Writing My Hotel Novel Inside a Hotel

(a character's profession is symbolic gold)

Dear Liz,

Spring greetings! The robins are singing in the trees outside as I write.

For two lovely weeks I’m at the Atticus Hotel in McMinnville, Oregon (wine country an hour southwest of Portland), where I am a writer-in-residence. Might should call it a writer-in-gratitude. A writer-absolutely-thrilled she’s getting to work on her “hotel novel” while staying in an actual hotel.

Yes, “hotel novel” is a genre where the characters are the guests and staff, and the hotel itself can be a kind of character, too. Some classic hotel novels include The Hotel by Elizabeth Bowen (1927), Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum (1929), and The Feast by Margaret Kennedy (1950). Come to think of it, The Shining by Stephen King (1977) is a hotel novel, as is The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (1949), though both of those go pretty dark pretty quick.

Contemporary examples include A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford, The Mystery Guest by Nita Prose (there’s a series of these), and The Wedding People by Alison Espach. This is an incredibly incomplete list! I have stacks of hotel novels at home. Oh, and Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac (1984) is an all-time favorite novel, period, set in a hotel or not.

I love hotel (and restaurant) novels because I have worked in hotels and restaurants. My mother was a travel agent when I was growing up, so the idea of travel has always been important to me. Reading a hotel novel, I feel like I’m on vacation meeting interesting, possibly murderous, people à la At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie.

My novel isn’t about a hotel per se. Peak Season (working title) is about Colt-Marie Sanger, a thirty-year-old front desk agent and Army brat who loses her job suddenly at a multinational hotel in Portland. Without a college degree, from a troubled family, and having never traveled before, Colt sets off on a Greyhound journey across her adopted state. Against the backdrops of Crater Lake, the coast, and the small towns of Oregon, Colt tries to slay the personal demons that have kept her stagnant so long: a father and younger sister killed in a plane crash, an alcoholic mother, and a lying, cheating boyfriend. Through traveling and meeting new people in unlikely places, Colt discovers what home and hospitality really mean.¹

As a metaphor, I think a character’s profession is a great way to explore who they are on a core level – whether they love or hate a job. A character’s profession equals symbolic gold. I sometimes think about characters only through their jobs! A nurse and a firefighter get stuck in an elevator…is very different from an engineer and a baker stuck in the same elevator. In Colt’s case, she fell into hotel work by accident, but along the way she discovered that she’s good at taking care of people. Losing her beloved job sets Colt in motion.

So I’ve been writing the last third of Peak Season in a gorgeous suite at the Atticus Hotel. (Turns out that a velvet couch in front of a gas fireplace while being taken care of by terrific staff, is definitely my work jam.) I always think of a story’s ending as a reflection of the beginning. The flip side. How the world has changed. The inevitable twists of fate. And now, what the new way of life looks like.

At the end of Colt’s journey, I’m leaning into forgiveness and redemption, which you and I seem to talk a lot about, maybe because of our churchy childhoods. But basically I’m thinking about how the cards that life deals out often aren’t fair. How we break, and repair, relationships. And just all of life’s triumphs and heartbreaks. Because that is life. Up. Down. Up again. Sideways. I love trying to capture that carnivalesque sense of real life.

I know you’re writing a story about a teenage girl on the cusp of adulthood in swampy Florida. I’m very curious to hear about your protagonist’s job. Does she have a job yet or a plan for one, or maybe she has no options at all? I can’t wait to hear.

Okay, mon amie, may the robins be singing in Central Park.

Hugs,

-mel

1. It’s really hitting me that without the gobsmacking hospitality of ordinary people who make a commitment to supporting artists/writers – such as the staff at the Atticus Hotel – so much art and literature simply wouldn’t exist.