Last Thursday, I went to a reading by novelist Laura Moriarty at the Lawrence Public Library. The reading was great fun; Moriarty was outgoing and entertaining (which you can't always expect from an author), and her new book sounds fascinating. I'm especially interested to read it because the heroine (Veronica) grew up in a suburb of Kansas City, attended KU, and is a resident assistant in the dorms, all of which I share in common with her. I think it will be exciting and strange to read a novel set in Kansas about someone who is at least a little like myself.
Anyway, the article below is an attempt to write a newspaper-style report on the reading. I was trying to make it terse, clean, informative, and focused on Moriarty as a writer. If you have any suggestions for improving it, please let me know! And if you want to know more about Moriarty as a person and her life in Lawrence, you can read this great little interview from Gavon Laessig of the Lawrence Journal-World.
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August 8, 2009
Not every novelist compares herself to a Border Collie and forces her characters to eat meat, but Laura Moriarty, a Lawrence resident and creative writing professor at the University of Kansas, is not every novelist. As she read to a crowd of over 70 readers at the Lawrence Public Library on August 6, the young author was relaxed, personable, and often funny, easily charming her hometown crowd, many of whom (if you go by their questions) had already read both of her previous novels: The Center of Everything, published in 2003, and 2007's The Rest of Her Life.
Moriarty's newest novel While I'm Falling, released this month by Hyperion, follows Veronica, a 20-year-old junior at KU, as she deals with the aftermath of her father returning from a business trip to find a young, shirt-less roofer sleeping in his bed. An expensive divorce follows, and Veronica finds herself scraping through college as her parents battle over money.
Moriarty weaves several storylines together in what she describes as her most plot-oriented novel yet: the parents' divorce; Veronica's mother's waning finances; Veronica's dislike of her job as a dorm resident assistant; Veronica's childhood friend Haley who undergoes a radical transformation to become the black-clad “Simone”; and Jimmy, a suspicious security guard who involves Veronica in his shady dealings.
Though Moriarty read two sections from her novel, she spent most of the hour-long reading responding to the audience's questions, including the perennial favorite of readers everywhere, “Is this book autobiographical?”
Though Moriarty also attended KU (where she earned a B.A. in Social Work and an M.A. in Creative Writing), worked as an R.A. in the dorms, and had parents who divorced while she was in college, Moriarty is adamant that, from there, she and Veronica are completely different people. When working on Falling, Moriarty made Veronica eat meat in as many scenes as possible to help keep Veronica “distinct” from her staunchly vegetarian self.
Moriarty says that the secret to her success as a novelist is writing 1,000 words a day, no matter how long it takes. She finds the most challenging part of writing to be blending her plot lines together and knowing when she should write about each character and conflict. She plans the details of each character's storyline very carefully before eventually “braiding” these lines together into a single plot sequence. When writing The Center of Everything, she used a chart hung on the wall of her home to stay organized; for Falling, she followed a very thorough outline.
As the evening wrapped up, one reader said, “You are a very prolific young author. Have you already started on your next novel?” Moriarty nodded and smiled. “Oh, yes,” she said. “The hardest times for me are when I'm coming up with an idea for a novel, so I try to start on the next one as quickly as possible. I'm like a Border Collie,” she laughed. “I like to know where I'm going.”
1 comment:
Wow! Nice work
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