Creating in Flow

Insights and advice about all forms of creative expression

Tinker with Your Novel, Win a Pulitzer

Paul Harding's winning of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction wasn't expected. Not by him, not by his publisher. He had tinkered with his debut novel (Tinkers) until it was tight and compelling. But he wasn't able to secure an agent or publisher and put it away for two or three years... Read More

What's the book about?

What's the book about? Similar length to the current draft of my book; hope I find a similarly good publisher

What it's about

You probably know that a literary novel isn't necessarily ABOUT what it's about. But here's the summary from the publisher (on their site at the link I mention in my post):

"An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure.

A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost 7 decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring.

Tinkers is about the legacy of consciousness and the porousness of identity from one generation the next. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, it is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature."

I bet your own book, Ian, isn't ABOUT the same thing! (But good luck with it.)

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Susan K. Perry, Ph.D., is a social psychologist and author. Among her 7 books are Writing in Flow: Keys to Enhanced Creativity and her latest, the novel Kylie's Heel.

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