Mostly Ghosts: The Drummers

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 6: Mostly Ghosts

Episode 2: The Drummers

Mostly Ghosts: The Elevator

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 6: Mostly Ghosts

Episode 1: The Elevator

Someday I'll Write a Book about Cider Apples

I went to a cider tasting workshop on Friday night.  We learned about what to look for when tasting a cider: the balance between acidity, sweetness, tannins, and alcohol.  We learned a little bit about the process of making cider, and then we learned some history.  And now I'm obsessed with the history of cider.

So cider comes from one specific kind of apple: the cider apple.  Cider apples are bitter and dry and basically inedible.   You can't really use them for anything other than making cider.  When prohibition hit the US, the vineyards could all continue to make grape juice.  The beer brewers could still use all their barley fields.  But there was nothing the cider makers could do with their cider apples.  The only choice they had (besides keeping an orchard full of useless cider apples that they couldn't sell) was to rip out the trees and replace them with (usually) culinary apples.

When prohibition was lifted, the vineyards and brewers got back in business, but the cider makers had no apples.  Cider in the US has never recovered.  The few cider makers in the US were mostly hobbyists, who started experimenting with culinary apples.  They combined different apple varietals of culinary apple with crab apples, which are tiny little apples that are too tart to eat raw.  Eventually, they developed what's called New World cider, which through sheer ingenuity manages to make a fun refreshing cider without the use of cider apples.  It also means that American cider has a foundation and ongoing history of experimentation that you don't feel as much in beer or wine making.  It embraces Americana ideals of innovation and preserveering through rough times.

They still use cider apples in England and France, and you can taste the difference if you try them.  They have complex tastes, and sometimes they're left to age just like wine, so they have the vintage stamped on the label.  How fancy!  They're much more like wine than New World cider, which I think of more like fun time apple juice that comes in a can.

There's a story in here.  There's a story about having to rip your life's work out of the ground because of a declaration from the powers that be that you're no longer allowed to do that work.  There's a story in here about trying to rebuild from culinary apples.  There's a setting of an apple orchard and a chronic tension.  It's not enough to carry a whole story, but it's enough to be the set up for a story.  Even though I'm overwhelmed with how much I need to get done and how many projects I already have going, I've spent the last several days overlaying story ideas onto this and seeing if I can get anything to fit. 

On Endings

If you're following the podcast, you might notice that I just end the episode when I'm done.  Maybe threads are left unresolved, because life is messy and I can't solve all this character's problems in twenty minutes.  Sometimes I leave a listener wanting more.  I consider this a victory, because it's far better than the alternative when a listener is thankful that the episode is over and they are 100% done with these characters.  Sometimes the resolution a listener thinks they want would be super dull if I actually gave it to them.  They would turn against me by the time I was done.  "Well, it was fun episode about kelpies until Carolyn stated talking about the process of getting a restraining order."  Maybe the lack of conclusion will eat at them until they start a conversation with my work by creating their own.  (That would be rad, but to my knowledge has never happened.)

This method of stopping when I'm done works for the podcast (or at least, I've decided that it works) because episodes are short.  Hopefully if a listener finds an ending unsatisfying, they won't feel cheated because they've only "wasted" twenty minutes.  Hopefully, their appreciation of the brevity will outweigh their disappointment that there's not more story. 

It does not work for a novel. 

In reading a novel, a reader has devoted hours to a single story, and they will feel betrayed if they are left unsatisfied at the end.  A reader has given an author's work their valuable time and valuable attention, so not providing they a payoff is almost aggressively rude.  Some novelists like breaking that implicit contract that they will resolve a problem (or at least not resolve it in a satisfying way), but I don't want to be one of those writers who purposefully frustrates their reader and purposefully makes a novel difficult to read.

So this is all a way of saying that endings are hard.  When my agent read my last novel, she asked if I planned a sequel.  I had not.  "If you're not going to write a sequel, you need to tie up these loose ends," she said.  "This reads like there's going to be more." 

Of course, I'd intended for it to be like "everything's not always tied up in a neat bow!  Life goes on and chronic issues take time to work on!  Whishy washy wishy washy."  But she was absolutely right, and what she said has stuck with me to the point where I've gone through other novels looking for this, and sure enough, it's there.  I tie up the main plot is a satisfying way, with some big show pieces and some drama and some fireworks, but what about all those other threads that flushed the novel out along the way?  I've just let those hang, thinking they'd fade into the background after the big showpiece climax!  But you know what?  If you let too many threads hang, you just end up with a frayed looking edge.

In trying to improve, I've been looking at my manuscripts and asking myself, "What story threads feel like they're leading into a sequel?"  And then working on those.  I've been removing them completely.  I've been altering how they play out so they end up with a conclusion, which is hard when I know how the story goes and this isn't it.

The other thing she said, that I'm trying to keep in mind is that I need to be mindful of y themes.  Those themes I've been bringing up like motifs throughout the novel, need to come back at the end.  I need to bring those back up at the end so that when a reader thinks back on the book, they think back on its themes.  That's hard for me because I want a reader to think back on the big, exciting explosion at the end, and I have to wrestle that desire under control because it's not helping.  And if the themes are tied to the explosion, then they both stand out.  They're both more rooted into the story.

Someday, I'm going to nail an ending, and it's going to be great.