Interview with Dawn Tripp: Game of Secrets

"Game of Secrets is the least factual of the three novels I have written, but it is more honest, more emotionally, and essentially, true." Here's more from Dawn Tripp about her new novel:

Jennifer Haupt: You wrote a wonderful essay about faith and writing. How did faith come into play while writing this novel?

Dawn Tripp: I often feel that in my fiction, I work toward what I cannot say. I write to find words for what lies just past words. Every novel I have written has started with some dark secret I can't quite bring myself to tell, and so I tell it on the slant, through the story.

Several years ago, late spring, I was working on something else-a historical novel-and out of the blue, over the course of a month I wrote a series of forty poems. I haven't written poetry since my twenties, although as a writing form, it is my primary impulse. And what I noticed is that those forty poems were all digging into things I couldn't quite bear to write straight out in narrative, and so they surfaced, in bits and pieces. I wrote about a mother and her son, a friend who died abruptly, a girl crossing over a bridge, a car accident, an illicit love and its consequence, a dream stubbed out, I wrote about an unconscionable act of cruelty, and a young man staring at a woman across a moving street while the rest of the world fell away. I wrote about the loss of a child.

It didn't take much for me to see that those poems had a life, a complexity that the novel I was working on did not. So I ditched that other book, almost 400 pages of it, because these were the stories I wanted to walk into, these were the lives I was on fire to tell.

At a certain point in the writing, I begin to sense a larger order at work. It is still intuitive at this early stage, not intellectual, not ‘hard-and-fast.' I begin to map my early raw material into a structure-a sequence of events, rising tension, climax, resolution. Structure, I believe, is essential to creating strong narrative drive. At the same time, though, I try to balance the bones of an early outline with a willingness to stay open, to allow for change. I have noticed the longer I can keep things open, the more necessary the writing becomes. It doesn't mean the order isn't there. It doesn't mean some dark underside of my mind hasn't already mapped it all out. I put my faith in the fact that there is a cogent, intrinsic order. I write to discover it.

Our human impulse, I think, is to want to figure it all out ahead of time, not to dwell in mystery, uncertainty, doubt. We want to pin things down to see how the jigsaw puzzle pieces all fit together, sneak a look at the picture on the box. But I have found that when I can let myself stay open to possibilities inherent in a story that I may not yet have uncovered, when I can let myself be driven by what I do not yet know, the story often turns and deepens in unexpected, revelatory ways.

My heart broke for four years as I was writing this novel. That might seem a strange thing to say. It was a strange thing to feel. But it drove me. Somehow I knew that heartbreak was a feeling I could trust.

JH: Where was the starting point of this novel? There are so many wonderful twists and turns throughout. When did you actually know how it ends?

DT: Out of those initial fragments, there were there I could not stop thinking about: the image of a fourteen year old boy driving fast down an unfinished highway in a borrowed car, heat in his hands on the wheel because he loved a girl; the image of two woman playing Scrabble; the image of two lovers, a man and a woman, meeting in an old cranberry barn-I did not know their names, but I could feel the charge of anger and desire between them, and I knew that this would be the last time they would meet. I had already filled a notebook when an older man told me a story of a skull that surfaced back in the ‘60s out of truckload of gravel fill, a neat bullet hole in the temple. The moment the story was out of his mouth, I knew that skull had everything to do with the two old friends playing Scrabble, the lovers in the cranberry barn, and with that boy driving fast down an unfinished highway in a stolen car.

I wrote what I thought was the ending of this novel early on, and I fell in love with it. It became that kind of horizon a strong ending can be, that drives you, day in day out, to create the 300 pages leading up to that moment, that turn. What I did not expect, and could not have foreseen, was that in fact the ending I wrote early on was not the climax. The most powerful revelation was something I was writing toward without even realizing it, until all at once, I did.

JH: Which character was the most difficult for you to bring fully to life, and how did you go about doing that?

DT:

Characters come to me often before I see the larger arc of the story they belong to. Even early on, I know things about them-about what they want, fear, hide, remember, dream, what they will not let themselves dream, often before I know their names or the details specific to their lives.

DT:

Marne was not in my original vision of the novel-which centered on the Scrabble game and the unsolved crime. Marne crept in as a satellite character-Jane's daughter-but at first only at the hem of things, and from her mother's point of view. I wasn't sure I liked her at first: she was cynical, she was not always kind. But she was funny-self-deprecating and wry-she made me laugh, and I could feel how alive she was, how on the verge-because she felt so much, and at the same time was resolutely unwilling to let herself feel. It made me curious: I knew that someone with such insistent hard-and-fast convictions would have to collide head-on into the thing she swore she never would. Marne is judgmental. That is her flaw.

