When I started writing All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, I had no idea how any of the characters fit together. The next fifty thousand words were much easier after I understood where the book was going, but if I imagined I'd learn something from that process, I was wrong. I was fifty thousand words and three years in, before I realized that those four stories were all part of the same novel. I have not been blessed with this gift.Ī true story about Lie Lay Lain: it started life as four separate stories.
There are people, so I'm told, who create elaborate outlines and spreadsheets to aid them in the writing of novels. As though I were going to fall down without something to oppose me. When I got too far away from it, though, I felt unsteadied.Īs though I'd been out walking in the wind and it suddenly stopped. It carried dust into the house all during my childhood and turned my hair into a rat's nest. When I was younger, I wandered around the world, but came back to Kansas to write. We didn't leave, even when it was the smart thing to do. I don't know if that makes them stupid, or fatalistic, or just stubborn. Death and misery became more readily available than bread and water. It blew away the soil and the soil blotted out the sun. Some people left Kansas because of the wind. All the Ugly and Wonderful Things (Thomas Dunn Books, 2016).Return to Top of Pageīibliography ( - housed in Thomas Fox Averill Kansas Studies Collection) She is the author of the novels All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, Last Will, and Lie Lay Lain. She earned a MA in Creative Writing from Kansas State University and continues to work in academia as an administrator. B ryn Greenwood is a fourth-generation Kansan, one of seven sisters, and the daughter of a mostly reformed drug dealer.
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