Nancy Crochiere discusses the first pages of her debut novel, Graceland, the importance of goals for each of her three point-of-view characters, the power of a “goal by request,” and how to work in backstory when a story that is so reliant on the secrets about the past is flying forward from the first scene.
Crochiere’s first pages can be found here.
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For thirteen years, Nancy Crochiere chronicled the ups and downs of family life—including her obsession with George Clooney—in her humorous newspaper column, “The Mother Load,” which ran in The Daily News of Newburyport, and North Andover’s Eagle-Tribune. In 2014, she published a collection of those columns that was a finalist for Foreword Reviews’ Book of the Year in humor and the Independent Publishers of New England 2014 Book Award. A graduate of Middlebury College, Nancy earned a master’s degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Minnesota and is an alumna of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program. She worked for many years as a development editor for various educational publishers and wrote essays for The Boston Globe, Writer’s Digest, and WBUR’s Cognoscenti blog. Once her daughters finished college, Nancy decided to pursue her lifelong dream of writing fiction. The result is Graceland, her first novel.
Passages: Nancy Crochiere on Graceland