Okay, I’ll confess it: I’m known for my enthusiasm about fabulous writing and the fine people that produce it. Guilty as charged. I’m also, I hear, notorious for waxing especially rhapsodic when a good writer who has paid her dues first breaks into print. Yet even for me, a phrase like particularly overjoyed is a rarity.
What’s sent me into overjoy overload, you ask? This time, I’m announcing a fabulous novel by a great writer who has paid her dues — and who also happens to have been my college roommate. So if you think I’m not going to be tap-dancing on the rooftops about this one, well, all I can say is that my neighbors have been anxiously spreading nets under their eaves for weeks, in anticipation of this moment.
Algonquin Books will be bringing the book out in April. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:
It’s 1943. As air-raid sirens blare in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, eight-year-old Saburo walks through the peach forests of Taoyuan. The least favored son of a Taiwanese politician, Saburo is in no hurry to get home to the taunting and abuse he suffers at the hands of his parents and older brother. In the forest he meets Yoshiko, whose descriptions of her loving family are to Saburo like a glimpse of paradise. Meeting her is a moment he will remember forever, and for years he will try to find her again. When he finally does, she is by the side of his oldest brother and greatest rival.
Set in a tumultuous and violent period of Taiwanese history — as the Chinese Nationalist Army lays claim to the island and one autocracy replaces another–The Third Son tells the story of lives governed by the inheritance of family and the legacy of culture, and of a young man determined to free himself from both.
In Saburo, author Julie Wu has created an extraordinary character, a gentle soul forced to fight for everything he’s ever wanted: food, an education, and his first love, Yoshiko. A sparkling, evocative debut, it will have readers cheering for this young boy with his head in the clouds who, against all odds, finds himself on the frontier of America’s space program.
Having gotten a sneak peek at this lyrical novel, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Double that recommendation for those of you currently pursuing the difficult-but-rewarding path of literary fiction: I think you’re going to be interested in the lovely things the language does in Julie’s talented hands.
I’m just a trifle excited, in short, that her work is about to be available to a wider audience. To celebrate, I’ve decided to rerun one of my all-time favorite guest posts, by, you guessed it, Julie Wu’s. I first ran it in 2011, soon after Algonquin acquired the novel.
I think it might resonate particularly well right now, as I know so many of you have spent the first three weeks of January (insert martyred sigh here) frantically querying agencies already dealing with what I like to call the New Year’s Resolution Avalanche. Still others have, bless your hearts, been champing at the bit, waiting for half the aspiring writers in North America to work that first querying enthusiasm of the year out of collective system.
But I’m correct, am I not, in saying that every single one of you has been gnawing your nails, worrying about whether your manuscript or book proposal is polished enough to make the grade? That’s completely normal; even the best books have to run the rejection gamut. Yet it’s amazing how seldom published authors speak frankly to those facing the prospect for the first time about something everyone who writes for a living knows is the case: facing rejection is an inescapable fact of the writing life.
Stop shaking your head — it’s true. Every single living author you admire has had to deal with it. What’s more, every living author you admire has been precisely where you are now.
If you doubt that any of these writing woes have been under-discussed, let me ask you: when’s the last time you heard a writer mention rejection or struggling to wrest writing time from his busy schedule as anything but a complaint?
What I like so much about today’s post is how unblinkingly it examines something else writers published and unpublished alike seldom like to admit: many a great premise has been lost to posterity for lack of necessary revision. It’s easy to lose faith in mid-revision — and even easier to reject the notion of revision at all.
Advance disclaimer: I’m not the roommate mentioned in the piece; I couldn’t throw a pot to save my life. In the interest of full disclosure, however, I should tell you that Julie is the kind soul that first introduced me to that modern miracle, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, a fact that in no way affects my estimation of her literary talents. A Boston-area native, she also probably saved my life by instructing this rural California girl on the delicate art of crossing Massachusetts Avenue on foot without being flattened like a pancake.
The local joke at the time was that Cambridge traffic tended to separate Harvard students into two categories: the quick and the dead. So if you have ever enjoyed a post here at Author! Author!, Julie’s teaching me to dash through traffic unscathed is partially to thank.
Please join me, then, in welcoming Julie Wu. Take it away, Julie!
My roommate once made a clay pot in art school. Threw it on the wheel, drew up its walls between the tips of her fingers, fired it, glazed it. When she and her classmates held up their finished pots, gleaming and beautiful, the instructor led the students to a pit and ordered them to throw down their pots. The point was, he said, not to become attached to a particular piece of work. You can always make more.
Some students cried. My roommate was traumatized, still bitter about the experience years later when she told me about it.
Hearing her story made my stomach twist. I had written a few short stories, and they were my precious babies, conjured up as I sat cross-legged in the dark in an apartment overlooking the Hudson River. My stories were praised in student workshops, but their strengths were no more robust or reproducible than the street lights’ glinting on the water’s surface. Even after the literary magazine rejections came in, I revised only a sentence here or there, hoping that would be enough.
Because I was afraid that if I revised more, I would ruin what was good and never get it back again. I was one of those art students, crying and clutching my pot at the edge of the pit.
Here’s the thing: that instructor was right. It has taken me ten years to understand that. Make one beautiful pot–maybe you were lucky. Make another from the ground up, and another, still more beautiful, and you are an artist. It takes practice, study, the making and smashing of many pots beautiful, average, and ugly, to really know that clay, to know exactly how to push your hands into it to get what you want.
It took me ten years to understand, because it took me ten years to write my first novel. I revised it countless times–a little when it first didn’t sell, then more and more. Eventually, I changed its structure, its point of view, its tone, its style. With each revision I received comments and started over, page one. Each time, I learned more, until I could revise without fear. And it was then that I sold the book.
In writing we have a safety net: the computer. Open a new file and you have smashed your pot and kept a picture of it at the same time. How to proceed at that point is a study in humility, in open-mindedness, in self-examination. It’s remembering all the advice you read about in the craft books–that you must have an interesting protagonist, a need, lots of conflict–and admitting you need to take that advice yourself. It’s hearing all the feedback from your readers–that the protagonist is unsympathetic, that nothing happens, that what happens is implausible–and admitting that they are true. It’s realizing that there’s power in depth, and that depth is a function of your narrative arc. It’s an equation of equal parts emotion and mechanics, and it’s fueled by that elusive beast, imagination.
After so many years, book one is done. I’m thinking about book two. I’ve got clay in my hands again, but I feel different now. Because I’m not afraid. Because I know now I can make a pretty good pot. And because if it doesn’t turn out well, I don’t have to cry. I can throw it into the pit, and make something better.
Okay, okay, so I didn’t manage to get our planned whew-I-survived-PNWA treat up yesterday, as I had hoped, as a quick breather between talking about how to handle conference pitching with aplomb and today’s plunge into how to handle a request for manuscript pages — which will still be happening later today, you will be delighted to hear. I have an excellent excuse, however: the other day, a truck burst into flames outside the salon where I was having my hair cut.
The first those of us inside the salon heard of it was the giant pop when the windshield exploded. Not the best time to have one’s head in a sink, as it turns out. Both my stylist and I jumped so much that I have a gigantic bump on the back of my noggin. It’s rendered it just a trifle difficult to focus on a computer screen.
And that, in case any of you had been wondering, is why fiction has to be so much more plausible than nonfiction — and why simply slapping real-life events on the novel page so often doesn’t ring quite true. Quite a lot of what happens in this zany world of ours would seem completely absurd if it popped up in a novel.
Case in point: would you believe it if Our Heroine not only rushed to her blog the instant she could see straight after that out-of-nowhere explosion, but posted twice in one day? Surely, that pushes the bounds of credulity; the fact that it is actually going to happen would be irrelevant.
Is my vision still a bit blurry, or are some of you sighing and shifting impatiently in your chairs? “Yes, yes, Anne,” those of you eager to get requested materials out the door mutter, “I’m sorry for your whacked head, but we’ve been talking about practical matters for the last week. I’ve appreciated that, as I have a manuscript request burning a hole in my metaphorical pocket from my recent successful conference pitch and/or a query that hit the right note. I’m begrudgingly honoring your advice to read my submission IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and perhaps even OUT LOUD before I send it off to the agent of my dreams. But honestly, a cozy chat about plausibility in fiction? Or a discussion of craft with a respected historical fiction author, as the title of this post implies you’re about to have? How can I do that and remain monomaniacally focused upon popping my manuscript into the mail as soon as I have satisfied your insane demands?”
All part of my evil plan, impatient shifters (but please, don’t say popping to me right now; it makes my head throb). As it happens, evil plans, plausibility in fiction, craft, and the all-important issue of how to keep the faith throughout what can be a long, attenuated submission process — even if you hit SEND immediately after today’s late-night post on how to present your work professionally, it’s not at all uncommon for submitters not to hear back for months — are all part of this afternoon’s treat.
So is the question of how to render over-the-top realities plausible on the page. Or wasn’t plausibility something for which you had been scanning while you were re-reading the pages you intend to submit IN THEIR ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and, if you want to make me happy, OUT LOUD?
Okay, that’s why you might want to pay close attention to the content of this discussion, impatient shifters. Now, allow me to introduce my discussant, a highly-respected historical novelist deeply gifted at bringing even the most over-the-top events of years past into vivid, plangent, and utterly plausible life on the page: Nicole Galland.
Nicole Galland’s terrific new retelling of OTHELLO, I, Iago came out a few months back, and although you of all people know I am not prone to gushing, I think it’s one of the best historical novels of recent years. I also think it’s both a terrific read and a great example for those of you toiling away in the currently popular vineyard of reconceiving classic tales. From the publisher’s blurb:
From earliest childhood, the precocious boy called Iago had inconvenient tendencies toward honesty—a “failing” that made him an embarrassment to his family and an outcast in the corrupted culture of glittering, Renaissance Venice. Embracing military life as an antidote to the frippery of Venetian society, he won the glowing love of the beautiful Emilia, and the regard of Venice’s revered General Othello. After years of abuse and rejection, Iago was poised to win everything he ever fought for…
…until a cascade of unexpected betrayals propel him on a catastrophic quest for righteous vengeance, contorting his moral compass until he has betrayed his closest friends and family and sealed his own fate as one of the most notorious villains of all time.
Pretty exciting, eh? Actually, for once, a blurb has undersold the dramatic action — and the genuinely astonishing twists of the plot.
Yes, even if one happens to know Othello awfully darned well. I do, as it happens: I’ve acted in it. Heck, I’ve played more than one role in it. And more than one turn of events made me not only gasp out loud, but put that pen with which a prudent author interviewer always takes marginal notes right through the page.
Think about that. Usually, I don’t jump for anything less than a nearby explosion.
Seriously, one of the occupational hazards of being an editor is the deadening of one’s capacity for surprise. Editors are notorious for rolling their eyes over mild foreshadowing on page 14 and murmuring, “Oh, great, now I know how the book ends.” If you are the type of person that likes to receive a story arc in sequential chunks, I would strenuously advise against accompanying an editor to a movie.
That suggestion is brought to you, incidentally, by the unlucky soul that happened to be occupying the adjacent loge seat when I saw The Sixth Sense. The first time the mother appeared onscreen and did not ask how her child’s therapy session had gone, everyone within three rows heard my annoyed huff, if not my whispered, “Oh, so the mother can’t see the therapist; he must be a ghost. I’m bored now.”
As you might imagine for a reader with that kind of attitude problem, it’s rare that a plot catches me by surprise. So how is it possible that reading a story whose ending I know as well as Othello’s kept me up all night reading because I wanted to know how it was going to turn out?
Which is, of course, the central problem in retelling any well-known classic. It’s always a writing challenge to draw readers into a story, particularly one that takes place long ago, but it’s an especially high dive with Shakespeare — and not merely because of the intimidation value of tackling one of the theatrical world’s greatest tragedies. Even readers that routinely turn pale at the very thought of their high school English class’ discussion of Hamlet may reasonably be expected to be familiar with the outlines of the plot: General Othello and the lovely Desdemona are in love, Iago convinces Othello to become madly jealous, and the stage quickly becomes littered with corpses.