To me, a character's flaw is often the most intriguing aspect of them; it impacts their fate; it is the point where what is paradoxical, seemingly irreconcilable-what is weakest and most violent and most beautiful about them-can intersect. Luce's greatest flaw, the reason he fails his daughter Jane is not because he does not love her enough, but because he loves her so much, yet cannot step out of his own shadows to say so. Jane in turn nearly visits the same fate on her own daughter. To me, though, the most deeply flawed character in the novel is Huck, and he was the most difficult for me to hold in balance. Before I knew anything else about him, I knew Huck only as that fourteen year old boy driving fast down an unfinished highway, thinking of a girl. I knew that long before I realized what he might have done and who he would become-how he would grow up to be a man whose views and past stood for things that are easy to dislike or disdain. But you can't quite lock him up that way, because of the raw and simple desire he felt once, not just for that girl, but for the freedom of a dream she stood for.

Characters to me have to have that relentlessly living aspect about them-even characters who might at first appear conclusively one-sided, I will go and dig into them, to find that other side-that vulnerable, inescapably human side that renders them in a different light, if only momentarily.

JH: I love the way you use a weekly Scrabble game between Jane and Ada to reveal the complex relationship between these two women who both lost the love of their lives. How did you come up with this idea?

DT: I love Scrabble. I grew up playing with my grandmother. We would play game after game in the afternoon until it was time for her to fix supper. Then we'd eat, clear the table, wash the dishes, I would dry them for her, and ask to play again. I learned details of her life-what she believed, what she had hoped for once as a young girl, what she had lost-those slight and quiet things got laid down with our letters on the board.

The idea for this novel came to me years after she was gone. But as I wrote the scenes of Jane and Ada playing Scrabble, I remembered the long sweet hours of those childhood games: the stillness of the house, the light tick-tack of the tiles on the board, the smell of her cigarette resting on the ashtray, untended, dwindling down. And as I wrote, I remembered too things I did not know I had forgotten, things that she had taught me as we played. She played Scrabble for the words, as many women in her generation did. I always played for the numbers. How we play that particular game can reveal so much about how we tick, how we live, who we are. In Scrabble, some play to keep the board open, some play to shut it down. Some play with an eye to the sum of the total scores of all players. Some play, simply, to maximize their own. Most players will look at the board and see the words that fill it. But a really good player, a canny player-and she was one of those-will also see opportunity in the skinny spaces still left open in between.

As I wrote Game of Secrets, the structure of the story came to mirror a Scrabble game. It is a mosaic narrative, fractured in point of view and time, which feels to me more intrinsically true to the way we apprehend our lives. The game for me became the perfect lens for a story about two women, two families bound together and divided by unspeakable secrets-a brutal past, a murder, a love story. Because what are words if not a bridge? Between one person and another. Thought and reality. Past and present, present and future. Words bridge silence. Words, and the stories they comprise, bridge time.

JH: What's something about your writing life that may surprise people?

DT: I write my first drafts longhand. There is a certain kinesthetic joy for me in a pen against the page. I will often write on throw-away things: receipts, scraps of paper, grocery lists, incomplete thoughts that I transcribe, and later, develop. I am oddly superstitious about the pens and notebooks that I use once I enter the real work of a story. I am extremely careful about whom I show my work to, and when. I do my best creative work, not at my desk, but when I am folding laundry, or out in the boat, or walking through the woods with my dog.

JH: What's the one true thing you learned from writing this novel?

DT: The question at the heart of Game of Secrets is: how well can we ever really know another person? That question touches, in some way, each character and every relationship in the novel. I lived in that question-ate, slept, and dreamt it-as I was writing this story.

There are moments where it seems like Jane has slipped off the edge a bit, is unable to absorb the weight of what she has lost, and as a result averts her eyes and appears to disassociate from her everyday world. Marne alludes to this, and judges her mother for it, because of her own consequent hurt. Yet there are other moments when Jane's perception of reality-of life and intimacy and time-seems to approach a deeper, more existential vision of what truth is. Jane is capable of great feeling, great compassion. And more than any other character, she seems to recognize that our lives are not as easily wrapped up as we imagine them to be. Sometimes what we feel and what we believe can be more necessary to who we are than what we think we know.

Dawn Tripp is the award-winning author of Moon Tide and the Season of Open Water. Her third novel, Game of Secrets, is a literary mystery, with a small-town murder at the heart of it, played out through a Scrabble game. To learn more, please visit www.dawntripp.com