Luke Gentile
James L. Peters is a Chippewa Valley resident who, throughout his life, kept himself busy by doing a multitude of creative endeavors. He was in a band that performed all over Wisconsin; he designs board games and he has written three novels: Shrugging, Turntable, and his newest novel, Fortune Falls.
Fortune Falls begins with a man driving home after having the best day of his life. He is detoured down a dark road and to a slot machine that gives him a dark, foreboding message. Soon after, his life will change forever…
I recently had the chance to sit down with Mr. Peters and learn more about his newest novel, writing style, inspirations, and future plans.
Luke Gentile: The last two novels you’ve written were loosely related to personal experiences. Could the same be said for Fortune Falls?
James Peters: I will say that Fortune Falls is the least relevant to my personal life... That being said, there are definitely elements that are relevant. But this was the furthest extreme I have ever gone. In my other two novels, the main characters are very strong elements of me. Jason is not me. Jason is kind of a jerk for a while. He had some things to deal with, but some of the things that he is facing are things that I, as a human being and as an individual, also face. Regrets in life and that idea of mortality. His milquetoast catholic background is certainly an element of my life as well, and something that he brings up several times and reflects back on. I feel in some ways, Jason is the me if I had not continued to pursue the bohemian lifestyle–music, writing, board games, whatnot– and focused solely on my career instead. In some ways, I see that as what could’ve been.
LG: Did you start off with Jason’s character as a version of you or did you start writing him, and it took off in that direction?
JP: It’s kind of interesting. I actually started this novel a little over thirteen years ago knowing that I was approaching my forties and wanting to deal with that, and so the basic idea of confronting mortality and the overt symbolism was all there. But … after a couple of chapters, I just didn’t see where it could go. So I just let it sit. After publishing my first two novels and deciding what I was going to work on next, I went back to a lot of my ideas …, then, I looked back at Fortune Falls and immediately reflected on the relatively unique past couple of years we’ve had. 2020, 2021, and it was like, “oh my God, this is what this novel has been waiting for,” and that just took it over right there and I knew exactly where it was going. That being said, … I do not plot out my novels. I’m not plot-driven, I’m character-driven. My characters tell me where the novel is going. I may have sketchy ideas and intentions, but typically I want a theme, and I want a character who is going to have to face something that is … critically important for him to deal with. That’s the impetus for anything that I write, and then a plot develops around that. In this case, I knew the character, I knew the basic theme, … it was almost like an ivy. An ivy can grow on its own but it needs that wall to grab onto and the tendrils to grasp. I didn’t have the “wall” yet. The ivy was growing, but it didn’t have anything to attach to. When those events happen, in these past few years, it was like, “ah there’s the wall, there’s where my ivy is going to grow.”
LG: Is Fortune Falls, the town in the novel, based on a town that you’ve been to and or lived in?
JP: In my previous two works, they are heavily based on location. This is more generally representative of … your typical small northern Wisconsin town. Upper-middle-class suburb… I wanted to take a deeper dive into all the major holidays that western civilization experiences but not through an idealized look. Instead, through trauma and through some levels of threat and instability and whatnot. That was another driving force of this. … I knew I wanted to touch on all these holidays and see how they go when life isn’t exactly going perfectly.
LG: Really give it that real-life aspect.
JP: I had a large number of advanced readers read this and some of them said “As much as they enjoyed it, they almost had a little bit of PTSD reading through it and remembering in depth some of the things they had recently gone through.” Definitely very steeped in realism.
LG: Is the extensive use of imagery a strategy you utilize with all of your novels?
“Symbolism is not there to go ‘Oh, I hid something and now you have to find it,’ symbolism is the framework that an author really has to build upon and add flesh to a story. ”
JP: It’s incredibly important to me that, as much as possible, every sentence and every word chosen reinforces a theme, a symbol, an analogy, and yet doesn’t weigh down the novel at all. I’ve been to several book clubs with my previous books, and honestly--nothing against the readers--a lot of people didn’t pick up on the symbolism and the themes and that's fine. Symbolism is not there to go “Oh, I hid something and now you have to find it”, symbolism is the framework that an author really has to build upon and add flesh to a story. I don’t see your skeleton right now, I don’t know what your skeleton looks like but it has been the basis of the framework of who you are, how you move, how you look, how you act. That to me, is what symbolism and analogy are in a novel, they’re hidden but yet they supply the larger framework of any piece of literature. And so typically, when I choose a word, I’m choosing a word because it is somehow referencing a seed I planted early on that I want to develop. A lot of the time when you do that, it’s amazing how much your subconscious takes over and you don’t even realize everything that has come out of there until you write it and you go “Oh wow, okay, I didn’t see that coming until that came down on the page.” And for me, that's part of the joy of writing,–you’re kind of closing your eyes, holding your nose and diving down into the depths of your own subconscious and saying, “Okay let's see what happens. Let’s see what I find out about myself.”
LG: Could taking a deep dive into yourself be an analogy of the theme/plot of the book?
JP: Definitely. The character sinks deep before he starts to pull himself up to the surface again. What I will say, I was really concerned when I finished this. I thought, “This is going to be too hard for people.” Because this character is a hard character to deal with, … I had forty-five advanced readers on this and I was really surprised with not only how accepting people were with the character, despite acknowledging the flaws and the difficulty. but also how many people also read this even though this isn’t the kind of story they normally read and were still highly engaged.
LG: Are any characters in Fortune Falls based on people in your life or history?
JP: There’s always inspiration to some degree on actual people, but in this one it’s probably the lightest that it’s ever been in my novels. You need something as a basis when you start writing a character just to get a face and to get an attitude and to get how they’re presenting themselves--the dialogue and whatnot. So certainly, I use that as a seed, but there is really not much else. They are a little bit more supportive of the plot, or I should say, to the development of the main character, rather than them being a reflection of existing people.
LG: Are you working on anything new, and if so, what can we expect?
JP: Hopefully, it’ll be finished within the next year or two. I just started it, but it’s been an idea that has been mulling around for a long time. Actually, one of the challenges with this one will be the fact that it is kind of the most plot-driven that I’ve ever had to write. And yet I still want it to be primarily character driven. But there is a very clear plot and a very clear mystery.
James L. Peters will be making appearances for book signings and readings from Fortune Falls on Thursday, March 14, from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. at The Local Store in Eau Claire, on Thursday, April 4 from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. at the Chippewa Falls Public Library, and on Saturday, April 6, from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. at Dragon Tale Books in Menomonie.