To make the dive even higher, the literary world has in recent years applauded — and even expected — new takes on culturally well-known tales not only to render them fresh and accessible for current readers, but to do so from the point of view of the villain. In reimagining Othello, that presents quite a difficulty: Iago does some pretty loathsome things to the people around him, rendering him hard to like — and, unusually for chatty Shakespeare, the play’s audience is actually not treated to much explanation of his motives.
How did Nicole conquer these twin challenge? By means of a writing choice that I think will delight and instruct those of us devoted to writing fiction: by delving so thoroughly into Iago’s past and personality development that as he takes each step toward infamy, the reader is cajoled into saying, “Oh, okay — I can go along with that.”
The result is hugely engaging. I, IAGO not only seduced me into liking the villain — something I would not have thought possible — but left me feeling by the tumultuous last quarter of the book that by having empathized with his increasingly warped sense of right and wrong, I had become enmeshed in his fate. Yet even though I could see it coming, even though I had picked up the book knowing that it had to come, the trip there kept catching me off guard, because I was experiencing it moment-to-moment with the protagonist-villain.
And that, my friends, is not something that happens all that often to those of us that murmur at the first mention of a character’s hard childhood, “Oh, so he’s the serial killer.”
An unexpected fringe benefit that friends of the Bard will love: this story is so steeped in the Shakespearean ethos that small hints of his other works seem to have been built into the very plaster of the ballrooms and steel of the swords. Here is an image plucked from a sonnet; there is descriptor reminiscent of Juliet. And could that possibly be a reference to Pericles, Prince of Tyre?
It is, in a word, fun — not word I generally associate with tragedy. If I have a critique (other than having lost sleep to this story), it’s that I would have liked to see both Desdemona’s very genuine wit and Othello’s descent into overwhelming paroxysms of jealousy in a bit more detail. Why was this great mind so easily overthrown?
But that’s a minor quibble. As an established fan of Nicole’s writing — and, in the interest of full disclosure, as someone who first met her during an audition for Measure for Measure at Harvard, back in the Reagan era — naturally, I expected to be charmed by the writing. I have to say, though, I think this is far and away her best book to date, and certainly one I have been frantically handing to every aspiring historical novelist I meet as a prime example of how it’s done.
So, equally naturally, when she made a flying visit to Seattle recently, I dragged her into my back yard, turned a camera on her, and implored her to share her writing secrets. Unfortunately, before we began, I took off the hat I had been wearing on that hat day first, so you’ll have to excuse my hair.
Seriously, its state requires excuse, so much so that had this not been such a meaty interview with such an old friend, I might have held off on posting it until I could find a gifted retoucher of videotape. But I promised you a treat, so I shall cast vanity to the winds.
How I suffer for your art, eh? Concentrate instead, please, on this year’s bumper crop of lilacs — and a great conversation about craft with one of the best. Enjoy!
I wasn’t kidding about the hair, was I? Those of us whose tint is, as Truman Capote put it so succinctly for all time, somewhat self-induced would do well to get into the habit of peeking at oneself in a mirror prior to doing any book promotion at all, much less a taped interview. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, present and future authors.
But let’s get back to the problem of constructing an inherently hard-to-like protagonist so that the reader will like him well enough to want to follow him throughout an entire book. First-time novelists — especially those writing in the first person for the first time, and that’s a lot of firsts — often don’t think about this crucial part of the author’s tacit agreement with the reader, but in either a first-person or tight third-person narrative, the protagonist is the reader’s guide to the story. We’re committed to seeing everything from his point of view.
So if that protagonist is too passive to ask relevant questions the reader wants to know, or not sufficiently nuanced in his worldview to be able to observe in useful detail, or too unpleasant to be good company for a few hundred pages, the reader may feel slightly cheated. Yes, even if the plot is very exciting: would you want to go on a tour of a haunted house with a guide that steered you away from the dark corners, did not seem to know much about the house’s history, or declared every fifteen seconds that anyone who believed in ghosts was an idiot?
Of course not. You want your guide to fit with the atmosphere. By the same token, in a historical novel, you want your protagonist to be both plausibly of his era and fascinating to follow.
Nicole’s protagonist and narrator is abundantly both, on both overt and subtle levels. At first, Iago seems merely sensitive and observant, a boy not born into a social class that would permit him the luxury of picking his own career. Increasingly determined to set his own course despite a demanding father’s demands (especially well-drawn) and a frivolous social order not given to recognizing real worth, he has to fight hard to remain honest, and it frequently costs him dearly.
So when he begins to feel just a bit resentful of others’ advancement, who can blame him? Why shouldn’t he gain the wife he wants, the promotion he craves, the spot at the exotic newly-minted general’s side? Shown through Iago’s eyes, his wants seem so reasonable, even moderate, and his opposition so privileged that we cannot help but cheer him on as he navigates the complex world of Venetian military and social politics.
By the time he starts to display enough sharp-edged jealousy to startle us, the reader is already implicated in what gradually emerges as a slow-acting, closely-observed madness from the point of view of the madman. Iago genuinely wants to believe he is doing the right thing as he continues to do more and more egregiously wrong ones.
The great characterization trick that keeps the reader following him: his justifications remain insidiously plausible, right up to the point when not even he can believe what he has done. But by then, as in all great tragedy, self-knowledge can no longer save him — or anybody else. The die is cast.
That’s not a characterization feat that could have been pulled off by just telling the reader all of these things. But how the heck does one show progressive madness from the increasingly mad character’s point of view?
So there’s another tip for those planning to give or conduct video interviews: don’t sit under a large, bug-attracting tree. Or add nice, juicy chunks of fruit to your iced tea.
Apparently, flying insects are real camera hogs. Stick with water, okay?
That practical tip out of the way — you know me; I’m always toiling to help make the life literary a bit easier for writers — I don’t want to set up the next clip too much. The discussion turned shortly thereafter from perspective and craft to more fundamental characterization issue of inhabiting one’s character thoroughly enough to be able to see his world through his eyes — and feel it with his skin.
But I promised you a solid discussion of plausibility, did I not? Here it is — and, as plausible fiction always is, it’s detail-oriented and down-to-earth. Those of you constructing fight scenes might want to pay particularly close attention to this segment; it’s full of practical tips.
Here’s the promised link to Nicole’s previous novel, Crossed: A Tale of the Fourth Crusade. Heck, while we’re at it, let’s take a gander at the publisher’s blurb for that, too:
In the year 1202, tens of thousands of crusaders gather in Venice, preparing to embark for Jerusalem to free the Holy City from Muslim rule. Among them is a lowly vagabond Briton, rescued from damnation by a pious knight who burns with zealous fire for their sacred undertaking. And so they set sail, along with dedicated companions—and with a beautiful, mysterious Arab “princess” whom the vagabond liberates from a brutish merchant. But the divine light guiding their “righteous” campaign soon darkens as the mission sinks ever deeper into catastrophe, disgrace, and moral turpitude—as Christians murder Christians in the Adriatic port city of Zara, tragic events are set in motion that will ultimately lead to the shocking and shameful fall of Constantinople.
Impeccably researched and beautifully told, Nicole Galland’s Crossed is a stunning tale of the disastrous Fourth Crusade—and of the hopeful, brave, and driven who were caught up in and irrevocably changed by a corrupted cause and a furious battle beyond their comprehension or control.
And now let’s move on to the my favorite clip, a discussion of how the opinions of others so often shape writers’ conceptions of their own talent. Those of you prone to late-night anxieties about your writing may want to bookmark this part.
Let me underscore one of those points: never give anybody else the power to tell you not to write. Because we live in a society that believes that if a book is any good, it will automatically get published — since, as we all know, the Book Fairy magically appears on every talented aspiring writer’s doorstep the instant after the writer has typed THE END, bearing the perfect agent and a publication contract — it’s incredibly easy for aspiring writers to come to believe that they are not real writers until they have a book out. Or until they land an agent, or win a literary contest.
Yes, talent is necessary to achieve these laudable goals, but it’s not the only requisite. Luck plays a role, too, as does perseverance. As literally everyone who has ever handled manuscripts for a living could tell you — yet surprisingly seldom do — plenty of brilliant books never make it into print. Plenty of marvelous writers never land an agent. And plenty of agents and editors shake their heads every day over promising queries and submissions, murmuring, “Gee, I would love to live in a world in which I could sell this book.”
One could regard that as depressing. One could also regard it as a fabulous reason to keep writing — and querying, and submitting. The literary world’s tastes change all the time. Perhaps today isn’t the day that agent or editor is living in the right world for your book, but tomorrow may well be.
You’ll never know unless you have your manuscript ready and waiting, will you?
Please join me in thanking Nicole Galland for sharing her wit, wisdom, and insight with us — and please, have faith in your writing. These two pros are here to tell you that ultimately, you need no one’s permission to write.
Here, as promised, is the companion piece to yesterday’s back-by-popular-demand guest post: Joel Derfner’s lovely piece on revamping his comic memoir voice for his second book. I thought it might come in handy in case, say, anyone might be thinking about entering the Humor or Memoir categories of our recently-announced literary contest.
As those of you familiar with the labyrinthine coilings of my mind may already have suspected, I have an ulterior motive for reposting these two helpful bits of professional insight. Writing comedy well is a heck of a lot harder than it looks. And, as also-hilarious memoirist Bob Tarte shared with us yesterday, contrary to popular belief, even the most effortless-sounding humorous voice is not equally applicable to every story.
Or, to break would-be humorists’ hearts a bit more thoroughly: sometimes, just being a funny person who happens to be able to write well isn’t enough to make a reader laugh.
Or even smile wanly. At the risk of repeating myself — fatal to a comic voice on the page, yet a sitcom and skit comedy staple — just because an event is funny in real life does not mean it will automatically generate yucks on the printed page. Ditto with jokes that slay ‘em when told out loud and/or anecdotes that have left one’s kith and kin gasping with helpless laughter for years.
Comedy in a book is not, in short, exempt from the demands of craft. And if you’re going to listen to anyone (other than, naturally, your humble correspondent) on the craft of being funny, you might as well listen to the best, I always say.
I was thinking just the other day about how hard it is for humor writers new to the craft to be able to tell whether material that has been, as previously noted, killing ‘em at cocktail parties is working on the page. An acquaintance of mine — a friend of a friend of a friend, to be precise — walked up to me at a recent social function that may or may not have had anything to do with the 236th anniversary of the founding of our nation, yanked out her iPad, and demanded that I tell her if something she had just written was funny enough to get published.
If your jaw is currently grazing the ground at the very idea of bearding someone in the publishing industry this way, I can only assume that you don’t attend social functions with us much. Baseball may be the national pastime, but aspiring writers’ leaping out from behind tables of canap?s to demand professional feedback on the spot from authors, agents, and editors surely runs a close second.
Because it’s not as though, “Could I make a living as a comedy writer?” isn’t a question that can be answered after a 32-second perusal of a rough draft thrust under one’s nose while fireworks are going off, after all. It’s not the kind of question someone who actually does make a living at it might want to give some serious consideration or anything.
But a friend is a friend (or at least a friend of a friend of a friend is…well, you know), and frankly, I was curious — this is not someone I have ever actually heard tell a joke. Or recount an anecdote with humor and verve. Or, indeed, talk about anything with a sense of whimsy. Yet still waters have occasionally been known to run hilarious; if this person was funny on the page, I would be genuinely pleased.
So I peered at the piece on the screen: an anecdote about a party suspiciously like the one at which we were currently mingling. Single-spaced, in ten-point type, no less. And not, I’m afraid, remotely amusing.
I attempted to hand the iPad back to her, but she wouldn’t take it. “I think it needs a bit more work,” I suggested gently. “It’s awfully hard to break into the humor market. Also, you might want to let your humor sit for a bit before you run it by others — right after something funny happens in reality, it can be hard to get all of it down on the page. It’s just too easy to assume that the reader is seeing what you still have fresh in your mind.”
She looked back at me unblinkingly. “But you didn’t laugh. You must not have read it closely enough.”
In response to that fresh thud of jaws on the parquet: this is a more common type of response to professional feedback than one might think. She wasn’t unfunny; I was merely distracted. Or incompetent. Take two!
“I have a better idea.” I forced her fingers around the edges of the iPad. “Why don’t you read it out loud to me? That way, I can get a better sense of the tone you have in mind.”
