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A COMPLETE CHARACTER STUDY IS REVEALED WITH A SERIES OF LISTS
Who doesn’t love making a list, and checking items off that list?
Lists are simple. They are manageable. They take big complex tasks — feeding one’s family or planning a party, for example — and break them down into itemized chunks of information that can be scratched out upon completion. They can help us organize our feelings about favorite and least favorite things. Lists are order in a world of chaos.
And, in the new novel “TwentyOne Truths About Love,” a series of lists helps provide insight into the heart and mind of the book’s main character, Daniel, a man struggling to hold his marriage and life together in the face of financial difficulty.
“It’s just list after list after list, and through these lists, you get an idea of who he is,” says Matthew Dicks, the book’s author.
This is Dicks’ sixth book and his fifth novel, and he says he tries to do something new with everything he writes. One book, for example, is from the point of view of an imaginary friend (that would, unsurprisingly, be 2013’s “Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend”).
The idea for “TwentyOne Truths” came to Dicks somewhat accidentally.
“I actually started writing it in meetings and bad training sessions to make other people laugh,” says Dicks, a 48yearold Newington resident who has also been a teacher for more than 21 years. He is also cofounder and creative director of Speak Up, a Hartfordbased storytelling organization that produces shows throughout New England.
He thought the silly lists were just an amusement — a “fluke” as he puts it. “I never thought it would be a book,” Dicks says. The book will be released Tuesday, Nov. 19.
But then he began to see how the lists could come together to tell a story. And, Dicks says, he saw a certain appeal to telling a story through lists.
“People love lists,” he says. “There are entire web sites dedicated to lists. Lists are also a way to reach people who might not necessarily want to read a novel. But they might read a collection of lists.”
It’s also important to Dicks to keep finding new ways to tell stories.
“I’m always trying to write something that’s a little different from what I’ve written before,” he says. “None of my books are anything like the others, except they tend to be funny, and they tend to make you cry at the end.”
Even the way Dicks launches and promotes his work is a bit unusual. Instead of doing a straightup reading from the text, Dicks’s appearances involve him telling a series of stories about his life and about writing his book.
For instance, at the Connecticut Historical Society event, he plans to tell a story about being stuck in writing the book and talking to his brother about it while they were at a football game together.
“I don’t even know my brother all that well, but now I have a story about going to a Patriots game with him where he saved my book,” Dicks says.
But being different has its challenges. Dicks says, even though he loves coming up with unique ways to tell stories, he sometimes wishes he worked in a more straightforward genre of writing, such as thrillers or horror novels.
“It’s tricky,” he says. “Sometimes I wish I could just write a normal novel.”
“IT’S TRICKY. SOMETIMES I WISH I COULD JUST WRITE A NORMAL NOVEL.”