THE BRIDGE

By Kasie Whitener

After workshop last week, I spent 45 minutes digging through boxes of old CDs looking for the Haydn trumpet solo described in the pages I took for critique.

It’s a 90-second piece that opens a concerto and it’s on a low-budget compilation album I bought at Sam Goody in 1993. It’s achingly beautiful, moving, deep, rich, and soul-healing. I can close my eyes and hear it to this day. But I couldn’t find the CD anywhere.

In the follow-up to my recently-published novel After December, the protagonist and first-person narrator, Brian hears that trumpet solo and is moved to tears. The scene takes place in a church about a year after Tony’s suicide. Brian is looking to reconnect with faith, to heal his soul after the loss of his best friend. Music is the bridge to healing.

Workshop is great for so many things, but the best thing is the confusion, disorientation, and sometimes blatant irritation the readers express over something you’ve submitted. I don’t want a workshop where the readers tell me how wonderful the pages are. I don’t get any better if what I brought in satisfies you.

So, tell me you hate it. And tell me why.

Brian sounds feminine. Is that because a woman read it aloud?

The music connection seems forced. Is that because we don’t think 23 year-old men have an appreciation for classical music?

And more useful than any other feedback was, “I don’t remember that from the first book.”

This is the first time I’ve written a sequel and this point is an important one. The readers who pick up Before Pittsburgh will not know After December as well as I do. The connections from one book to the other have to be made explicitly clear.

It’s not enough to mention Brian listening to the Haydn trumpet solo with Tony. It’s not enough to describe the connection he feels to the piece or how it moves him, a year later, to tears in a public place. If I want the reader to believe the moment, I have to deliver the memory and the present action in equal detail.

On WriteOnSC Saturday morning, we talked about Chekov’s Gun, the literary 'rule' that including a detail in your story obligates you to make that detail matter. If After December’s classical music discussions are going to be relevant in Before Pittsburgh, I need to remind the reader what those discussions were.

I wouldn’t make any progress in my work without my workshop readers. They hold me accountable. They force me to be responsible. They remind me the reader is as much part of the story as the writer is.

I’ve written before about how important critique groups are. I rely on them in a million different ways. Now, if they could only help me find that old CD. I swear it’s here somewhere.