Which, of course, is a completely unfair test of written humor — it’s not as though the author can stand next to a reader, bawling in his ear, “No, you read that wrong.” I, however, was thirsting for a piece of that watermelon on the other side of the patio, far, far away from the insistent lady trying to make me work on my day off.
She read it. In a passable impression of Jerry Seinfeld’s voice. I still didn’t laugh.
“Ah, I see,” I told her, edging toward the rapidly-disappearing watermelon. “You were probably thinking of this in your favorite comedian or sitcom character’s cadence. Since the reader won’t be, though, that’s always a dangerous strategy in print.” In the interest of scoring some melon, I did not add that sounding like a ten-year-old sitcom is not typically the best way to impress an agent that represents comic writing today. “There’s a professional trick for that: the more you can sound like you on the page, the less likely your humor writing is to fall prey to this common trap.”
I could have said more, but by then, the “Ooh!” and “Ahh!” of the fireworks-watchers would have drowned out further speech. While her head was turned, I snuck away. The last slice of watermelon was in fact very nice.
What, if anything, do I expect you to take away from this grisly little anecdote, other than the undeniable fact that chilled watermelon is popular on hot summer nights? Well, first, just because a pro is nice to a writer that accosts her at a social function — which, as I MAY have mentioned, happens all the time — doesn’t mean that the pro doesn’t resent it. Asking someone who reads for a living to peruse your work gratis is not all that dissimilar to expecting a doctor to perform an appendectomy while standing in line for a buffet at a wedding: we could both do it if it were an emergency, but honestly, wouldn’t it be more considerate to call our offices during business hours and make an appointment? The results in both instances are substantially less likely to leave a scar.
Second — and here’s the part that’s most applicable to Joel’s post — while part of every writer’s learning curve involves shortening the differential between the scene he’s envisioning and what’s actually on the page, that gap tends to be a bit wider for comic scenes. My accoster was actually pretty wise to seek outside feedback. Her mistake (other than timing the request) lay in not having enough faith in her own comic vision to present the scene from her unique perspective.
Why is that a problem, necessarily? Because the last time I checked, the world already had a Jerry Seinfeld. For my fellow party-goer to make a name for herself as a humorist, she was going to need to develop her own voice, not his.
With all of that firmly in mind, please join me in re-welcoming someone who actually is as funny in real life as he is on the page, Joel Derfner. Enjoy!
And no, you didn’t misread the blurb on the cover: it’s that Elton John. The little bird that flies around telling people things told me that he liked the original release of Joel’s memoir so much that he volunteered to blurb the second edition.
If you prefer not to receive your news from passing waterfowl, you can read a fuller account of this remarkable publication story in Joel’s earlier guest post on book promotion. While we’re on the subject of guest posts, Joel also charmed the Author! Author! community with an exceedingly useful guest post on obtaining permission to use song lyrics in your books, should any of you be contemplating setting foot on that particular Yellow Brick Road. (Or were you under the impression that memoirs and novels could quote songs willy-nilly? Au contraire, mon frère.)
Mssr. John was not the only one to fall in love with Joel’s deeply human, devastatingly honest, and often howlingly funny voice. I already knew how amusing and insightful Joel was before the book came out, yet as the neighbors that did not move away instantly at the sight can attest, certain sections of this book made me rush into the street, tap-dancing with glee. Sparklers may or may not have been involved.
Was I that hard up at the time for some humorous memoir? you ask, bemused. No, thank you, I write, read, and edit funny memoir all the time. What separated Joel’s first book from, well, everything else was not merely how consistently diverting it was — not an easy trick, with a life fully and well lived — but how unblinkingly truthful it was.
Yes, those of you rolling your eyes? “Oh, come on, Anne,” the memoir-jaded snort. “The whole point of memoir is that it’s true, isn’t it?”
Ah, but there’s true in the sense of having actually occurred — and true that sends shivers through your membranes because it shows you life in a way you had not seen it on a page before. There’s true that reads plausibly — and true that makes the reader gasp, “Wow, my therapist does not know me as well as I now know this memoirist.” And, as any memoir editor worth her salt and/or pepper could tell you, there’s true that’s well-written — and there’s true that’s so prettily phrased that one’s socks, shoes, and pinky rings get blown off.
Or, at the very least, that causes one to go running out into the street, looking for an innocent bystander to whom to read a particularly striking passage. (My neighborhood used to be so quiet before I met Joel.)
I’m certainly not the only professional reader that felt this way when his bombshell of a first memoir came out, incidentally. Some other bon mots from those that know about such things:
In a culture where we disguise vulnerability with physical perfection and material success, Derfner skewers heartache with Wildean wit . . . [Derfner is] the next No?l Coward.? — Out.com
“Searing” — Washington Blade
“Derfner’s writing is perfect. . . . He’s your best friend. He’s your brother. He is you.? — EDGE Los Angeles
“Sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant, always clever, and unpredictable.? — Philadelphia Gay News
What’s that you say? You’d like me to stop telling you the man can write and let him get on with showing you same? Reasonable enough. Let’s start with the publisher’s blurb for Swish:
Joel Derfner is gayer than you.
Don’t feel too bad about it, though, because he has made being gayer than you his life’s work. At summer day camp, when he was six, Derfner tried to sign up for needlepoint and flower arranging, but the camp counselors wouldn’t let him, because, they said, those activities were for girls only. Derfner, just to be contrary, embarked that very day on a solemn and sacred quest: to become the gayest person ever. Along the way he has become a fierce knitter, an even fiercer musical theater composer, and so totally the fiercest step aerobics instructor (just ask him—he’ll tell you himself).
In Swish, Derfner takes his readers on a flamboyant adventure along the glitter-strewn road from fabulous to divine. Whether he’s confronting the demons of his past at a GLBT summer camp, using the Internet to meet men — many, many men — or plunging headfirst (and nearly naked) into the shady world of go-go dancing, he reveals himself with every gayer-than-thou flourish to be not just a stylish explorer but also a fearless one. So fearless, in fact, that when he sneaks into a conference for people who want to cure themselves of their homosexuality, he turns the experience into one of the most fascinating, deeply moving chapters of the book. Derfner, like King Arthur, Christopher Columbus, and Indiana Jones — but with a better haircut and a much deeper commitment to fad diets — is a hero destined for legend.
Written with wicked humor and keen insight, Swish is at once a hilarious look at contemporary ideas about gay culture and a poignant exploration of identity that will speak to all readers — gay, straight, and in between.
Here again, we smack head-first into that bugbear of memoirists everywhere, the distinction between true and true. All of these statements are factually accurate about the book, but what struck me most about Joel’s memoir, what set my membranes humming, my feet tap-dancing, and my neighbors scurrying into the street to see why I was shouting is not mentioned in this blurb.
What’s missing, in my view? The fact — oh, okay, my opinion — that this is one of the best memoirs ever written on how darned hard it is to be a smart, sensitive human being in a world that habitually rewards neither.
And that, my friends, is what has made this book among the most tattered on my memoir shelf. Occasionally, life will throw a meandering curveball that knocks one of Joel’s beautifully-phrased insights out of my at this point stuffed-to-bursting memory vaults, sending me rushing right back to the text.
Oh, and in the spirit of this series, I should add: the guy’s paid his dues as a writer, and then some. He’s done it with wit, humor, and perseverance in the face of some pretty long odds. All of which has not only garnered my completely ungrudging respect (and you of all people know how high my threshold for grudge-free respect is), but a feeling that somewhere up there in the Muses’ palace, the Ladies in Charge have already reserved some serious shelf space for Joel’s subsequent literary achievements.
Ah, but there’s the rub, isn’t it? After a debut memoir like that, what precisely does one do for an encore?
I asked Joel that question, and rather than fleeing with the flailing arms and piercing screams such a seemingly flippant but subversively difficult question deserves, he gave it the alternately serious and humorous literary attention that has caused me to come to think of him as the memoirist little brother the Muses should have seen to it that I had. (With all requisite apologies to the nonfiction author big brother with whom they actually provided me — oh, you thought my parents would have put up with offspring that didn’t write?)
Here, then, is his response, and I have to say, I wish I had read it before I first sat down to write a memoir. In my checkered experience, it’s not only true — it’s true. Take it away, Joel!
Wait, that wasn’t Joel. Although, come to think of it, I’ve never seen him and Judy Garland in a room together. I’ve never seen Superman and Joel in a room together either, though, so…hey, wait a minute…
Here, then, is Joel as his usual charming self — and his usual wise self vis-? -vis the difficult path of the memoirists. Five, six, seven, eight!
I’m about to sign a contract for the publication of my second real book, whose working title is Lawfully Wedded Husband: How I Tried to Destroy America With my Gay Marriage.
When my last book, Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What Ended Up Happening Instead, came out, many reviewers praised its combination of funny and wistful. It “bounce[d] back and forth,”? wrote one, “from tender and touching and deeply sad to wildly funny, sometimes in the space of a paragraph, or even a single sentence.”?
Yes! I thought when I read this. It’s a good thing this reviewer has a distinctive name, because now I can look him up online and stalk him and make him fall in love with me and then we can be happy together for the rest of our lives.
Part of what had allowed me so to bounce back and forth in Swish was that I was incredibly, incredibly depressed. I hadn’t been quite on the verge of suicide while writing the book, but I had certainly been within spitting distance, and I’d found it easy somehow to reach inside, touch a raw, exposed nerve, and twist it until something funny came out and I started crying.
I began Swish in 2005, and it was published in 2008. At some point in 2009, my agent said to me, “Joel, I need another book from you.” (I realize this sounds incredibly glamorous, but really I’d just begged her for a meeting because all I’d been able to afford for months was Taco Bell and I was hoping she would at least take me to TGIFridays or something.) (She didn’t.) So I said, “Okay, no problem, I’ll start working on another book.” My boyfriend had just proposed to me, and the issue of marriage equality seemed topical enough to be worth writing about, so I went home, turned my computer on, and started typing.
After an hour or so, I looked at what I’d written, realized it wasn’t interesting at all, deleted it, went to the bodega on the corner, bought a couple candy bars, came back, ate them both, and started over again.
A couple hours later, I looked at what I’d written, realized it wasn’t true at all, deleted it, went to the bodega on the corner, bought five candy bars, came back, ate them all, and spent the rest of the evening staring morosely at the television, because I had a very serious problem:
I was no longer unhappy enough.
In the years between 2005 and 2009, I had made a great many positive changes in my life, including but not limited to getting a therapist, going on massive doses of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and moving in with my boyfriend, and all those nerves that had been so raw and exposed before now had a modicum of protective covering. My two-candy-bar attempt had been uninteresting because I hadn’t been twisting any nerves; my five-candy-bar attempt had been dishonest because I was only pretending to twist nerves that weren’t in fact twistable, at least not in the way to which I was accustomed in writing.
My muse had disappeared.
Please don’t think for a second that I’m saying you have to be unhappy to write well. It wasn’t my writing that had suffered, you see; it was my subject matter.
I came quickly to think of this as the Tolstoy problem. Even if you haven’t read Anna Karenina you’re probably familiar with its famous opening sentence, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”?
It was easy to write with deep sadness and wild humor when that was all I had, and I had them in my own way, and could convey them with idiosyncratic verve.
But what was I going to write now? “?I cooked my boyfriend dinner. It was yummy. Then we watched Tabatha’s Salon Takeover and went to sleep. I love him.”? Who would want to read that for even a page, much less an entire book? I certainly wouldn’t.
But if I faked it–”?I cooked spaghetti for my boyfriend and accidentally used only one clove of garlic instead of two in the spaghetti sauce and he didn’t say anything about it so now I’m lying awake staring at my ceiling trying to figure out whether he didn’t notice or he noticed but didn’t want to say anything about it because it was the last straw and he’s going to break up with me tomorrow”?–well, that could work for a paragraph or two, maybe even a few pages, but it wasn’t true, and I knew there was no way I could sustain it for an entire book.
So what was I going to do?
This question paralyzed me for about a year. Occasionally I would sit down and start writing something, trying to be both interesting and honest, fail, and then stop thinking about it for another month or two, because not thinking about it allowed me to avoid discovering I could no longer write.
