Hello everyone,

Today I’m chatting with Kathryn Craft, who opened up a devastating part of her life to write The Far End Of Happy. Tough, gripping story. Life can be so heartbreaking….and beautiful, both.

Cathy Lamb:  Well, Kathryn, we’ll just jump in here to the guts of the interview. Can you tell the readers here about The Far End Of Happy?

Kathryn Craft: This novel is based on my first husband’s suicide standoff at our farm.

“Our little piece of heaven,” he called it, and we spent most of the fifteen years of our marriage renovating it as our forever home. My novelization explores possible reasons for his final decline into depression and alcoholism from the points of view of the three women closest to him—his wife, her mother, and his own mother—who try to sustain hope while awaiting word about the outcome of the standoff between this desperate, armed man and a huge police presence back at the farm.

Was it cathartic for you to write this story?

After toying with writing it as memoir over the course of seventeen years, I ended up writing it as a novel—in ten months, under contract. And I am not a fast writer.

I write in layers, interweaving new arcs and imagery through many drafts—and although basing the novel on familiar material, I was also adding new characters and figuring out a radical new twelve-hour structure.

In those final months I wrote fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. I fully immersed myself in that time in my life, in effect spending more time with my deceased husband than I did with the one who was lovingly tolerating this behavior. Coming out of it at the end was discombobulating to say the least. I think I have yet to learn its true influence on me, perhaps I will as I discuss the novel with book clubs.

I did experience another round of grieving, though, once my tether to this project had been cut.

What did you learn, how did you change after this very painful experience in your life?

Do you have moments in your life that stick in your memory as if illumined with golden light? One of mine was maybe a year after the suicide, when someone said to me, “Oh you poor thing, having to raise those boys and tend to the farm and run your business all by yourself.”

I knew in an instant that she had it all wrong. I had always wanted children, and it was my absolute joy and privilege to raise them, even if on my own.

I was trying to make that easier by finding good homes for the animals, but that’s not the kind of thing you can rush. Moving was not a consideration—a time of chaos and grief is no time to uproot your children and try to make new friends in unfamiliar surroundings. It’s a time to rely upon the familiar, and the friends who can lend support.

And I had started my desktop publishing business because I cared about effective communications and knew I could help organizations with their marketing—and thank goodness for it, because it was now my sole source of income.

In that golden moment I realized that I was living the life of my choosing, and there is no thought more empowering. We were going through hard times, no arguing that, but I learned that the life that had somehow become my husband’s personal hell was still my little piece of heaven.

And how is life today?

Five years ago, once my sons were well into college, my second husband and I left behind our country lifestyle, with its horses, ponies, goats, chickens, barn cats, dogs, and vegetable patch, and moved an hour east to a townhome in Doylestown, PA. We can now accomplish almost everything we need to do on foot. We love that.

For three months each summer we relocate to a lakeside cottage in northern New York State where my extended family has vacationed for generations. It’s a recipe for annual renewal!

And, as a writer, you need that annual renewal. Speaking of which, what do you like about writing?  What’s a challenge for you?

Does it seem too cheesy to say “everything”? Writing challenges me in all the ways I love to be challenged—from devising the larger story and character arcs down to final word choice and order, from initial research to the final, beloved editing, from motivating self for the long hours alone to reaching out to readers through social media and in-person events—I love it all. I’d say the biggest challenge is managing anxiety while coming up with that next great idea.

I know you teach writing. What are five pieces of advice that you have for people who are not yet published?

Ooh, great question! Let me see:

1) The old adage “Story is conflict” will lead you astray. Story is about a “specific kind of conflict,” and irrelevant inclusions will cause your reader to lose faith in your story.

2) There is a difference between an idea for a story (a woman has to deal with her husband’s standoff) and a story (a woman’s determination to leave her husband is put to the ultimate test on a public stage when he makes good on a previous suicide threat). An idea will peter out—a story will see you through.

3) You probably want to write because you love language—I get it, I love to write pretty!—but that won’t be enough. Love story more, and learn all you can about why classic storytelling structure works.

I once heard literary agent Gail Hochman deliver this truism: “Show me a beautifully written novel with a decent story and I won’t be able to do anything with it. Show me a fantastic story that is adequately written and I’ll make it a New York Times bestseller.”

4) Once she recovers from the incident that rocks her world, make sure your protagonist is engaged in goal-oriented behavior. The story question her goal raises in the reader’s mind (Can this character really achieve her goal?) creates that all-important psychological tension that will keep the reader engaged (“Yes! She’s doing it!” or “Yikes—not looking so good right now!”), and will keep her flipping pages until she gets the answer.

5) If you get stuck, try these measures: a) write about your story as if you were evaluating it for someone else and you will often uncover the problem; b) go back to the beginning and make the story more important by deepening motivation and raising the stakes of failure for your protagonist; c) back up to your last so-so plot point (the sprained ankle) and make it worse (need for field surgery). One of those will usually work!

Excellent advice, Kathryn.

I’d like to throw a little snippet of The Far End Of Happy to our readers….

The pages felt thick with life as they flipped through her fingers.  A long suffering friend, this journal, taking everything she’d throw at it. The questions. The tortured answers. The pros. The cons. Moments rich with beauty. The long, slow death of a dream.

At the top of each page, she’d centered her name: Ronnie Farnham. On the lines below, she’d centered herself.

Ronnie sat on the guest room bed, propped a pillow against the wall behind her, and waited for the jostle as her shaggy little dog, Max, repositioned himself against her thigh. She pressed her pen to a cool, fresh page. Today, more than any other, in these last precious moments before her sons awoke, Ronnie needed the ink to offer up its ever – flowing possibilities.

Her pen stalled after one short sentence.

Today Jeff is moving out.

THANK YOU, KATHRYN! Good luck!

Have a chat with Kathryn here…

‪http://kathryncraft.com (read excerpts, purchase links, sign up for newsletter)

‪https://www.facebook.com/KathrynCraftAuthor

‪https://twitter.com/kcraftwriter (@kcraftwriter)