with their parents, and how the pregnancy and Gabrielle’s decision to have an abortion affected those relationships.
A Few Words about Family
I’m aware that Absolute Value is an outlier in its treatment of family—usually parents and family don’t play such a major role in teen fiction. This age group wants to read about kids making their own decisions, living their own lives. That’s only natural. But it’s also true that our families of origin have an enormous impact on the people we become and the choices we make. The two families portrayed aren’t perfect; neither are they dysfunctional. They are different in many ways, but also share many of the same values. I would hope that even those who oppose abortion would acknowledge that, for any woman at any age, the decision to have an abortion isn’t made in a void. Family matters.
I’d also like to point out that this book, while treating a controversial topic, is actually quite discreet. The abortion itself isn’t depicted, and there’s no explicit sex. I tried to keep the focus on the characters’ emotional lives and on the events that were important to the story.
About Those Chapter Openers
When I wrote an early draft of the first chapter, in class, I included a scene in which Nate does a Google search for the word dread. It’s sort of a game with him, to look up individual words just to see what comes up. It gives him a sense for the hidden connections between things. I decided to use internet word searches as his chapter openers. I liked the idea of openers, to provide a more structured transition between the two points of view. I didn’t want them to be too overt—they were only supposed to suggest the theme, the dominant emotion, in the upcoming chapter, not imply that Nate actually sat down and did that particular search.
But if I had chapter openers for Nate, I needed to have something similar for Gabrielle. She was into math and numbers, and I knew I wanted her openers to have something to do with that, but I didn’t know what. I dug up some interesting math facts, but they didn’t set the right tone. I found some math poetry, and while some of it was beautiful, I felt it was too dominant—the voice was too strong, and it had nothing to do with Gabrielle. Plus it would be very cumbersome (and likely expensive) to find just the right poems and then have to get permission to use them. Then I discovered a website devoted to the etymology of math terms, and it seemed like the perfect fit. Here, too, I intended openers to be only suggestions of what lay ahead in the chapter—just something that Gabrielle might think, not that she actually did.
It’s likely that some readers won’t get the openers, or won’t enjoy them, but I hoped that even if that was the case, their effect would be neutral—readers could always skip them without losing track of the actual story. For me, figuring out the openers was the most purely enjoyable part of putting together this manuscript. The internet word searches gave me a subtle way of providing more cultural context to the book, and I was always able to find one phrase to end with that had an exceptionally good ring to it or that related more directly to the story. And with the math etymology, I was frequently amazed at how well these short definitions of basic math terms described what was happening in Gabrielle’s chapter. For me, anyway, the openers elevated the story and provided a reminder that seemingly disparate ideas are often, in fact, related, and that the world is always a little more mysterious, more poetic, than we think.
Chapter 14
Another decision I made was how to treat the chapter in which the abortion takes place. I knew I didn’t want to describe the abortion itself—even though I had interviewed a staff member at the Midwest Women’s Center in Minneapolis and probably could have pieced together a convincing scene. I didn’t want anyone to read this chapter as a “What to Expect at the Clinic” sort of piece. I wanted to stay focused on the emotional impact of what Gabrielle was doing. I started writing in a present-tense, stream-of-consciousness style, and the chapter flowed so easily that I felt like someone else was giving me the words. The rest of the book had a here-and-now, realistic feel, but I thought that Gabrielle would have experienced that particular day in a sort of dreamlike state, and that’s what I wanted to convey.
The Epilogue
While writing the main text I often felt like a sadist—I kept stripping things away from these characters, making their conflicts deeper and deeper and not giving them any respite. In their last chapters, however, they finally hit bottom and start coming back up. Gabrielle crawls into bed with her little sister, feeling that she can get some rest there; Nate hears his father say “you’re our son, you belong here.” I knew that I didn’t want to take the main story past that point. But I found that I myself needed a little more comfort, and I imagined that readers would feel the same way.
My earliest exploratory drafts had included a prologue and epilogue in Gabrielle’s voice, taking place on New Year’s Day—the prologue when she was just starting to notice Nate, and the epilogue a year later when she was reflecting on her decision and the breakup. I’d discarded that material much earlier, but thought it could still work to include a New Year’s epilogue that lets the reader see that some healing has, in fact, taken place. When we leave these characters, we know that Nate and Gabrielle did truly love each other. We know that they will be okay.
Why Write Fiction?
My experience with Absolute Value taught me that writing long fiction is a tremendous risk. We work in the smallest of units—words, punctuation, and breaks. These are the individual pixels we wrestle with, on a day-to-day basis. But these pixels have to add up to a much larger picture. With a novel, or any work with a sustained narrative, it’s not enough to write some good sentences, or some good paragraphs, or even some good chapters. Working in pixels, we strive to carve Crazy Horse out of the mountain.
But striving doesn’t make it so. It is entirely possible that these beautiful pixels we struggle with will never amount to anything, in the end; they won’t join together to form a satisfying whole. Even if every chapter is successful on its own, the chapters might not coalesce into the shape the writer intends, or maybe the larger pattern turns out to be lackluster and dull. The warrior and his magnificent horse never emerge.
I don’t think there are a lot of pursuits that demand so much time and focus and determination, with the end result being so precarious. Even if a novel does succeed, the odds of it actually getting published are dismally low. The odds of it making enough money to live on are even lower.
So why do it? The success or failure of a particular book might just be irrelevant. We can work hard, aim high, and hope for the best, but it’s essential that we take our pleasure in the process of writing. That has to be reason enough.
When I was writing Absolute Value, I often felt like I was building a house in my head. I drew up the blueprint, put up the studs and the sheetrock, installed the pipes and electrical, laid the carpeting. Sometimes I had to rip out walls or put in windows—it wasn’t a very efficient process. But it was an amazing feeling, to carry with me at all times this alternate world. If I woke up in the middle of the night—which happened very frequently while I was writing—I could wander around this house, going from room to room, admiring a picture on the wall or trying to fix a leaky faucet.
I loved the complete freedom of fiction, coupled with the sense of purpose—to sit down each day with a problem to solve that is entirely of my own making. I loved being startled at odd moments by sudden revelations: that a passage belongs in this chapter and not that one; that a character would be feeling a different emotion in a certain scene; that a section would be stronger if I cut this paragraph. I did truly feel that I was tapping into a mysterious source of knowledge.
But the best moments were the ones in which my characters felt the most real: when I saw an outfit in a store that I knew Gabrielle would like; when I was on the treadmill and suddenly felt my breath catch in my throat, the way it did for Nate’s mother when she found out about the abortion; when I was walking in a school parking lot at night and had the sense that Nate was nearby. When, just the other night, in a dream, Nate handed me a small package—and then I woke up, thrilled by his presence and yet disappointed, because I hadn’t seen his face.