The problem was that not thinking about it was great as a strategy to avoid discovering I could no longer write, but as a strategy to write it left something to be desired. If the only way to avoid confronting my inability to write was refusing to write, then the whole thing sort of turned in on itself until everything collapsed and at some point the bodega was going to run out of candy bars.
So I figured, okay, why don’t I ease into this by writing about the issue itself first, not about my own experiences? If you’re quoting legal statutes you can hardly be expected to be wildly funny and deeply sad.
So I started with a sort of analytical/philosophical/whateverical chapter, and went from there. And as I wrote, I tried to find ways to touch and twist indirectly those nerves to which I no longer had easy access.
I think I’ve succeeded, to some degree. I think that when this book is at its best I’m able to explore things about feeling alone even in a relationship, about what a relationship can’t give you, about the difference between expectation and reality.
I’m sorry not to have a better or clearer way to talk about how I was about to get started again or what those indirect ways are. I think it’s because I’m still in the middle of the story–the story of me writing this book, I mean, not the story the book is telling–and I don’t have the perspective I need to understand what I’m doing differently.
I’m still very afraid that this book isn’t as good as my last one, because its sadness isn’t as deep nor its humor as wild. One reason I went with this particular publisher, though, was that the editor said he liked this book more than Swish, which was incredibly heartening, because it allowed me to hope that whatever I’ve replaced twisting raw nerves with might be equally valuable, or even more valuable–to hope that I’ve found a way, all unawares, to skirt the Tolstoy problem.
And if that’s the case, then, if I’m lucky enough to be invited to post again on this blog in a few years, maybe I can tell you how I did it.
Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and Gay Haiku author Joel Derfner is from South Carolina, where his great-grandmother had an affair with George Gershwin. After fleeing the south as soon as he possibly could, he got a B.A. in linguistics from Harvard. A year after he graduated, his thesis on the Abkhaz language was shown to be completely wrong, as the word he had been translating as “who” turned out to be not a noun but a verb. Realizing that linguistics was not his m?tier, he moved to New York to get an M.F.A. in musical theater writing from the Tisch School of the Arts.
Musicals for which he has written the scores have been produced in London, New York, and various cities in between (going counterclockwise). In an attempt to become the gayest person ever, he joined Cheer New York, New York’s gay and lesbian cheerleading squad, but eventually he had to leave because he was too depressed. In desperation, he started knitting and teaching aerobics, though not at the same time. He hopes to come to a bad end.
Yes, yes, faithful readers, your eyes are not playing tricks upon you: I am, uncharacteristically, re-running a guest blog, and one from only a couple of months ago, too. Why would a do such a thing? Might it perhaps have something to do with Seattle’s bizarrely winterish recent weather’s finally having given way to something that resembles, if not precisely summer in a reasonable climate, than at least a rather pleasant spring?
Unfortunately, no: a horrible head cold has carried off my voice in toto for days on end now, so blue skies are merely the painted backdrop I see through my windows while I sneeze. But my misfortune doesn’t mean that you fine people should not be treated to some fine writing advice, does it?
Actually, I had been intending to re-run today’s and tomorrow’s guest posts sometime this summer in any case. Originally, I had planned them as companion pieces on developing and maintaining memoir voice, but then Godzilla came stomping through my studio in the midst of the series in which they both played such an admirable role, and the running order got all mixed up…
Oh, you doubt that’s how it happened, do you? Well, maybe you’re right; perhaps that was the week that marauding pirates invaded my lair. It’s been an eventful year.
In any case, I think these two posts have an alchemy read back-to-back that they don’t when read, say, a week apart, so do tune in tomorrow for the second, even if you should happen to remember Bob’s incisive advice from last time around. And if, as is so often the case, you’re one of the readers that adjust your reading habits seasonally — the end of the school year brings an annual radical shift in the hit stats — welcome!
Either way, enjoy!
Before I introduce today’s installment in our guest blog series by hardworking authors about the ins and outs of moving smoothly from one book to the next, let me ask you: is this not one of the best, most mood-evocative book covers you have ever seen?
It is, for those of you reading this in some strange universe in which the Internet does not come with pictures, the cover art for the always-hilarious Bob Tarte‘s latest foray into memoir, Kitty Cornered. I’m going to have a lot to say in praise of Bob — for my money, one of the consistently funniest memoirists working in American English, and certainly one of the best documenters of the wackiness of life — but first, let’s talk about why this is such a tremendously good book cover.
Actually, scratch that, so to speak: before we slide into first, allow me to pause a moment to let you in on how I know for a fact that this is an unusually eye-catching book cover: my 13-year-old neighbor was absolutely riveted by it when he visited the other day. Not only did he instantly pounce upon the book and begin leafing through it — the moment he walked into my library, he made what can only be called a beeline for it.
Actually ran to get his I’m sorry to report grubby paws upon that book. As if it were — sorry, but it must be said — catnip.
Now that’s a cover that does its job, and then some. Kudos to the marketing and art departments at Algonquin Press for a magnificent achievement in a notoriously difficult medium.
Fair warning: if read this book in a public place, be prepared for total strangers to come running up to you and ask what on earth you’re reading. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. If I were planning into, say, a crowded writers’ conference anytime soon and wanted to make some friends fast, I would nonchalantly tote this book under my arm. (Again, well done, Algonquin.)
Why am I so impressed by this cover? Well, you try to come up with a photo that makes that winsome kitty appear intent upon beating Godzilla in a race to stomp on Tokyo. It provides a great twist on the expected. But that’s not the only reason I like it: it’s rare that a cover captures the spirit of the book within this well. That mad-eyed cat, combined with the offbeat lettering, tell the reader pretty plainly that this is going to be — and having read the book, I’m not too afraid of going out on an interpretive limb here — an uproarious memoir about living with a small battalion of marauding cats.
Which, as luck would have it, is precisely what the book is about. Check out the publisher’s blurb:
Bob Tarte had his first encounter with a cat when he was two and a half years old. He should have learned his lesson then, from Fluffy. But as he says, “I listened to my heart instead, and that always leads to trouble.” In this tell-all of how the Tarte household grew from one recalcitrant cat to six — including a hard-to-manage stray named Frannie–Tarte confesses to allowing these interlopers to shape his and his wife’s life, from their dining habits to their sleeping arrangements to the placement and furriness of their furniture.
But more than that, Bob begins seeing Frannie and the other cats as unlikely instructors in the art of achieving contentment, even in the face of illness and injury. Bewitched by the unknowable nature of domesticated cats, he realizes that sometimes wildness and mystery are exactly what he needs.
With the winning humor and uncanny ability to capture the soul of the animal world that made Enslaved by Ducks a success, Tarte shows us that life with animals gives us a way out of our narrow human perspective to glimpse something larger, more enduring, and more grounded in the simplicities of love–and catnip.
Just between us, Bob has a pretty great eye for image composition himself. I would highly encourage those of you interested in marvelous critter pics to check out his Facebook page and/or follow me on Twitter @BobTarte; he posts new bird and beast photos there with charming regularity.
Of course, authors seldom have any direct say over their cover art — you knew that, right? — but they do often provide their author photos. Bob always has superlative ones. Check out his latest:
Bob with Maynard and Frannie
Doesn’t leave you in much doubt about the subject matter of his memoir, does it? Nor does it leave his platform in question: the guy obviously knows cats.
Again, that’s good promotional strategy: what’s more boring than the standard-issue, flatteringly-lit jacket photo? I say hear, hear for author photos that actually make the author look like he might have some real-world experience with his subject matter. And isn’t it a perennial source of astonishment how few author photos actually do?
But all of that is secondary to the purpose of this series: to blandish hardworking, successful authors into sharing their thoughts on something we literary types virtually never talk about amongst ourselves, the difficult task of switching gears — and sometimes authorial voices — between books. That’s a rather strange topic to avoid, from my perspective, because if one is going to be a working author, one presumably will need to tinker with one’s original voice to fit the next story.
Oh. you thought the Voice Fairy stole with little cat feet into writing studios across this fine land of ours, whacking established authors on their august noggins, and twittering, “There, my dear — write away!”
Obviously, that’s not happening — but let’s face it, writers new to writing humor often believe something almost as implausible. They (and, if the author does her job right, her readership) often labor under the mistaken impression that a funny voice pops out of a gifted storyteller as spontaneously as breathing. Or — sacre bleu! — that all a person that’s good at telling amusing anecdotes has to do is provide a transcript of what she might sound like in a bar, and poof! Hilarity ensues.
Cue the Humor Fairy. You’ll find her in the dressing room she shares with the Pathos Pixie, the Dialogue Dervish, and the Opening Grabber Genie.
Mind if I inject a little reality into that fantasy? Yes, a great humorous memoir voice will come across on the page as effortless, but a truly fine, memorable, and in Bob’s case simultaneously side-splitting and deeply honest voice doesn’t happen all by itself. It takes work. And throughout this series, I’m going to be asking authors to be generous and brave enough to talk about that often-difficult process.
I’m particularly delighted to be able to bring you Bob’s thoughts on the process. Not only is he a well-recognized master of spinning a yarn, but he also had to mine his creativity to fine-tune his already quite successful voice to a new breed of story.
And no, I’m not going to cut out the cat puns anytime soon, but thanks for asking.
As tempted as I am to let the cat out of the bag (don’t say I didn’t warn you), far be it from me to stand between a gifted storyteller and his audience. I suspect, though, that what follows will be even more instructive — and even more fun — if I give you a swift guided tour of Bob’s earlier work, on the off chance that some of you have not yet had the opportunity to become familiar with Bob’s work (or perchance missed his earlier guest blogs on developing a unique authorial voice for memoir and dealing with reader expectations).
When Bob Tarte left the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan for the country, he was thinking peace and quiet. He’d write his music reviews in the solitude of his rural home on the outskirts of everything.
Then he married Linda. She wanted a rabbit. How much trouble, he thought, could a bunny be?
Well, after the bunny chewed his way through the electrical wires and then hid inside the wall, Bob realized that he had been outwitted. But that was just the beginning. There were parrots, more rabbits, then ducks and African geese. The orphaned turkeys stranded on a nearby road. The abandoned starlings. The sad duck for sale for 25 cents.
Bob suddenly found himself constructing pens, cages, barriers, buying feed, clearing duck waste, spoonfeeding at mealtime. One day he realized that he no longer had a life of quiet serenity, but that he’d become a servant to a relentlessly demanding family: Stanley Sue, a gender-switching African grey parrot; Hector, a cantankerous shoulder-sitting Muscovy duck; Howard, an amorous ring-neck dove; and a motley crew of others. Somehow, against every instinct in him, Bob had unwittingly become their slave.
He read all the classic animal books — The Parrot Who Owns Me, The Dog who Rescues Cats, Arnie the Darling Starling, That Quail Robert, The Cat Who Came for Christmas — about the joys of animals, the touching moments. But none revealed what it was really like to live with an unruly menagerie.
Bob Tarte’s witty account reveals the truth of animal ownership: who really owns who, the complicated logistics of accommodating many species under one roof, the intricate routines that evolve, and ultimately, the distinct and insistent personalities of every animal in the house – and on its perimeter. Writing as someone who’s been ambushed by the way in which animals — even cranky ones — can wend their way into one’s heart, Bob Tarte is James Herriot by way of Bill Bryson.
Bob Tarte’s second book, Fowl Weather, returns us to the Michigan house where pandemonium is the governing principle, and where 39 animals rule the roost. But as things seem to spiral out of control, as his parents age and his mother’s grasp on reality loosens as she battles Alzheimer’s disease, Bob unexpectedly finds support from the gaggle of animals around him. They provide, in their irrational fashion, models for how to live.
It is their alien presences, their sense of humor, and their unpredictable behaviors that both drive Bob crazy and paradoxically return him to sanity. Whether it’s the knot-tying African grey parrot, the overweight cat who’s trained Bob to hold her water bowl just above the floor, or the duck who bests Bob in a shoving match, this is the menagerie, along with his endlessly optimistic wife Linda, that teaches him about the chaos that’s a necessary part of life.
No less demanding than the animals are the people who torment Bob and Linda. There’s the master gardener who steps on plants, the pet sitter applicant who never met an animal he didn’t want to butcher, and a woman Bob hasn’t seen since elementary school who suddenly butts into his life.
