Novelist’s advice is to just keep writing

Gail Oberst recently published her first novel, “Valkyrie Dance.” It is available on Amazon. The writer lives in Independence.

/ Photo by Haugen's Galleri

Two words define Gail Oberst’s approach to writing: Don't stop.

“My process in writing, and this is what stops a lot of writers, my process is to just keep writing,” said the Independence novelist. “If you’re following a train of thought, don’t stop and correct yourself, don’t stop and review what you’ve written. Just keep on writing until you can’t think of any more words to say.”

Full speed ahead, though unorthodox to some, works for Oberst.

“Not everyone does (this),” she admits. “A lot of people I know will go and outline the whole thing, and that’s their creative process. Good for them. I have done that before, but I always go off script.”

Which isn’t to say her path is straight and narrow.

“Editing is in my blood as well. When I’m trying to write a novel, I have to kind of stifle it so I can get everything on the page,” she said.”But there’s a time, at some point during your writing, you get a hundred pages out and you have to go back and organize. You have to think about the story arc. You have to think about the structure of your story, and how people are going to read it.”

Oberst is also a contract writer for several publications. Be it fiction or nonfiction, the process is the same.

“I get up in the morning and write whatever comes into my head. If I’m on a project, working for a newspaper, sometimes I have to do deadlines and headlines,” she explained. “But if I don’t have those kinds of things going on in the morning, I usually write from the time I get up until at least noon.”

Oberst revisits a dark chapter from her past in “Valkyrie Dance.” The female-driven psychological thriller is a book only she could write.

“It was 1982. Looking for adventure, I left my job as a reporter to be a stripper in Anchorage, Alaska. There I met a teen-ager and his teen roommates - a pimp and his prostitute girlfriend - and was drawn into their criminal lives,” she stated. “Unknowingly, I aided in the murder of their older roommate.”

Oberst added she embellished this core story by adding serial murders, crime syndicates and natural disasters similar to real events in Anchorage’s story.

“A stripper goes to Alaska and winds up involved in a murder. That story is a little story, and I wanted to make it a bigger story, about how it made me feel responsible in some ways for the things that had happened,” said Oberst. That sense of responsibility “I hope comes through in this book. We are our brother’s keeper.”

Mayim Buchmiller, the book’s protagonist, is loosely based on the author.

“It’s not written in first person. It’s written as if there’s a character. Not myself, but in many ways it is myself,” she said.

Reviewers praised the read. “Valkyrie Dance” has been described as “chilling” by Henry Hughes, Oregon book award-winning poet and author of “Back Seat with Fish,” and “cleverly constructed and deeply relatable” by publisher Benjamin Gorman. Local author Maren Anderson added, “Gail Oberst’s evocative writing paints a humane portrait of her characters in this suspenseful tale of murder …”

The idea of writing a novel lingered within Oberst for years.

“I had friends that said, Gail, you’re alway telling me these stories. Why don’t you write them down,” she said. “I think that’s kind of a normal thing for people who talk a lot and tell stories, or have had interesting experiences. So my friends and my family, especially my family, encouraged me to go ahead and supported me while I was taking the time to do this.”

Oberst has been a writer most of her life. Family provided her with a career boost while still in her teens.

“I started at a newspaper that my uncle owned, a small weekly in Roseburg,” she said. “At 19, he hired me to answer phones, clean up the print shop and the bathrooms, and I managed to finagle my way into writing for him. That’s how I got started.”

Actually, that’s how she got started professionally. Oberst love for writing was with her much earlier.

“The first time we put those little pages that have lines on them when you’re a kid. And you make those circles like this,” she demonstrated while whirling her arm, “to try to stay inside the line. And I decided I like this. I’ve been keeping journals and diaries and things since I was a child.”

Oberst doesn’t have to look far for source material if her well of inspiration ever runs dry. Family roots run seven generations deep in Polk County. Many of her short stories have detailed ancestral lore, but never a novel was written. That may change.

“I have written some short stories that I would love to turn into novels. One of them is about something that happened to my relatives that lived up in the hills, just west of the coast range,” she said.

The setting is in the 1800s, at a time when it was common for diseases, especially whooping cough, to tear through an area and destroy entire families. Including one of hers, which was chronicled by the mother of several of the victims.

“The thing that inspires me to write about it, even though it’s kind of a dark subject is, number one, we’re all in kind of a dark frame of mind these days. But the other thing is that the lady that this happened to wrote down all of the details,” said Oberst. “And so I have all of these details of these children in her family dying one by one, and it’s just heartbreaking.”

Oberst enjoys being a writer.

“I cannot imagine a more wonderful life than the life I have,” she said. “I get to write, both for money and for fun.”

“Valkyrie Dance” is published by OberstInk press and is available on Amazon. She does not recommend the book for non-adults.

(Publisher’s note: This article originally appeared in the Polk County Itemizer-Observer. It has been slightly edited for publication in the Monmouth Free Press.)