Joshilyn Jackson's Backstory for gods in Alabama

gods in Alabama began with a dead body. Lord knows I was frustrated enough to kill someone.

In four years, I’d burned untold hours writing and revising two novels, spent hundreds of dollars on postage getting an agent, and waited with all my internal organs crowding up to squat in my throat while each book was shopped at the big NYC houses. All I had to show for it was a fat file of encouragingly long rejection letters that said a variation of, "This is a writer we are interested in…but this is not The Book. Let us see her next one. Let us see it first." So my agent would pat my head and say, "Very few writers actually sell the first book they write. Stick that one in a drawer and go write another. Try to make it The Book this time."

When he sent me off to write the third novel, I already had a couple of characters I knew I wanted to write about. Arlene Fleet and her boyfriend, Burr, both appeared in a short story I had written almost seven years earlier and sold to TriQuarterly Magazine. They are "on screen" for maybe ten lines, and the narrator of that story can’t stand Arlene, but something about them, Arlene especially, stuck with me. Re-reading the story, watching Arlene crouch in a self-protective wad and smoke fiercely and glare around, I felt she must have a great and terrible secret to be on such defensive autopilot… I just didn’t know what it was.

While I was mulling her over in my head, a writer friend came over in a state of despair. Her novel had placed second in a contest. The first place prize was a rather nice publishing contract.

"What the hell do I have to do?" she wailed. "Kill somebody?"

And I thought, "Yeah. Maybe you do…"

After my friend left, I ran to my computer and started typing. I wrote for several hours, eager, unstoppable. It was like I was transcribing. I could see the rows of junker cars lined up at a make-out spot, could smell the cut-green scent of rural Alabama air, and I could hear Arlene perfectly, a younger Arlene, only fifteen years old, as she told me exactly what happened the night she went creeping up to the top of Lipsmack Hill to beat Jim Beverly’s head in with a tequila bottle.

The scene I wrote that night appears almost word for word in gods in Alabama. That’s very unusual for me. I usually spend about 15% of my writing time drafting and the rest is spent revising, revising, revising. Oh, the story around it changed radically over the next year and a half, and the scene itself moved from the opening pages to chapter two. The book now begins over ten years later in Chicago, where Arlene has made a deal with God: She’ll never tell another lie, she’ll stop fornicating with every boy she meets, and she’ll never cross the state line back into Alabama, as long as God keeps Jim Beverly’s body hidden. That deal goes south, and so does Arlene.

When I finished gods, I sent it off to my agent, and I left a long, breathless message on his answering machine, telling him it was coming, and saying, "And I think this is it, this is what you told me to write. I think…I think…I think this is The Book."

My agent is an older man, very stately and genteel, and he has always acted as mentor to me, guiding me through the shark-infested waters. He called me back and left a message on my machine: "Alright then. I’ll read the new book when I get back in town, but don’t get all hyped up and crazy. I’ll tell you when it is The Book, you just concentrate on the work…"

A week or so later I came home to another message from him. I pressed play. He said two sentences, just seven words, before he hung up. "You were right. This is The Book." And it was.

Joshilyn Jackson is the author of gods in Alabama.

Comments

[Margaret Able]

Loved this backstory. I'd clipped the ad for Gods in Alabama as a possible buy, but I'm definitely getting it now! Congratulations on selling The Book!

[Jozef Imrich]

I seem to have your message back to front and up side down ... I understand that writer should kill first in order to write, but sometimes it is better to write first and then kill ...

Hope dies last - how cruel yet kind ;-)

[Allison Brennan]

Fantastic backstory. I saw a post on Kathleen O'Reilly's blog about this book and added it to my wish list at bn.com (I sort of blew my book budget for the month already), because I loved the premise.

[littlemiss]

How Neat!!!!

I just bought the book and am a fellow Momwriter...:)

Ann Marie

[Robin Kemp]

Just met Joshilyn in passing at a writing group, where she told a slightly longer version of this story--encouraging to hear someone whose nerve and finesse came in handy at publishing time! Can't wait to read the book itself.