With the same biting humor and ability to capture the soul of the animal world that made Enslaved by Ducks such a rousing success, Bob Tarte shows us that life with animals gives us a way out of our small human perspectives to glimpse something larger, more enduring, and more wholly grounded in the simplicities of love — even across species lines.
With both of those intriguing premises firmly in mind, let’s see what words of wisdom on strategizing voice are wiggling on the end of the string that’s…I mean, let’s get on with stalking…wait — fireman, what’s that up in that nearby tree?
Oh, I give up. Please join me in welcoming back Bob Tarte!
I had big, fat, goose-size hopes for Enslaved by Ducks back in 2003. In my fantasies, the book would become such a huge honking success that I could spend the rest of my days humming cheerily as I effortlessly churned out sequels.
Unfortunately, I had overestimated the clout of readers who kept ducks as pets. The total population of duck owners in the US probably couldn’t fill a single theater in a shopping mall multiplex. In fact, they probably couldn’t fill a jumbo popcorn tub. So their enthusiasm only got me so far. Enslaved by Ducks sold steadily, but slowly. I wanted to do better.
For my second book, I decided that I would break out of the traditional pet book mold and vault into the ample lap of the general public. I didn’t take the ducks, geese, parrots, rabbits, cats, and other critters out of Fowl Weather. Instead I wrote about how they affected my life during a stressful period of time in which I lost my dad, my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and ghost cats haunted our basement. The result was a book that some folks thought was the funniest thing that they had ever read and others decided was mega-depressing.
NPR’s Nancy Pearl occupied the former camp, and thanks to her enthusiastic January 22, 2008 “Under the Radar” review on Morning Edition, Fowl Weather was briefly the sixty-third best selling book on all of Amazon. But after that it sunk like a rock tied to an anvil, never making it out of hardcover — even as Enslaved by Ducks gradually waddled into its thirteenth paperback printing in 2012.
So what went wrong with my sequel? Lots of things. Pushing the animals even slightly into the background wasn’t the smartest approach, since critters were what my readers wanted. And the subject matter was dark compared to Enslaved by Ducks. Because there were so many narrative threads and no single string strong enough to hang a catchy subtitle on, Fowl Weather also proved to be tricky to market. Death and Alzheimer’s weren’t suitable subjects for a humorous back cover blurb. And the non-waterfowl-owning segment of the population that had enjoyed Enslaved by Ducks presumably spotted the duckling on the cover of Fowl Weather and decided that it was a rerun.
In other words, Fowl Weather was simultaneously too different and too similar to my first book. It took me years to figure out how to follow it up, even though the solution lay right under my nose. It was as close as the nearest litter box.
It took me twice as long to write Kitty Cornered as it had to write either of my first two books. It didn’t start out as a cat book. I kept trying to find new ways to write about our birds and other pets. While the cats kept clawing their way into the narrative, I never even considered making them the subjects of a book, because I couldn’t shake loose of the image of myself as the duck guy. I couldn’t shake loose of any good ideas, either. In an attempt to add some verve to a sagging repertoire of avian anecdotes, I concocted an increasingly unlikely series of devices, culminating in — I’m embarrassed to admit — a goose egg crystal ball that revealed incidents from my pre-pet past. This didn’t work out any better than it sounds here.
Fortunately a skittish white-and-black stray cat showed up to rescue me from author’s oblivion. As soon as I decided to write about this complicated little being that we named Frannie, I felt as if a huge goose-size burden had been lifted from my shoulders. I incorporated the strongest aspects of my first two books into Kitty Cornered, keeping the sunny-to-partly-cloudy tone of Enslaved by Ducks and the overlapping narratives of Fowl Weather, all the time returning the focus to Frannie as I wrote about all six cats.
My re-invention as a cat guy seems to have worked. Kitty Cornered was on the independent bookstore indie bestseller list during its first two weeks on the shelves, and when it was just short of a month old, it went into a second printing. Naturally, I’m hoping that it continues to gain momentum. It sure would be great to be able to knock out a couple of sequels, you know?
Bob Tarteand his wife Linda live on the edge of a shoe-sucking swamp near the West Michigan village of Lowell. When not fending off mosquitoes during temperate months and chipping ice out of plastic wading pools in the depths of winter, Bob writes books about his pets.
Emmy Award-winning actress Patricia Heaton has taken on an option on the dramatic rights to Enslaved by Ducks. Fowl Weather was selected as an “Under The Radar” book for 2008 by Nancy Pearl on NPR’s Morning Edition.
Bob wrote the Technobeat world music review column for The Beat magazine from 1989 to 2009. He has also written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Miami New Times newspapers.
Bob also hosts a podcast for PetLifeRadio.com called What Were You Thinking? that’s supposedly about “exotic pets” as a general topic, but the show just as often turns into a chronicle of life with his own troublesome critters.
Bob and Linda currently serve the whims of parrots, ducks, geese, parakeets, a rabbit, doves, cats, and hens. They also raise and release orphan songbirds (including woodpeckers) for the Wildlife Rehab Center, Ltd. in Grand Rapids and have the scars to prove it.
Normally, I would open with a few remarks on the occasion — observing, perhaps, that the actual vote on independence in 1776 occurred on July 2, not July 4 — but given that I actually intended to post news about the summer’s second Author! Author! writing competition a good a week and a half ago, who am I to quibble about dates? Just because the nastiest head cold ever to visit a North American intervened between the announcement of our first literary contest of the season, aimed at adult writers and writers for the adult market, and what I had planned as the next day’s revelation of the rules for a competition devoted exclusively to young writers and those that write YA doesn’t mean that I should equivocate for a few more seconds now.
Except that I should say a few words about today’s guest blogger — and, not entirely coincidentally, the author that is going to be graciously giving away some copies of the charming middle-grade reader novel you see above. Since her book’s protagonist is in fact a writer who is herself very young when the story begins, young Marie has inspired me to create a contest that not only rewards good writing in YA, but great writing by writers currently in middle school and high school.
Well might you champ at the bit. Trust me, though, today’s guest blogger is here to help you polish up the writing skills you will want to have bright and shiny before you construct a contest entry.
Continuing what would have been a logical progression to self-evident to require explanation had my sinuses permitted me to post these two contest announcements back-to-back, I asked today’s guest, Stacy Demoran Allbritton, author of the recently-released The Diary of Marie Landry, Acadian Exile, to share her thoughts on how to write well about food in fiction. Not just in any fiction, mind you: in prose intended for young readers.
I see some of you purists scrunching up your noses, do I not? “But Anne,” you cry, “isn’t good, showing-not-telling writing pretty much the same, regardless of the intended audience?”
Heavens, no, campers. Good writing takes its target readership into account, always.
And before anyone wrinkles so much as a single proboscis at me, let me hasten to add: no, that’s not sacrificing art to market concerns. It’s simply good writing courtesy to craft one’s novel in such a way that the reader will enjoy it.
While being familiar with the conventions and overall vocabulary expectations of one’s chosen book category is, of course, one of the first steps a writer serious about treating potential readers politely is to familiarize herself with what’s currently being published for that readership. (Conveniently, that also happens to be excellent marketing strategy, too.) For all stripes of YA, though, writers also have to be extremely sensitive to presenting age-appropriate vocabulary and situations.
Which is precisely why I asked Stacy to blog on the subject: she has taken some quite dark historical subject matter and transformed it into a debut novel I was completely comfortable giving my 10-year-old neighbor. That’s quite a trick. Take a gander at the publisher’s blurb:
During the Great Upheaval of 1755, the British forced the Acadians to leave their homes in the Canadian provinces. After having lived in exile in Maryland for ten years, fourteen-year-old Marie Landry and her family prepare to join a mass exodus to Louisiana. In her diary, Marie describes the Acadians’ journey to Louisiana while simultaneously including the details of their removal from Acadia ten years earlier. This historically accurate account of Louisiana’s Cajuns depicts tales of hardship and friendship, anguish and hope. Because of their perseverance and faith, Marie and her loved ones are able to survive and find happiness in Louisiana. Illustrations enhance this engaging portrayal of human strength.
An intriguing bit of American and Canadian history to tackle for a young readership, isn’t it? Stacy does it both sensitively and surprisingly unblinkingly. I love it when YA authors respect their youthful readers’ intelligence enough not to sugarcoat tough reality.
She also did something quite clever on the vocabulary front: although the writing overall is age-appropriate, she peppered the manuscript with slightly higher-level vocabulary — and added a glossary of those terms to the back. I wish writers for the young would do this more often; one does not always have a dictionary handy at any age, after all.
The other reason that I blandished Stacy into writing on this particular topic is that her novel includes some actual recipes. Since I know that many of you that write about food in fiction have at least toyed with the concept of writing a cookbook, I thought it might be both fun and useful to ask her to show you the same recipe formatted to appear in a nonfiction manuscript and to show how she might write about the resulting foodstuff for a young readership.
Why might that particular distinction come in handy? Glad you asked. Once again, in the fine tradition of the Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence, then, and as part of my ongoing quest to provide good writers with much-needed Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy (which, let’s face it, is harder for young writers to accumulate), I am proud to announce:
The Make Us Want to Eat It Literary Competition of 2012
As I mentioned when I announced the previous contest for adult writing, although people experience life via all of their senses — sight, sound, taste, smell, touch — many, many of the manuscripts those of us who read them for a living see on a daily basis seem to assume that characters can only see and hear. Or that readers expect to know nothing about a character’s sensations except what an actor might be able to convey to us if we saw him playing that character on T.V.
But you’re a better writer than that, aren’t you? And you’re certainly a better reader.
Because I’m pretty confident that my readers are good at writing about what it’s like to be alive, I’m calling for young writers and adults that write for young readers to enter short scenes — anywhere from 2 to 8 pages in length — that present food in a manner that incorporates more than two senses.
Here’s the catch: the scene can’t take place in a kitchen — or at a dining table.
Why? Because I’d love to see you exercise your creativity, that’s why. That’s my idea of a proper reader-oriented spectator sport.
In order to give young writers more freedom to stretch those creative limbs, you may enter either fiction or nonfiction. (Sorry, adult writers: you may enter only YA fiction. You can always enter your memoir in this summer’s adult contest ) If you are entering memoir and don’t want to use your real name, it’s fine to use a fake one; just make sure that you let us know, so we announce the right name when you win.
Either way, no profanity, please — and please have all of your characters fully clothed. I want to keep this site accessible for young writers whose parents have set up content filters on their computers. So if you wouldn’t want your parents to find a YouTube video of you doing something your characters do, give it a pass in the entry, okay?
Winners will not only receive fabulous prizes (hold your horses; we’re getting to those), but may have their scenes and accompanying synopses both published and critiqued in a post here at Author! Author! for all the world to see and admire. And, if you’re a student, we’re going to recognize the teacher you feel has helped you most with your writing as well.
The grand prize winner in each category will receive a half-hour Mini Consult in order to discuss any aspect of writing. That means I will read up to 20 pages of your writing — a query? A synopsis? The opening pages of the manuscript you’ve been writing? — and call or Skype you in order to have a lovely, long talk about it. I’m also going to post your winning entry here on Author! Author! and tell everyone you know just how terrific your writing is.
First and second place winners will have their entries posted and critiqued on this blog.
All winners will also be asked to nominate the teacher that they feel helped them most in their quest to become a writer. Choose carefully: if the nominated teachers agree, I shall posting their names, a short bio, and a photograph here at Author! Author!, thanking them publicly for having done such a good job with these students. The judges and I shall also be putting our heads together on a pretty fabulous certificate of appreciation, recognizing the teacher as one of the great encouragers of future authors.
And yes, I do mean all winners, even in the adult writers of YA category. You think their favorite teachers shouldn’t be recognized? I couldn’t disagree more.
Hadn’t I mentioned that my mother was not only an editor, but also my junior high school librarian? Or that my completely fabulous seventh-grade English teacher is still one of my heroes?
Here are the specific steps required to win. Do read them all carefully, and post any questions you may have. And if you would like to see me walk through each and every requirement of contest entry, showing you step-by-step visual examples, all you need to is click here.
1. Write or select a scene no more than eight pages in length from your manuscript or manuscript-in-progress that best shows off a sense-based description of food.
How will you figure length? Glad you asked.
