Behind The Book With Liz Johnston, Author of The Fall-Down Effect
Today, we invite Liz Johnston to the Book*hug blog to share the story of how she began writing her debut novel The Fall-Down Effect! Finding initial inspiration through reading environmental articles on The Narwhal, as well as from the works of Annie Proulx and Kim Trainor, Liz details how she came to settle on the classic three-act novel structure, and how she chose to address current issues such as the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Climate Crisis through her writing. Take it away Liz!
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When I began writing The Fall-Down Effect, I’d been living in Toronto for eight years. The last time I’d visited Revelstoke, the B.C. town I grew up in, was when my partner and I moved here in the summer of 2010, driving from Victoria to Canada’s biggest city in a car weighed down with all our belongings. Revelstoke had been a quick stop along the way. We hung out with my sister for maybe an hour. I remember eating fresh peaches at a picnic table.
Going back to other places in B.C. in 2017, 2018, I was confronted with evidence of the wildfires I’d been hearing about from my siblings and reading about in the news. Even on Vancouver Island, you could see and smell wildfire haze that had drifted from the Interior or from Washington, Oregon, maybe even California. Of course, there’d been forest fires before, when I was growing up, but not like this. Thinking about that gone world I grew up in, maybe I wanted to preserve it to some extent, to remember what an Interior B.C. summer used to be like and get that down before the baseline totally shifted and non-stop megafires started to feel like how it’s always been.
I believe I was also reading Annie Proulx’s Barkskins around this time when I first conceived of my novel, which I originally referred to as The Forest. We’d published an excerpt from Proulx’s epic in Brick magazine, where I’m an editor, and, intrigued, I’d picked up a copy. It took me a few years to finally brave it. Reading about the long history of this continent’s deforestation by European colonizers got me thinking of all the people I knew from my hometown who were involved in the logging industry, people who’ve been loggers or foresters. My best friend from high school works at the lumber mill. Someone else from my class now has his own logging company. I remember seeing, as a child, a bumper sticker: Hug a logger. You’ll never go back to trees. Logging was ubiquitous where I grew up, and it’s not like I’d never thought about the destruction. Like Sylvia, one of the three siblings my novel revolves around, I read The Lorax and watched FernGully.
But reading Barkskins in 2018, breathing the particulate of forest fires, the environmental costs of the logging industry filled my mind. Books about logging and trees and forest management and megafires started piling up on my desk. I learned the logging term fall-down effect in one of them, a way to describe what happens when old-growth forests are logged faster than second-growth ones can reach the same “timber value,” and I tucked the words away for future use, not realizing they would become my title. I read so many articles on The Narwhal I decided to become a member to support their excellent journalism. And I tried to picture the shape my own book about forests might take.
I wish I could remember the context in which my friend, the poet and essayist Allison LaSorda, brought up the classic three-act structure. I picture us drinking tea in the living room of the sweet apartment she had at the time, laptops on our laps. Maybe we were having a grant-writing get-together, each dreaming of having the funds to just write for a while.
However it happened, this idea of three acts, three parts, lodged in my mind. I decided that, in my novel, each act would take place in a different year. Part 1 is set in 1989, part 2 in 2001, and part 3 in 2020. Those first two parts are set in the B.C. Interior that I remembered, before wildfire haze became a summertime given. (In Kim Trainor’s recent book, Blue Thinks Itself Within Me, the poet pins the beginning of “the eerie, soft pink sci-fi light at noon in Penticton, in Edmonton” around 2015 or 2016. I mention this book because it deals, in part, with Trainor’s experiences participating in the Ferry Creek blockade against old-growth logging, news of which riveted me later in the process of working on this novel.) By part 3 of The Fall-Down Effect, we’ve entered this megafire world.
I figured setting that final section in 2020, a couple years in my future, would help ensure the novel still felt current by the time I completed the manuscript. (And here it is finally out in the world in 2026.) As I wrote, 2020 arrived, and with it the COVID-19 pandemic. By the time Toronto first went into lockdown, I had a partial draft of part 3, supposedly set in 2020, but a 2020 that was nothing like the one we were living through. I can’t recall now if I ever considered simply shifting my timeline: make all my characters a bit younger, adjust the major milestones in their lives, avoid processing and writing about the times we were living through. I probably worried no one would want to read about the pandemic; it was enough to have to experience it.
In any case, I did not change the timeline of part 3. Instead, I tried to record, with as much precision as possible, what those times were like. And the kind of magical thing is that the pandemic setting actually made sense of certain plot points that otherwise would have required me to add some other narrative justification. Sadly, soon enough there was a real fire to anchor the narrative’s events on, a fire on Mount Christie that caused hundreds of people in Penticton to evacuate their homes. I believe the “Thanks, 2020” tweet Sylvia sees when she’s looking for news of the fire is a real Penticton resident’s tweet I came across in my research.
A lot shifted from my initial conception of the novel to the final version readers can now hold in their hands, unsurprisingly. But the last element I want to mention here is point of view. The Fall-Down Effect is told in close third person through the perspectives of siblings Sylvia, Fern, and River and their parents, Lynn and Tom. Originally, however, I thought I would only use the perspectives of the three siblings. I started drafting from the middle, working on part 2 when the youngest, River, is graduating high school. That was the scene I could see most clearly to start setting down words. Like River, I graduated high school in 2001. Twenty-five years have passed since then, yes, but it was easy enough to think back and put myself in his perspective. I still very much remember what being eighteen felt like, those friendships, those anxieties, what I was thinking of when I approached the end of one phase of my life and got ready to embark on the next. River’s sisters, one nineteen and taking a “gap year” after high school, the other away at UBC doing a master’s degree, were equally available to me. And more importantly, the full story I wanted to tell at that point was available to them too.
When I started writing part 1 though, I soon came up against the limits and challenges of writing from only those three perspectives. With part 1, set twelve years earlier, my point-of-view characters were no longer teenagers and young adults, but now children, six, seven, and eleven. Of course, many writers have told sophisticated stories through the eyes of children. (I think of Shani Mootoo’s brilliant and beautiful Starry Starry Night, for one.) But for the story I wanted to tell, the sense of things I wanted to convey to the reader, I decided to bring in some adult perspectives. For a little while, it was a bit of a free for all; I’d pop into anyone’s head. When Lynn takes her children to blockade a logging road, part of that scene unfolded through the eyes of one of the loggers. Later, when the kids are first enrolled in public school, I had a scene in the teachers’ lounge, from Fern’s teacher’s point of view. These viewpoints did not stay in the manuscript long, but Lynn’s did, and it grew to take up more space, continuing through parts 2 and 3. Tom’s sections were a fraction of hers, and for helping me find his place in the narrative, I’m ever thankful to my editor, Meg Storey.
Between all that fiddling around on my own and working with Meg, there were other editors—friends in my writing group, first readers, even a generous editor at an agency I queried whose rejection was softened by a thoughtful editorial letter with advice for revisions. I’m grateful to them all, and you’ll find their names my acknowledgements. But the rest of the twists and turns the novel took between those first stirrings of inspiration and its publication are between me and them, at least for now.
