In Person: Novel success
Toolbox
Published: August 16, 2003
By Chris McDonald
Photo by Stefan Hard
The advance attention for Montpelier native Thomas Christopher Greene’s new novel is the stuff of writers’ dreams.
Within weeks of acquiring an agent last year, the 34-year-old had publishing contracts in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland and Italy, as well as an audio book deal. His novel sold more than 7,000 copies in the first week of its release in Australia, with almost no publicity. In June, it garnered a recommendation from USA Today as one of 15 “Sizzling Summer Books,” alongside works by well-established authors such as Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates.
Not a bad start for someone who had never before sold a work of fiction.
“My head was really kind of spinning for a while,” Greene says. “I just had good luck and good timing … but it’s what you dream about.”
So it is that with the publication of his novel, “Mirror Lake,” this summer, Greene joins the impressive number of successful fiction writers who live in Vermont.
His success was not entirely unpredictable. Greene was precocious: His first regular job out of high school, at the age of 19, was as a press secretary and speechwriter for Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign. Later, at Hobart College in upstate New York, he and some friends started a humor magazine called The Observer. (“Actually,” he says with a laugh, “we basically copied National Lampoon.”)
Greene eventually earned a master’s of fine arts degree through Vermont College’s creative writing program. His mentor there was Bret Lott, a best-selling novelist.
“I finished a book of short stories there to complete the program,” says Greene, “but then I didn’t write anything else for several years. It wasn’t really a conscious decision; it just sort of happened that way. I was working a regular job (as a spokesman for Norwich University), and I didn’t really find the time. I never lost the literary ambition, though — and somehow that’s even harder, having the ambition and not writing. And I knew it had to be a novel. Publishers all want a novel.”
Eventually Greene joined a writing group in Montpelier, which gave him the structure to get the first 60 pages of the novel written. Once he got going, the process gained momentum.
“It took about a year all together to write, but the last 50 pages were done in about two days,” he says. “I did the last 40 pages in one marathon eight-hour session, finishing at about 2 in the morning. I had heard from other writers that sometimes the book just takes over, it just writes itself, and I always thought that was kind of nonsense, but that is exactly what happened to me.”
After that, it was “only” a matter of finding the right agent. Greene sent a one-page query letter to 20 agents, and the first 15 turned him down flat. The next five were interested enough to look at the novel.
One of those was Nick Ellison, a New York City agent who represents the best-selling Nelson DeMille and mystery writer Carol Higgins Clark, among others. Ellison responded less than three months after Greene sent out his proposals.
“He called me on a Saturday night and said, ‘I have to represent this novel,’” Greene says. “I was thrilled — I mean, I was prepared to wait a year just to get an agent. Everything just fell into place after that.”
Within two weeks, “Mirror Lake” was auctioned off to publishers in a bidding war eventually won by Simon & Schuster. Greene didn’t want to reveal how much the publisher is paying him, but suffice it to say he no longer has to work full-time.
Greene’s novel has attracted so much interest because of its solid writing and compelling story. Equal parts romance and mystery, “Mirror Lake” follows the unlikely friendship that develops between two “lost souls” from different social worlds whose paths cross in Vermont: Nathan Carter, a 30-ish Boston transplant, and Wallace Fiske, a widowed farmer. Fiske becomes confidant and adviser to Carter on his latest romantic entanglement, while Carter in turn finds himself in the role of Fiske’s confessor.
Greene concentrated heavily on capturing the mystique that rural Vermont summons to the popular imagination, in effect making the backdrop for the novel another character. Although the book is set in Eden, Vermonters familiar with the area surrounding Number 10 Pond in Calais, also known as Mirror Lake, will have little trouble recognizing the inspiration for the setting.
Reached entirely by dirt roads that thread their way through the hills north of Montpelier, it’s a place where people we think of as “traditional Vermonters” coexist a bit uneasily with their more recently arrived, relatively affluent neighbors. Not coincidentally, Greene once lived in an old farmhouse near the lake.
“There is something about the nature of landscape here that you don’t see anywhere else,” Greene says. “Here we tend to live in small towns, but we’re not isolated in the same way as people out west. And yet we aren’t as anonymous as people in the cities. There is a different, closer variety of human interaction, and human interaction is at the heart of all good fiction.”
Greene says he likes to think of “Mirror Lake” as literary fiction, even though Lott has cautioned him that literary fiction is “what they call a book that doesn’t sell.” He hopes to maintain his literary standards and still find a wide commercial audience.
“I want to be respected, of course, but mostly I want to be read,” Greene says. “And I want the whole broad literary career. I’m laying the groundwork for 15, maybe 20 novels right now.”
Greene aims to finish writing his second novel by the end of August, which is pretty ambitious, especially considering that he just got married earlier this month. Then again, he has made a habit of working quickly.
Chris McDonald is a freelance writer who lives in Montpelier.
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