2. Pages must be double-spaced in 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier., with one-inch margins and a slug line at the top containing your last name/title/page #.
All pages must be numbered, in accordance with standard format for book manuscripts. You’ll find examples of it in the guest post below. (And don’t worry — next week, I shall be showing you precisely what standard format would look like in a contest entry.)
3. All entries must be in English.
Whether you choose to write in American English, Canadian English, or U.K. English, however, is entirely up to you. Just let us know which — and make sure it’s spelled correctly.
4. The scene must center on food, but it cannot take place in a kitchen or at a dining table.
That should sound familiar, right?
5. The scene must include depictions of at least two human senses, but cannot include any profanity or references to sexual activity.
No exceptions. Humans have a lot of other senses. Remember, too, that the judges will be looking for a variety of senses to be addressed in the scene.
6. Polish your scene to a high gloss and save it as a Word document, as a .doc file
Only .doc entries in Word will be accepted — not TextEdit, PDF, or any other formats, please. Please title the Word file your name and the abbreviated title of your book (Austen Pride & Prejudice), not just as contest entry or the ever-popular Anne Mini contest (The last time I ran a contest like this, I received 42 entries with one of the other file name.)
7. In a separate Word document, give your name, state (or country, if entering from outside the U.S.), age, name of your school (if you are enrolled in one), and e-mail address, as well as the category you are entering.
Telling the judges the category will save a lot of confusion. The possible categories are:
Category I: Fiction on food by writers currently attending or about to enroll in middle school
Category II: Nonfiction/Memoir on food by writers currently attending or about to enroll in middle school
Category III: Fiction on food by writers currently attending or about to enroll in high school
Category IV: Nonfiction/Memoir on food by writers currently attending or about to enroll in high school
Category V: YA fiction on food by adult writers
If you are entering Category V, please see Rules #8 and #9. Everyone else can skip to Rule #10.
8. If you are entering in the adult writer category, on the same page as the material in Rule #7, please include a 1-paragraph explanation of how the scene you are entering fits into the overall story of the book.
This is the only chance you’re going to get to set up the scene for the judges, so make it count!
9. If you are entering in the adult writer category, on the second page of the document described in #7, please include a synopsis of no more than 1 page, giving the judges an overview of the book’s premise, its main characters, and its central conflict.
Again, this synopsis must be in standard format. If you are unfamiliar with either standard format or how to write a 1-page synopsis, you will find explanations (along with examples) under the HOW TO FORMAT A BOOK MANUSCRIPT and HOW TO WRITE A 1-PAGE SYNOPSIS categories on the archive list located on the right-hand side of this page.
10. Make sure that both documents are properly formatted: precisely as they would appear in a manuscript submission.
Part of the goal here is to help young writers learn how to submit their work professionally. If it is not double-spaced, in 12-point type, and featuring a slug line (Author’s last name/book title/page #) in each page’s header, the judges will not consider the entry.
11. Attach both Word documents to an e-mail.
Please include FOOD! and the category number in the subject line. Please also mention the category In the body of the e-mail. (It makes it easier to process the entries.)
Make sure to say who you are, too, so we don’t get entries mixed up. It’s also a nice touch to say something pleasant (like “Howdy, Anne!”) in the e-mail itself. Just a nice habit for a writer to have acquired before starting to work with an agent.
12. E-mail the whole shebang to contest(at)annemini(dot)com by Sunday, September 30, 2012, at midnight in your time zone. If you are entering more than one category, please submit each entry in a separate e-mail.
Do I need to explain that the (at) should be typed as @, or that (dot) should appear as a period? Nah, probably not; you all understand why reasonable people don’t post their e-mail addresses online.
13. Because winners will also be awarded life-long bragging rights and coveted ECQLC , the judges reserve the right to award as many (or as few) prizes as the quality and quantity of the entry pool in any given category warrants.
That’s a fancy way of saying that if we don’t receive enough wonderful entries in one of the categories, we may not give an award for it. So you might want to urge your friends to enter.
Those are the rules! Please follow them closely. As I said, I shall be writing a post next week that goes over them in detail, with visual examples, but in the meantime, you might to bookmark this page. As well as “the one on which I provide examples of how to follow each and every rule. (Oh, you thought I would leave my young readers to guess? How little you know me!)
And seriously, please ask if anything at all seems puzzling. It’s actually very helpful to know what could use more explanation.
And do read the guest post that follows. As I said above, I think you’re going to find Stacy’s insights into food writing very thought-provoking. You might even want to ask her some questions in the comments.
One last word before we begin: my apologies about the blurriness of the page shots here; I had asked Stacy to show you all how to format a recipe in a manuscript — because, presumably, some of you would-be cookbook writers would like to know — but the shots she sent me were exceedingly blurry. No one’s fault, as nearly as I can tell. I’ve fixed them the best I can, but if you would like to see the details better, I would suggest holding down the COMMAND key and pressing the + key repeatedly to enlarge the image.
Take it away, Stacy!
When you think back on a Christmas dinner, a birthday party, or a crawfish boil, the festivities were centered on food, but the experience was so much more than food. They involved the people who shared that food with you; the circumstances in which you ate that food; where you were, and when.
That is what makes writing about food in fiction so flavorful — the story, the emotion, the people surrounding the fare.
The use of food and recipes in fiction can be a tool by which you define and develop your characters, and by which you move your plot forward. Food can also expose your readers to a different world. So, though the scene might be focused on dining, it is what the food brings to the table, so to speak, that opens the window to an entirely new dimension — both for your character and for your readers.
In my novel for middle-grade readers, The Diary of Marie Landry, Acadian Exile, the multi-layered capabilities of food propel the story and reveal character. For example, on the surface, the cook Bernardine teaches Marie some Creole recipes, but more than learning about the food itself, Marie is able to learn about another life and another way of life. Through these recipes, she is able to share a piece of herself as well.
Let me give you some very concrete suggestions on how to use food in fiction to achieve such goals.
1. Use memory
I think almost everyone recognizes how memories can resurface simply from the taste of something long-since forgotten, or from a smell that morphs us back to another time and place. The most notable example I can give (from Remembrance of Things Past) is Marcel Proust’s biting into a petite Madeleine cake after he had dunked it into a cup of tea — the way he remembered doing at his aunt’s house when he was a child. Memories flood the forefront of his mind based on that simple act of tasting a tea-soaked cake.
Anne here: the passage to which Stacy refers is so wonderful that I cannot resist breaking in to share it with you, at least in part. If you’re not in a frantically Proustian frame of mind, feel free to skip past everything in boldface: Stacy’s guest blog resumes at the first plain text.
“I put down my cup and examine my own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.
“And I begin again to ask myself what it could have been, this unremembered state which brought with it no logical proof of its existence, but only the sense that it was a happy, that it was a real state in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished. I decide to attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I find again the same state, illumined by no fresh light. I compel my mind to make one further effort, to follow and recapture once again the fleeting sensation. And that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out every obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop my ears and inhibit all attention to the sounds which come from the next room. And then, feeling that my mind is growing fatigued without having any success to report, I compel it for a change to enjoy that distraction which I have just denied it, to think of other things, to rest and refresh itself before the supreme attempt. And then for the second time I clear an empty space in front of it. I place in position before my mind’s eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.
“Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too much confused; scarcely can I perceive the colorless reflection in which are blended the uncapturable whirling medley of radiant hues, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one possible interpreter, to translate to me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste of cake soaked in tea; cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, of what period in my past life.
“Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise? Ten times over I must essay the task, must lean down over the abyss. And each time the natural laziness which deters us from every difficult enterprise, every work of importance, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of to-day and of my hopes for to-morrow, which let themselves be pondered over without effort or distress of mind.
“And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt L?onie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks’ windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
“And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on color and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.”
This very phenomenon happened to me as an adult one year at a Christmastime cookie swap. When I bit into a cookie that a colleague had shared, memories of my childhood summers spent with my grandmother in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi demanded my attention. So important were those memories that I never again wanted to forget the taste of that cookie — and everything that I associated with it.
I just had to have that recipe! I’m happy to report that my colleague was not stingy with her recipe, and to this day I still bake that cookie every Christmas.
Paulette Rittenberg, a columnist with The Times Picayune in New Orleans understands the importance of stories connected to recipes: her food column includes the stories inextricably linked to the recipes she publishes. Lucky me, she included my cookie story in her column years ago. Her column will give you many examples of using memories of food to fuel a story.
What recollections do you have that revolve around a particularly meaningful food to you? Ask yourself a series of questions, and listen to your answers.
Where did you first taste it?
With whom?
How old were you?
What did you think of it –- liked it, hated it?
Be as specific as you can, then put the most evocative details into your tale.
As for me, many of my fondest memories go way back to when I learned how to cook the summer I was twelve years old. Thinking that my maternal grandmother was ancient at sixty-two years of age, I figured that time was of the essence — I needed to get those recipes out of her head, and soon!
That’s not entirely true. My biggest motivations for learning to cook were that I loved spending time in the kitchen with her, and I thought that she was the greatest cook on the planet. The lagniappe — the little bit extra — that I got when learning to cook from my grandmother was all those wonderful memories that became fodder for stories.
I so enjoyed cooking with my grandmother that I based Bernardine the Cook on her and turned those memories into scenes in my novel. Cooking was a natural way for my protagonist, Marie, to make a new friend. It was also the catalyst by which she was able to adapt to a new environment, to feel less frightened in unfamiliar surroundings, and to learn new ways of doing things. Food is her path to finding familiarity and acceptance in a new environment, in a different culture.
Using your own memories of food can help reveal your character’s values and personality traits in an oblique manner. How? Take a look at my grandmother’s recipe for drop biscuits — delicious hunks of dough, I assure you — and then, later in this post, I’ll show you how I turn it into a story for young readers.
Quick note from Anne to those of you planning on using this page shot as a guideline for formatting a cookbook manuscript: many publishers prefer that at the submission stage, abbreviations be written out. Do check small publishers’ submission requirements before you send so much as a page; if they do not specify that the standard American measurement abbreviations are acceptable, I would advise writing everything out.
Try to think about the difference between this example and the next as a matter of audience. As a recipe, this page contains all of the elements someone would need to bake this delicious biscuit, right? But novel readers are looking for more than that: they want to feel they are there.
2. Use all five senses
Let’s face it — eating is more than just a gustatory experience. Not only do we taste it: we see food, smell food, enjoy (or not) the texture of food. And when we are in the kitchen, the sounds of preparing and cooking it can entice us. We anticipate the act of eating for more reasons than just filling our bellies.
Every scene with food does not have to include every sense, of course, but you should give your readers more than just a description of what is being served. Let them in on the sensory indulgence that your character is experiencing.
Another way to think of it is allowing the reader to feel what it was like to be in your character’s body at that moment. To take an example from my novel, is Marie’s first experience of seafood gumbo:
[Bernardine] leaned her ample arms on the table as she pushed herself up and said, “Come see. I’ll show you just what gumbo is.” She limped slightly as she shambled over to the hearth. Then she swung the kettle out of the fire and grabbed her paddle without taking her eyes off of the pot. As she stirred the thick soup, steam whirled past my nose, and I unconsciously said, ‘Ummmm,’ and closed my eyes to savor the luscious smell.
Anne here again: sorry to keep interrupting, but since Stacy’s example is taken from a middle-grade fiction work, I do feel compelled to point out that in YA or adult fiction, this passage would be considered a bit skeletal, as food descriptions go. Why? Well, let me ask you: if you had never smelled gumbo before, what specific scents would you think Marie was experiencing in this moment?
Not to criticize Stacy’s choice of example, of course: it’s a great illustration of something that aspiring writers are all too prone to forget, that the prevailing style standards and expectations for one type of fiction are not necessarily what prevail in another. I’m grateful for the opportunity to show that important reality so explicitly. I’ll shut up now.
Eating is a multi-sensory experience, and a universal one to boot, so use what is naturally at your disposal to develop your characters. And I’m not just talking about culinary knowledge. Remember that bare-bones drop biscuit recipe? Here it is again as the opening to a story I’ve entitled Camelia’s Christmas Day Biscuits.
