Word By Word, A Novel Is Built, Torn Down, Rebuilt

Susan Schoenberger built a castle, then she tore it down, then she built it again.

Over and over, “about a hundred times.”

Building a castle brick by brick, word by word, is the veteran journalist’s metaphor for writing a novel – in this case her first published work, A Watershed Year.

She spoke about the book on April 27th at the Tolland Public Library, and about the castle-building and rebuilding process, which, in this case, took nearly seven years.

Released in March by its publisher Guideposts Books, A Watershed Year is the uplifting story of a woman who loses a dear friend, is haunted by grief, but rediscovers the joy in life through the adoption of a 4-year-old Russian boy.

The story grew from Schoenberger’s loss of a friend and co-worker years ago at The Baltimore Sun, one of several newspapers she has worked for in her career.

Her friend, an assistant business editor who was dying of cancer, “confided in me because a lot of his friends had dropped away. It was a very dramatic and emotional experience for me.” The experience crystallized for her one of her novel’s underlying themes: the pain of “things that are left unsaid” and “how we need to communicate with each other.”

Schoenberger, a former Hartford Courant copy editor and currently an editor for , is the first to admit that she is not one of those mythical novelists who conceive and spin out a nearly finished story.

She wrote of the Baltimore experience first in a short story entitled “Intercession;” then, because the subject evoked such a strong reaction among readers, decided to make it into a full-length novel.

Though the book is driven by the “emotional truth” Schoenberger has experienced as a friend, wife and mother, much of the rest is “journalistically based,” she said.

She has “a whole wall of books” about adoption at her home in West Hartford, has interviewed people who adopted children, and read exhaustively about Russia, where she has never been.

There are of course parts of her in her 38-year-old protagonist, she said, but “I’m every character in the book,” even the stubborn four-year-old boy. Schoenberger said her characters are roughly one-third her, one-third someone she knows, and one-third made up.

The trick and the goal, she said, is to combine in words these elements – the emotional, intellectual and imaginative processes – into “something that holds together in a beautiful way.”

Some other writers certainly thought she did. Before it was published, Schoenberger’s manuscript won first prize in the 2006 William Faulkner Wisdom Writing Competition.

If the novel proved to be inspirational, however, the process of writing it was more perspirational.

For a number of years, Schoenberger took care of her three children, worked two or three evenings a week at the Courant, and devoted two to three hours each day to her writing.

Though her family didn’t notice at the time, part of her mind was constantly working on the novel all the time; during her daily runs, her housework, her time at the grocery store. She even dreamed about her manuscript, she said.

She thought - wrongly, it turned out – that winning the Faulkner prize would bring interest from the publishing industry. Attempting to find a publisher, however, only began more years of knocking down the castle and building it again in response to industry reviews.

The working title “Intercession,” for example, did not impress her agent, Jessica Regel, as having much commercial potential. “A Watershed Year” was one of about ten optional titles Schoenberger offered as a replacement, and using it required some retooling of the text.

Even through the proofreading process, she said, she was making small adjustments.

Now that the book is released, of course, the author, who works full time as a journalist, is spending her spare time promoting her work. She expects she will eventually get back to the draft of her second novel, which she hasn’t touched since September.

Schoenberger’s visit to Tolland was the last of a series sponsored by the Tolland Public Library Foundation. According to Kate Farrish, secretary of the foundation and Schoenberger’s former colleague at The Courant, the series is made possible with a grant from the Phoebe Dimock King and Elizabeth C. King Eaton Endowment.

The endowment was created in 2009 through a bequest from the late Elizabeth C. King Eaton. The benefactor was raised in Tolland and like her mother, the late Phoebe Dimock King, spent her professional life as a librarian.