{"id":5800,"date":"2013-06-25T08:19:56","date_gmt":"2013-06-25T13:19:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/college.unc.edu\/?p=5800"},"modified":"2024-07-02T14:23:40","modified_gmt":"2024-07-02T14:23:40","slug":"roam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/?p=5800","title":{"rendered":"The King of Roam: Novelist Daniel Wallace is back with another whopper"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Daniel<\/a>
Daniel Wallace (photo by Steve Exum)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The best novelists seem to will their stories into creation, as if they fully formed the plot and characters in their minds and then merely put their ideas to paper when the spirit moved\u00a0them.<\/p>\n

Nonsense. Writers aren\u2019t seers. They\u2019re ditch diggers. They fret over word choice, sentence style, story structure, tone, pace, plot twists, character development. It\u2019s a laborious process, producing a book, that only the great ones can make look easy. The hard truth is that some of the best writers don\u2019t even know what sentence will come after the one they\u2019re currently\u00a0conjuring.<\/p>\n

This brings us to the mind of Daniel Wallace, UNC professor and author of five novels, including Big Fish<\/em>, which director Tim Burton made into a movie<\/a> in\u00a02003.<\/p>\n

When I interviewed Wallace for an Endeavors<\/em> profile<\/a> back in 2008, he told me why Big Fish<\/em> ended up feeling different than most novels. Some chapters are just a page long; others feel very independent. That\u2019s because Wallace was taking care of his one-year-old son and could only find time to write when Henry was napping. The myths of Big Fish<\/em> started off as standalone tales. Only after Wallace wrote them could he see how they might coalesce into a novel of mythic proportions.<\/p>\n

But now Henry is grown up. Wallace, who has four more novels under his belt, finds more time to write these days, though he still approaches his craft in much the same way he did in the 1990s. And that\u2019s one sentence at a\u00a0time.<\/p>\n

\"wallace_daniel_kings_and_queens_book_web\"<\/a>In the case of his latest novel, The Kings and Queens of Roam<\/em><\/a>, it all started\u2014as these things do\u2014with a sentence that he wrote many years\u00a0ago:<\/p>\n

\u201cRachel McCallister and her sister, Helen, lived together in the home they grew up in, and as far as anyone could tell (Rachel and Helen included), this is where they would die as\u00a0well.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s all Wallace had. \u201cAll I knew is that somewhere out there another sentence was waiting to come after it, and after I wrote that second one, the third, the fourth, the\u00a0fifth.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the sentences came, so did the story. Booklist<\/em> describes it as \u201can eerie fairy tale for grown-ups \u2026 a melancholy yet enchanting pastiche of love, loss, redemption, and revenge.\u201d And as Kirkus Review<\/em> says, \u201cA tale of love, magic and reconciliation \u2026 a fanciful story layered in symbolism and ripe with lyrical\u00a0language.\u201d<\/p>\n

That fanciful-fairy-tale bit is vintage Wallace. I wouldn\u2019t call it his shtick, but he\u2019s become known for spinning fantastical yarns, and The Kings and Queens of Roam<\/em> is no different. In a way, though, he simply takes what all novelists do to a stranger\u00a0level.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that every novelist strives to create a world all its own, something self-sustaining, an idiomatic ecosystem\u2014a world brand-new and dangerous that feels, at the same time, familiar, warm, hospitable, a place a reader might want to hang out for a while,\u201d Wallace says. \u201cDoing both, that\u2019s the big trick. This is why, to the degree I succeeded doing it, I think of Roam<\/em> as my first novel. It\u2019s a place you\u2019ve never been to before, and neither have\u00a0I.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet, Wallace writes it as the all-knowing narrator with a style all his own, and that makes the journey through Roam<\/em> all the more\u00a0entertaining.<\/p>\n

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Daniel Wallace is the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English<\/a> in the College of Arts and\u00a0Sciences.<\/p>\n

[Story by Mark Derewicz, Endeavors<\/a> magazine]<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Big Fish” author and creative writing professor Daniel Wallace is back with another fanciful whopper — a new book entitled “The Kings and Queens of Roam.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5803,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center 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