15 October 2024
Directives from Rachel Weaver's Point of Direction
Rachel’s Point of Direction is the story of a woman, Anna, who accepts a job as tenant/keeper of a lighthouse in the middle of a channel near Juneau, Alaska, as a means of escaping the world while simultaneously committing to a project—to heal from a traumatic incident in her recent past. The story is a bit of a psychological mystery/thriller, but without any horror or gore. Weaver draws out the mystery of her protagonists’ traumatic incidents the duration of the novel, and we are given to wonder why they make the choices they do, why they relate the ways they do, until the very end.
In Rachel’s workshops, and when she was my mentor, she always instructed that the events prior to the inciting incident should not contain backstory. This novel is a testament to that guidance: Anna’s backstory is dribbled out in hints and clues throughout the first half of the novel, only given to us in full by about the halfway mark. Kyle’s is dribbled out in clues the entirety of the novel; we do not learn his full story (and indeed, he himself does not) until the novel’s climax. This draws the reader forward, not from confusion but from curiosity.
One thing Rachel instructed in our last workshop was to lay out the scenes of your story like a train, introducing new questions/mysteries at intervals, and answering them at intervals—but always withholding some answers until further down the road. For example, we don’t know whose phone number Anna keeps on a tattered note in her pocket until the second-to-last chapter, although it was introduced, I believe, in the first chapter. Likewise, we don’t learn that Kyle’s father is still alive until the third half of the book—and don’t learn why he abandoned Kyle until even later than that. The result is that as readers, we don’t really know why the protagonists behave the ways that they do until far further into the story—which works.
For sure, Rachel’s novel is instructional in the skill of withholding critical information in a way that doesn’t necessarily frustrate the reader, but rather makes them curious. In any case, it’s always a delight to read my mentors’ writing and see what they make of their own instruction.
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