Notice how Camelia’s senses are tickled throughout the experience. And why not consider it an example of how to properly format a manuscript, while we’re at it? (Yes, this is a short story, but for the sake of usefulness, let’s imagine that it’s a novel I plan to submit to an agent.)
3. Use Details
Writing about food is more than just description — it was bland; it was spicy. Where is it? On the table? How did it get there? Who put it there and why?
If you are going to write a recipe into the scene, remember that if it is your character who is conveying the recipe to someone else, you must make sure that the retelling of it on the page is appropriate for the character’s personality, age, gender, etc. A ten-year-old girl would not have the same recollection of baking gingerbread cookies as a world-renowned gourmet chef.
You can propel the plot (and/or teach the lesson) through detailed preparation, consumption, and discussion of a particular dish or recipe. In my novel, for example, I don’t just have Marie and Maman discuss beignets: my readers learn that Marie has a remembrance of them, but she needs Maman’s validation of this memory because she was too young to recall them vividly. She wants to be sure, because she has discovered a recipe that had faded from her family’s daily life because of circumstances beyond their control. She learns that she loved this confection when her family was intact, when life was full of promise for them. For her, poignant emotion is attached to the taste of a doughnut.
But she didn’t understand this until she had a conversation about it with Maman. It is much more believable for Marie — a teenager — to understand her feelings by accident through food than through calculated introspection.
To show you how this dynamic might play out on the manuscript page, let’s take a look at rest of “Camelia’s Christmas Day Biscuits.” As you are reading, ponder what you learn about Camelia and her grandmother through the story’s food details. What is their relationship? How old do you think Camelia is? What kind of man is her father? What, if anything, did she learn here — about herself, about baking, about life?
Did you notice how the answers the questions above were not addressed overtly on the page? Instead, they are revealed to the reader only through details. That’s the essence of showing, not telling.
4. Read!
When it comes to writing about food in fiction (or writing about anything, for that matter), my last piece of practical advice is to read, read, read. Find out what you do and don’t like on the page. Good readers make good writers. And how!
Stacy Demoran Allbritton, a New Orleans native, has always been fascinated by the multi-faceted history of her home state. She holds a B.A. in French and an M.A. in Romance Languages from the University of New Orleans, where she received the 2005 James Whitlow Award for Excellence in Romance Languages. She was a high school French and English teacher in Louisiana until 2009, when she decided to pursue opportunities in writing and travel. The Diary of Marie Landry, Acadian Exile is her first published novel. She is currently working on her second novel in the Louisiana Heritage series. Stacy and her husband divide their time between Monroe, Louisiana and Paris, France. You can visit her on her blog.
As those of you who have been hanging out here at Author! Author! any length of time have probably surmised, there are few eventualities I enjoy more than when a deeply talented, hard-working writer gets a first book published — unless it’s when a magnificently gifted, ardently committed established author has a new book out. And if, as in the case of today’s guest blogger, it’s also a writer who has not only paid her dues in not one, not two, but three different book categories, but also takes the time to help aspiring writers learn the craft ropes, well, you’ll pardon me if I become downright giddy.
Why, you ask, hesitant to join me in cavorting around the nearest bonfire? Having grown up watching many, many authors that later became household names claw their way to public recognition, word by word and reading by reading, I must confess that I get a kick out of seeing good writers succeed. I also believe quite firmly that those of us that celebrate not only our own literary milestones, but those of our fellow writers, have an easier time keeping the faith over the course of that uphill climb.
And not merely because the road up the mountainside is notoriously windy and steep: it’s hardly a news flash that in the literary world, your garden-variety overnight sensation has often put in a decade or two of intensive toil before attaining public recognition. By cheering on our compatriots, we can reaffirm our sense that a difficult path is not an impossible one: good writing does indeed get published. We can also learn from those who have tread the byways before us how to navigate it — and, if the author in question is generous enough to share her experience and expertise, perhaps pick up a few tips to improve our writing as well.
That’s why I asked the perpetually wonderful Bharti Kirchner, author of five critically-acclaimed novels, four cookbooks, and hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, to share her insights into writing today. She’s well worth attending to: in addition to being one heck of a conference speaker on craft (something surprisingly few writers’ conferences have been concentrating upon lately), Bharti is one of the Pacific Northwest’s great food writers, both in nonfiction and in fiction. Her Pastries: A Novel of Desserts and Discoveries is one of my favorite food-related novels of all time; I would urge anyone seriously interested in learning how to handle comestibles on the page — not nearly so easy as it looks — to study it carefully.
Why? Well, Bharti’s a well-established master of sensual detail. Her characters do not experience food merely as a fleeting sensation dancing upon their taste buds: her narratives speak to the eyes, the ears, the skin, the nose, the psyche. Her characters experience life down to their viscera. Pastries is also a wonderfully evocative and accurate portrait of Seattle life, for those of you looking to learn something about establishing a sense of place.
Just of author — and writing — I like to celebrate here at Author! Author! in short. And to help all of you get in the habit of rejoicing that such authors have put in all of that hard work, I’m going to pop a metaphorical champagne cork over her new novel, Tulip Season: A Mitra Basu Mystery, by offering all of you something that could help move you along that uphill climb: the opportunity to generate some Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy.
That’s right, campers: it’s time for this year’s Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence. This time around, we’re going to be concentrating on writing through all of the senses in a competition I like to call the Sensual Surfeit Literary Competition of 2012. This year, we’re accepting novel, memoir, and narrative nonfiction book excerpts in a quest to find the best previously-unpublished sense-oriented writing that’s not in a sex scene. And this time, instead of asking for just a first page, the entries will consist of an entire scene of 8 pages or less.
Why, yes, that is a bit of room to flex your descriptive muscles, now that you mention it. To make it even more interesting, the judges and I have decided to create more separate categories for different kinds of writing.
That’s not all, either. Because some of you asked so nicely last year, I’m not just going to announce the contest’s rules and deadline and leave you to it. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be using this literary competition as a springboard for wrapping up our ongoing discussion of craft in contest entries.
Yes, really: we’re going to be using this contest not only to help build up the writing chops to bring the senses to life on the page, but to learn how to wield those skills to maximum effect in contest entries and manuscript submissions.
You’ll find the rules at the end of this post. Yes, yes, I know: I usually list them at the top, and I shall surely devote an entire post to them down the line, but I think that what Bharti has to say will be so helpful to your initial brainstorming about what you would like to enter in this contest — which is going to call upon all of your creativity — that I am going to introduce her and her insights first.
Because Bharti is so delightfully prolific, I can do that in several ways. First, as always, I can show you the publisher’s blurb for her latest book:
A missing domestic-violence counselor. A wealthy and callous husband. A dangerous romance.
Kareena Sinha, an Indian-American domestic-violence counselor, disappears from her Seattle home. Her best friend, Mitra Basu, a young landscape designer, resolves to find her. Mitra’s search lands her into a web of life-threatening intrigue where she can’t be sure of Kareena’s safety or her own.
And, while we’re at it, let’s take a gander at some deservedly high praise for it:
“Mitra is gunpowder chutney to the mystery genre, her adventures a hot refreshing blast of sumptuous storytelling. Bharti Kirchner has once again conquered another literary field. Highly addictive.”
“A multi-layered mystery, Tulip Season is carefully crafted. Set against the backdrop of spring and its promise of new growth, the heat is on as master gardener, Mitra Basu, pulls out all the stops searching for her missing friend, Kareena, a domestic violence counselor who herself may have been abused. A sense of menace is palpable as Mitra puts together all the pieces that lead her to a bittersweet but welcome epiphany. Lovely and compelling!”
I could also, to give you a sense of her range, bring up my favorite of her cookbooks, The Bold Vegetarian, of which Publishers Weekly said:
Only a stoical (or very full) cook would not be tempted by the recipes here, which kick off with Carmelized Garlic from Spain, Pecan Mushroom Pate from France and Indian-Style Roasted Potatoes redolent of asafetida, mustard oil, cumin and mango powder. While Kirchner (The Healthy Cuisine of India; Indian Inspired) draws heavily on that subcontinent for inspiration, she includes recipes from China, Spain, France, Japan, Mexico, Thailand, Korea, the Middle East and the U.S. She also melds recipes to come up with some truly appetizing new dishes, such as an Asian Pesto that combines the flavors of the Italian original with hints of the lime/peanut/garlic sauces of east Asian cooking. Kirchner is sparing in her use of fat, relying on cooking techniques, spices, flavored oils and judiciously combined textures to create good taste. Her gentle tours through international marketplaces, the extensive “vegetarian pantry” and the descriptions of recipes’ evolutions are likely to inspire readers’ inventiveness, although the more timid can rely on the generous helping of serving suggestions and listed substitutions.
And then I could, I suppose, answer the question that half of you have been shouting out there in the ether — how on earth does a writer move so easily between book categories? — by referring you to the excellentAuthornomics interview in which she talks about just these sorts of practicalities. Or, for those of you with a bit more time and a hankering to hear about craft, I could easily send you straight to a really interesting interview with Book Lust’s Nancy Pearl:
But I always feel that the best way to find out about a writer is by — wait for it — reading her writing, don’t you? So I’m going to let her speak for herself without further ado. I shall meet you on the other side with particulars about the writing contest.
Join me, then, in welcoming today’s guest blogger, one of the local greats. Take it away, Bharti!
Years ago at a Bouchercon conference (a conference meant for mystery readers) held in Seattle, I heard the following anecdote. A group of out-of-towners, who had come to Seattle specifically for this conference, got together in the evening and ventured out to try various local restaurants. Off they went hopping from one restaurant to another, places where their favorite sleuths had dined in the mystery novels they’d enjoyed.
The story moved me. I loved food and always wanted to write about it. At the time I was a novice writer, mostly doing magazine pieces, but immediately appreciated the power of food references, how much they affect the readers.
My passion for food continued to grow. With the passing of years, I went on to write four cookbooks and numerous magazine food articles. Possibly in a future post, I’ll talk about the phenomenon of writing nonfiction books/short pieces on the subject. In this post, I’d like to dwell on the use of food in fiction and creative nonfiction (such as a memoir).
Why is food so important in writing? When M.F.K. Fisher was asked why she wrote about food and not about love or war, she said, “Because I am hungry.” In my humble opinion, we hunger for a taste sensation in our mouths because we’re hungry to taste life.
Perhaps that is why cooking has always been a big part of my existence. Baking, in particular, fascinates me. I lose all sense of time as I mix the flour with baking powder, whisk the eggs, and add the almond extract. It gives me great pleasure to inhale the aroma of a tart baking in the oven. The pleasure doubles when I serve the finished product, warm and rosy, to family and friends.
I’d always dreamed about writing a book on baking. But there are far too many baking books in the marketplace. So I thought of a different way of giving expression to my baking urges. What if I made baking a pivotal element in a work of fiction?
In my fourth novel, Pastries, I found just such an opportunity. The setting was a neighborhood bakery in Seattle and many of the players were bakers. I had ample opportunity to infuse the pages with the aroma of melting chocolate and fresh vanilla beans. I had moody bakers who didn’t show up. I also had bakers who literally forgot the icing on the cake.
Pastries, incidentally, isn’t just about baking. In the plot, I’d worked in Sunya’s dilemmas: a broken romance, mother who’s about to marry a man she doesn’t like, and intense competition from a chain bakery named Cakes Plus. I had to be aware of one thing: not to overdo the food descriptions, not to overwhelm the readers’ palate with mentions of chocolate mousse and cinnamon buns. A little food description goes a long way.
To paraphrase a reviewer: This novel deals with such diverse elements as the WTO riots in Seattle, Zen in the workplace, and wasabi cheesecake.
What do you love about food and cooking? Can you put that in a novel or memoir?
Sometimes it’s not the actual dishes that the characters’ consume that move the story but rather the moods around the dinner table, the emotions that suddenly soar. Here is an example from my latest novel, Tulip Season. Mitra, a landscape artist, is intent on finding her best friend Kareena who is missing. She’s done all she could and has had the help of community members and friends, and there is no lead.
In this particular scene, Mitra and Ulrich sit at her kitchen table, sharing a dinner of cauliflower curry, candlelight between them. Mitra is fascinated by Ulrich, a mysterious man from Germany she’s recently met. For a moment she’s able to let go of her worries about her missing friend and concentrate on the plate before her. Ulrich says he loves her cooking and asks her if she grew the vegetable herself. She says yes.
