Guest post by Ruth Bonapace

Photo credit: Holtz Photography

At 35, with two young children and a disintegrating marriage, I was freelancing between magazine editing jobs. Hoping to earn some much-needed extra cash, I signed on to run a laundromat with a partner who had a 9 to 5 job. I soon discovered that when an employee didn’t show or equipment malfunctioned, it was me they’d call, equating freelance with free time.

I had considered my exasperating trips to the Jersey City laundry akin to purgatory, but my lousy laundromat gig left me with an unexpected gift. It awakened my ability to listen deeply and absorb a lingo far removed from my suburban mom life.

While expertly clearing jammed coin boxes, I began discerning the language patterns of the attendant, the dapper dry cleaner, and the customers. There was an elderly man who rarely did laundry but came for small talk and companionship, teachers stopping by after school, teen drug dealers using the pay phone, large immigrant families with their children hauling sacks of wash.

Their patois was the unfiltered voice of my own working-class upbringing on Long Island, pronounced “Lawn Guyland.” My dad, born in Italy, sharpened knives for a living while my stay-at-home mother peppered her speech with malapropisms like “ravenoate” (renovate) and “intensive purposes” (intents and purposes). It was a way of speaking – and storytelling – that I’d drifted away from when I left the neighborhood for college and a professional life in journalism.

It all came back in that scrappy laundry, where I began to listen with a writer’s ear for aural patterns that I’d long forgotten. Wanting more, I’d roam the urban landscape like a linguistic detective, sitting in coffee shops and fast-food joints with a small notebook, eavesdropping not for plot material, but for inflection, non-sequiturs, broken grammar, interruptions, and sentence fragments.

I’d long dreamed of writing fiction. With this rediscovered language, I found the courage to enroll in my first summer workshop. Having internalized hours of conversation as washing machines hummed, I’d select random dialogue, re-arranging and expanding, trying to create characters that brimmed with life. These early stories, never published, were my canvas where I experimented with tonal color.

Starting my first novel The Bulgarian Training Manual a decade later, I had no outline or plot. I was certain of only one thing: my narrator’s voice. I imagined myself, trapped in my old hometown or, worse, in the laundromat, desperate to leave, yet comforted by its familiarity.

It was a tough-girl, in-your-face, baring-my-guts, entre nous inflection that was also vulnerable and filled with self-doubt. With this, my narrator and alter ego Tina was born.

Sustaining that strong, first-person narrative proved more challenging than I expected. There were times when I’d start writing and Tina would sound more like me – the professional editor me, the degree in creative writing me. On those days, I’d give up the fight and try again a week or two later, waiting for those ghosts of the past to reawaken.

Once I’d found my groove, I needed people to interact with her, not with idle chitchat, but in ways that would move the plot along. Developing a facility with street language and banter was one thing. How could secondary characters, whether they were my laundromat folks or the gym rats in my novel, shine with a personality of their own?

When I’d get really stuck, I turned to free drafting, a technique I’d learned in a college playwrighting elective. The instructor, a theater director, had us practice getting the characters talking about, well, anything at all. Then, let a third person walk into the conversation. How does the dynamic change? When is the conversation mired in the mundane or expository, and where does it sparkle with turning points? Then cut to the essentials.

Since The Bulgarian Training Manual is a satire of gym culture and the striving for relevance, I doubled down on my listening at my local gym. I started paying close attention to the clipped bravado amid the grunts and groans, the loquaciousness of the mansplaining musclemen trying to pick up girls in leggings, and the casual chatter of women in the locker room. I imagined myself as Tina, my narrator, taking it all in, alternately exasperated and exhilarated.

I also leaned into my love of classic radio and early film, with its reliance on exaggerated accents, cliché, and colloquial speech. For example, in the 1936 movie The Petrified Forest, Betty Davis’ dialogue was full of defiant spunk and spitfire. Humphrey Bogart had lines that screamed outlaw on the lam: “Just keep in mind that I and the boys is candidates for hangin’. And the first time any one of ya makes a wrong move, I’m gonna kill the whole lot of ya!”

Forcing myself to be unafraid to let the language fly forth in all its quirky veritas enabled me to keep the voice consistent to the last page, evolving ever so slowly, adding micro doses of sophistication as the narrator grew and changed.

Writing my novel took about 10 years until it was ready for submission. When I finally had a first draft, I used the same techniques in countless revisions, forcing myself to make minimal grammatical changes and never at the expense of authenticity. For example, early in the manuscript a copy editor questioned the line “Mrs. Sciancalepore don’t like noise.” “Is this purposeful?” she asked. Absolutely, I replied.

For me, my book had to pass the “ear” test. If I read it aloud – and I always did – would the characters ring true? Were they speaking naturally, as they would in their world, not my world, whether stuffing their clothes in a washer or lifting weights? And when the answer was “yes” and “yes,” I could finish my day – and my novel – satisfied.

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Ruth Bonapace’s debut novel The Bulgarian Training Manual, is published June 4 by Clash Books.

The Bulgarian Training Manual by Ruth Bonapace

The Bulgarian Training Manual is a comic novel about Tina’s quest to find her true parents and the perfect jeans. With a magical book’s help, she travels from Hoboken to Bulgaria on a whimsical journey. Along the way, she sparks a unique contest combining bodybuilding and poetry. This witty story explores self-improvement, self-doubt, and dreams, showing that those who follow the manual gain not just muscle but also poetic inspiration.

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