Steve & Melanie Tem's Backstory
We are a long-married couple who write. Sometimes we write together; we'd have said we do that only very occasionally, but recently we compiled our collaborative stories into a collection (as yet unsold) and it came in at 19 stories, over 96,000 words.
In 2000 we wrote a novella called "The Man On The Ceiling." We wanted to try something we'd never done before: use ourselves as characters in a story. We had our doubts about the wisdom of this, and at times we were pretty sure no one would ever publish it. The strange thing about our pessimism concerning the potential audience for this project, however, was that it freed us to say what we really felt about our lives and this career we had chosen, and about the death of our son Anthony.
A small press, American Fantasy, picked it up and published it as a limited edition chapbook. It went on to win the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, and World Fantasy Awards for that year—the only work ever to win all three. We were proud of having created a work that somehow managed to talk about grief, and hope, and love, and the power of the human imagination, all within a piece of writing that was neither pure fiction nor pure memoir, but an amalgam of the two. But it was a one-time thing: we strongly believed that that's not the sort of experiment a writer should attempt twice.
Two years later an editor at a major house asked us if we'd ever considered expanding this material to book-length, writing a novel of metafiction in the same way we had created a metafictional novella. Our immediate response was certainly not, but we told her we'd think about it. And almost immediately we realized we had much, much more to say about how the imagination figures into the real life of an individual, a couple, and a family. We also realized that when you are given the chance to make a testament about what it was like during your time on the planet, you don't turn it down.
THE MAN ON THE CEILING, A Novel {Maybe} is a March 4 release from Wizard's new Discoveries line, distributed by Random House. The scope of the novel is much broader than the scope of the original novella, and losing a child is only one of the things the novel is about--in a sense it's the trigger that sets off a larger meditation and speculation on personal and familial fears, and how storytelling can be an essential, not just a peripheral, aspect of life. It's a broader look at how the imagination works in the life of the individual and in the life of a family. At one point in the novel we call this book a "biography of our imaginations," and that's pretty much the way we looked at this project.
In all our collaborations we have attempted to create a "third author" to tell the story. This third author has taken certain qualities from both our writings, left out others, and writes stories neither one of us might have attempted in our solo careers. Surprisingly enough, this "third author" was even more important to the successful execution of a book as personal as THE MAN ON THE CEILING. We needed this third author to tell us, as we were attempting to write about the most important things in our lives, when we had gone too far, and conversely, when we were holding back material that had to be in the story. We came to depend on this third author to tell us that we should give up our need to protect ourselves as characters or to present ourselves in any kind of balanced way, in order to give ourselves up to the needs of the book.
It was a scary, exhilarating ride. When we read the book now, we’re sometimes amazed by what that third author wrote. We still think we'll probably never do anything quite like this again.
Comments