Friday Speak Out!: Algebra for Writers

by Lee Zacharias

I knew I wanted to be a writer from second grade, when I first put my hand up for show-and-tell and made up a story. I never knew what the story would be, but there was a certain logic to my tales. The longer I could draw out the suspense the less time we had for arithmetic.

So it might seem odd that when I got to high school I fell in love with algebra. To me the beauty of algebra was its system of logic. That my son never bought this argument when I was helping with his homework is beside the point. Writing is a process of posing problems and figuring out answers. There is a kind of algebra to writing a novel.

Some problems may be mundane: how to drain a lake, how to evacuate a ship? (Research helps there.) But the most pressing problems are more profound: why is this story being told, why now, what is the resolution, what does it mean? Sometimes you have to dig deep; it may take years to discover the answer. I was more than twenty drafts into my new novel, Across the Great Lake, before I knew who the ghost was. At some point in the first I knew why my narrator was telling her story, knew her secret, knew pretty much how the story would resolve, but I did not know who the ghost was. After all, the Great Lakes have a lot of ghosts. Why shouldn't any one of those spirits visit her?

But my narrator's ghost didn't come from Midwestern lore—I stole her from a night I once spent at the Island Inn on Ocracoke, nearly 1200 miles away from the Lake Michigan railroad car ferry where Fern's ghost visits her. I was at the edge of an ocean, not a Great Lake, but something about edges puts one between one world and another. Mrs. Godfrey—whose identity is fairly well documented, I've learned since—did to me what exactly what Fern's ghost does to her, grabbed my big toe and held on. (Is it a coincidence that the same toe later developed hallux rigidus and required a surgical implant?) She made for a restless night, but I might have convinced myself I'd imagined it or had a bad dream if the desk clerk hadn't taken one look at my face when I came downstairs the next morning and said, "Would you like to change rooms?" Yes, and Mrs. Godfrey never bothered me again. Why she chooses certain rooms over others I can't say. Ghosts keep their secrets. Perhaps that's why it took me so long to discover the identity of Fern's.

But a ghost in a novel can't be just any ghost you've read about in legends or even encountered yourself, unless you figure out why. A ghost needs a purpose, and once you realize that purpose you have found X, and it is that X that immeasurably deepens the meaning.

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LEE ZACHARIAS is the author of a collection of short stories, Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night; three novels, Across the Great Lake, Lessons, and At Random; and a collection of personal essays, The Only Sounds We Make. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council, North Carolina's Sir Walter Raleigh Award, Southern Humanities Review's Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award, Prairie Schooner's Glenna Luschei Award, and a Silver Medal in Creative Nonfiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (the IPPYs). Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and been recognized by The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Essay, which reprinted her essay "Buzzards" in its 2008 edition. She taught at the University Arkansas, Princeton University, and the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where she is Emerita Professor of English, as well as many conferences, most recently the Wildacres Writers Workshop. Find her online at http://leezacharias.com/
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Would you like to participate in Friday "Speak Out!"? Email your short posts (under 500 words) about women and writing to: marcia[at]wow-womenonwriting[dot]com for consideration. We look forward to hearing from you!
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