Of all my books, my first novel, Life at These Speeds, remains a favorite of many people. In many ways, it is my favorite, too, though I love all of my books.
In December of 1994, I was a senior at Vassar College, and one night I was studying in the library when quite suddenly, from nowhere, I heard this voice (not literally) say "Straight off, I'll tell you that all the people in this story are real living people except that most of them are dead." In that instant, I also understood that it was a cocky teenage boy speaking and that the bus carrying his track team had had an accident, killing everyone aboard.
The voice was so clear, so direct, and so ready to tell his story, that I left the library immediately, walking quickly home to my apartment. I stared at the sidewalk as I went, afraid that if I looked around I would be distracted and lose my sense of this character who was speaking to me. At home I sat down and wrote a short story describing the night of the bus accident. I named the character Kevin Schuler. I named the story "It Didn't Bother Me".
It was the best story I'd ever written. People responded very positively to it, and I began to think that perhaps there was a larger story to be told. Some readers wanted to know what happened after the accident, and I realized that that was what a novel could explore. I'd never written a whole novel, but I made a few attempts, in the spring of 1995, to write some chapters and ideas.
Between the fall of 1995 and spring of 1997 I was in the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. I used my time there to write many different kinds of short stories. Short stories are ideal for the workshop format, and short stories gave me the chance to explore many different kinds of writing. But all the time I was writing stories, I knew that I wanted to return to my "It Didn't Bother Me" novel project, and as soon as I finished my MFA thesis in the spring of 1995, I started work on the novel. I was excited about it, and ready.
I wrote an entire first draft of the novel between May and December 1995. During that time, I lived on my parents' farm in mid-Missouri--the place I had grown up, and the setting of the novel. Being home again after six years of being away at school was a rich experience in remembering the details of the place, but also a bittersweet reminder that time had passed, people had changed, childhood was gone, and adulthood was rather strange. In part, I felt that my novel was a way for me to say goodbye to the Missouri of my childhood, and the classmates that I had spent thirteen years with in the public school in Russellville. Though I didn't model any of my characters directly on real people, there were certainly bits and pieces of real people that made their way into the book.
While I wrote the novel, the working title was The Tracker. I know, not a great title. I wrote six days a week, two or three hours each morning. When I finished around noon, I would walk the perimeter of our farm, which took about half an hour and helped me clear my mind. I thoroughly enjoyed writing about Kevin Schuler. His voice was strong and steady, and I sympathized with him, liked him, and trusted him. He was kind, smart, and interesting, but also troubled, difficult, and sometimes annoying. Still, I found myself thinking of him throughout the day. Sometimes I would wake up thinking of him. Sometimes I experienced physical symptoms that mirrored his.
In general, I didn't really know what was going to happen in the story until I wrote it. The writing of the novel was a "process of discovery" as my teacher Frank Conroy would have said. I knew where the novel started (with the chapter that had been the story "It Didn't Bother Me") and I had a vision of where it ended (with Kevin literally walking away from the track), but the writing process involved building a bridge between those two points.
When I was finally done with the first draft, I was kind of sad. I still wanted to be writing about Kevin. I wanted to write him letters that started "Dear Kevin, I wish I were still writing about you..."
I edited and polished the manuscript in 1998, and then I put it away for a while. I taught writing at Vassar between 1998 and 2000, and during that time I finally showed it to a literary agent, David Dunton, and after working with him to improve the manuscript, he sent it out to publishers. More than twenty publishers turned it down, which seriously made me question the quality of the book. In fact, I was preparing to do a complete overhaul of the whole book when an editor named Carin Siegfried, at Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, bought the book in the spring of 2001.
Carin helped me improve the book even further, and she helped me discover the title Life at These Speeds. And in the summer of 2002 the book was published. Though the publicity and marketing was minimal, the book was picked for Barnes and Noble's "Discover Great New Writers" series, and got a smattering of nice reviews, including a glowing one in the Boston Globe, and generally sold slowly but steadily, largely by word of mouth. Runners and teens both discovered the book. In 2003 Picador put out a lovely paperback edition, which is still--six years after initial publication--in print.
No, I certainly didn't get rich or famous off of Life at These Speeds--not that those are my measures of success--but it is a book I'm proud of, warts and all, and I will never forget the engrossing and somewhat magical writing process that created it.