More compliments follow. They’re bantering, having a lively conversation. He even mentions the words “honeymoon” and “couple.” She drinks it all in, losing herself in a daydream about them getting married, and even picturing the wedding ceremony in the nearby rose garden.
Then her eyes fall on the candlelight. A moment ago, it was shivering. Now it is dead.
Only by creating a cozy dinner scene first was I able to do this foreshadowing. Food can lead you to unexpected twists and turns.
Bharti Kirchner is the author of nine books—five critically acclaimed novels and four cookbooks and hundreds of short pieces for magazines and newspapers. Her fifth novel (a mystery this time), Tulip Season: A Mitra Basu Mystery, is now out.
Bharti is Contributing Editor for The Writer. She has written for Food & Wine, Vegetarian Times, Writer’s Digest, Fitness Plus, Northwest Travel, and The Seattle Times. Her essays have appeared in ten anthologies, the most recent being Imagination and Place: Weather.
Bharti has won a VCCA (Virginia Center for Creative Arts) Fellowship, a City Artist’s Project award, two Seattle Arts Commission literature grants, two Artist Trust literature grants, and has twice been a Fellow of Jack Straw Productions. She has been honored as a Living Pioneer Asian American Author. She is a popular speaker at writer’s conferences nationwide, and may be followed on Twitter: @bhartikirchner.
Anne again here — wasn’t that fun? Now let’s talk about this summer’s literary contest. First, Since we’re going to be concentrating upon craft issues this summer at Author! Author!, this season’s writing contest is going to focus squarely upon their importance to expressive excellence. We always like to reward good writing, but this year, we’re going to be expanding the variety of categories.
All entries must be writing for the adult market (don’t worry; there will be a YA contest later in the summer), but Memoir and Narrative Nonfiction will be separately judged, for instance, as well several different stripes of genre fiction. That way, we may reward a broader variety of writing. A certain minimum number of entries must be received in each category, however, for the prizes to be meaningful, so do tell your friends and critique group members!
We’re also making the writing challenge more difficult than in years past. The Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence have always rewarded entries featuring strong, sense-based detail and imagery, but this year, that will be the primary judging criterion. To that end, we’re calling only for scenes that utilize a range of senses in interesting and unexpected ways. But in order to keep things interesting (and the results PG-rated), entries must present a scene that does not involve overtly sexual contact.
So although this competition is for writing that incorporates all of the senses, we will not be accepting sex scenes, period. Nor will we accept an entry containing profanity. Not that there isn’t some great sensual writing dealing with that arena of human experience, as well as some magnificent swearing, but this is a blog committed to making it possible for writers of all ages and varieties of Internet access to participate.
Many library and home computers are protected by blocking programs, you see. And I would hate for any members of our community not to be able to view the winning entries in each category — which will be published here. (More on that later.)
Third, we’re opening up the possibilities for what you can enter. Yes, the contest is still calling for manuscript excerpts, so entrants will not have to take the time away from their works-in-progress to write something new, something folks seemed to feel pretty strongly about in years past. But this time, the entry need not come from the opening pages of the book; by popular demand, entrants will be allowed to submit a synopsis that shows the judges where the submitted scene falls in the manuscript.
Finally — and I suspect this will please many of you — you actually do have most of the summer to contemplate entering. Why? Well, in previous years, some members of our little community complained (nicely, of course) that they didn’t have enough lead time to pull together an entry.
So this time around, I’m giving you until the week before Labor Day. In fact, I’ll let you cut it so close that you will be able to smell your neighbors’ charcoal heating up for weekend burger-grilling: the deadline is midnight in your time zone on Tuesday, October 30, 2012Monday, December 3, 2012 — changed by popular demand!
So you have a nice stretch of time to polish up those scenes. Please read all of the rules carefully, and feel free to ask follow-up questions.
Seriously, please ask if anything at all proves puzzling. As I always do when I’m planning to work on a contest-entry series, I polled a discreet group of veteran contest judges about trends in entries, and wouldn’t you know it? Every single one of them expressed the wish that good writers would read contest rules more closely.
Why? Because it’s the single most common reason for not making it to the finalist round.
I just mention.
In the fine tradition of the Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence, then, and as part of my ongoing quest to provide good writers with much-needed ECQLC, I am proud to announce:
The Sensual Surfeit Literary Competition of 2012
Although the last time any of us here at Author! Author! checked, human beings experience the known world through their sensory organs, the overwhelming majority of manuscripts seem to rely mostly upon just two: sight and sound. That’s understandable, of course, since the world is stuffed to the gills with television, online, and movie storylines that must depend upon only those two senses to convey meaning. On the printed page, however, there’s seldom a reason for a narrative to limit itself to only what could be observed on a screen.
In order to encourage aspiring writers to incorporate more senses — and more specific sense-oriented detail — in their manuscripts, the Sensual Surfeit Literary Competition of 2012 is calling upon you to wow the judges with just how thoroughly you can make them feel that they are there for one scene in your book.
The catch: it cannot be a scene that contains overtly sexual activity. Find other ways to engage the senses. And the scene in question must be 8 pages or less.
Winners will not only receive fabulous prizes (hold your horses; we’re getting to those), but may have their scenes and accompanying synopses both published and critiqued in a post here at Author! Author! for all the world to see and admire. To be specific:
The grand prize winner in each category will receive a half-hour Mini Consult on a query, synopsis, and first 10 pages of the manuscript from which the winning scene was excerpted, as well as having the winning entry, bio, and an author photo posted on Author! Author!
First and second place winners will have their entries posted and critiqued on this blog.
Because winners will also be awarded life-long bragging rights and coveted ECQLC , the judges reserve the right to award as many (or as few) prizes as the quality and quantity of the entry pool in any given category warrants. Awards are purely up to the discretion of the judging panel.
Entrants may enter more than one category, but a particular scene may be submitted in only one category. Please select your category by the type of book from which the scene is taken, rather than the content of the scene itself. The categories are as follows:
Category I: Literary fiction, women’s fiction, and mainstream fiction
Category II: Science fiction, fantasy, and paranormal
Category III: All other genre fiction, including romance and mystery
Category IV: Humor (either fiction or nonfiction, but please do tell the judges which)
Category V: Memoir
Category VI: Narrative nonfiction, cookbooks, and academic books
All entries must be submitted via e-mail to contest(at)annemini(dot)com by Monday, December 3, 2012, at midnight in your time zone. Late entries will not be considered. Please submit each entry in a separate e-mail, in accordance with the rules below.
Those are the general rules. Here are the specific steps required to win. Do read them all carefully, as I am anticipating vigorous competition. Please be aware that entries that do not follow the rules will be disqualified.
1. Select a scene no more than eight pages in length from your manuscript or manuscript-in-progress that best demonstrates the use of sense-oriented description and/or imagery. Scenes may be excerpted from any point in the book, but do be aware that the judges will be assessing the writing by only this scene and your synopsis (see Step #5).
Pages must be in standard format for book manuscripts, in 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier. Work that is not double-spaced, contains shrunken margins, or otherwise differs from standard format will be disqualified.
All entries must be in English. Whether you choose to write in American English, Canadian English, or U.K. English, however, is entirely up to you. Just make sure it’s spelled correctly.
2. Make sure that the scene in question does not include any overtly sexual act or profanity. The goal here is sensual description that is specifically non-sexual. Remember, too, that the judges will be looking for a variety of senses to be addressed in the scene.
3. Polish your scene to a high gloss and save it as a Word document, as a .doc file Only .doc entries in Word will be accepted — not TextEdit, PDF, or any other formats, please. Please title the Word file containing your synopsis as YOUR LAST NAME + SYNOPSIS. Please containing the scene with your name and the abbreviated title of your book (Austen Pride & Prejudice), not just as contest entry or the ever-popular Anne Mini contest (The last time I ran a contest like this, I received 42 entries with one of the other file name.)
4. In a separate Word document, give your name, address, e-mail address, and telephone number, as well as the category you are entering. On that same page, please include a 1-paragraph explanation of how the scene fits into the overall story of the book. This is the only chance you’re going to get to set up the scene for the judges, so make it count!
5. On the second page of the document described in #4, include a synopsis of no more than 1 page, giving the judges an overview of the book’s premise, its main characters, and its central conflict. Again, this synopsis must be in standard format. If you are unfamiliar with either standard format or how to write a 1-page synopsis, you will find explanations (along with examples) under the HOW TO FORMAT A BOOK MANUSCRIPT and HOW TO WRITE A 1-PAGE SYNOPSIS categories on the archive list located on the right-hand side of this page.
6. Make sure that both documents are properly formatted: precisely as they would appear in a manuscript submission. Please be aware that correct formatting is a prerequisite to entry in this contest, not merely a judging criterion. If it is not double-spaced, in 12-point type, and featuring a slug line (Author’s last name/book title/page #) in each page’s header, the judges will not consider the entry.
7. Attach both Word documents to an e-mail. Please include SSLC ENTRY and the category number in the subject line. Please also mention the category In the body of the e-mail. (It makes it easier to process the entries.) Again, the categories are:
Category I: Literary fiction, women’s fiction, and mainstream fiction
Category II: Science fiction, fantasy, and paranormal
Category III: All other genre fiction, including romance and mystery
Category IV: Humor
Category V: Memoir
Category VI: Narrative nonfiction, cookbooks, and academic books
Make sure to say who you are, too, so we don’t get entries mixed up. It’s also a nice touch to say something pleasant (like “Howdy, Anne!”) in the e-mail itself. I just mention.
8. Make sure to mention which category you are entering. Seriously, we need to know this.
9. E-mail the whole shebang to contest(at)annemini(dot)com by Tuesday, October 30, 2012 Monday, December 3, 2012, at midnight in your time zone. If you are entering more than one category, please submit each entry in a separate e-mail. Do I need to explain that the (at) should be rendered as @, or that (dot) should appear as a period? Nah, probably not; you all understand why reasonable people don’t post their e-mail addresses online
Those are the rules! Please follow them closely. Indeed, you may wish to bookmark this page, so you may revisit and review them prior to hitting SEND.
And no, you didn’t misread the blurb on the cover: it’s that Elton John. The little bird that flies around telling people things told me that he liked the original release of Joel’s memoir so much that he volunteered to blurb the second edition.
If you prefer not to receive your news from passing waterfowl, you can read a fuller account of this remarkable publication story in Joel’s earlier guest post on book promotion. While we’re on the subject of guest posts, Joel also charmed the Author! Author! community with an exceedingly useful guest post on obtaining permission to use song lyrics in your books, should any of you be contemplating setting foot on that particular Yellow Brick Road. (Or were you under the impression that memoirs and novels could quote songs willy-nilly? Au contraire, mon fr?re.)
Mssr. John was not the only one to fall in love with Joel’s deeply human, devastatingly honest, and often howlingly funny voice. I already knew how amusing and insightful Joel was before the book came out, yet as the neighbors that did not move away instantly at the sight can attest, certain sections of this book made me rush into the street, tap-dancing with glee. Sparklers may or may not have been involved.
Was I that hard up at the time for some humorous memoir? you ask, bemused. No, thank you, I write, read, and edit funny memoir all the time. What separated Joel’s first book from, well, everything else was not merely how consistently diverting it was — not an easy trick, with a life fully and well lived — but how unblinkingly truthful it was.
Yes, those of you rolling your eyes? “Oh, come on, Anne,” the memoir-jaded snort. “The whole point of memoir is that it’s true, isn’t it?”
Ah, but there’s true in the sense of having actually occurred — and true that sends shivers through your membranes because it shows you life in a way you had not seen it on a page before. There’s true that reads plausibly — and true that makes the reader gasp, “Wow, my therapist does not know me as well as I now know this memoirist.” And, as any memoir editor worth her salt and/or pepper could tell you, there’s true that’s well-written — and there’s true that’s so prettily phrased that one’s socks, shoes, and pinky rings get blown off.
Or, at the very least, that causes one to go running out into the street, looking for an innocent bystander to whom to read a particularly striking passage. (My neighborhood used to be so quiet before I met Joel.)
I’m certainly not the only professional reader that felt this way when his bombshell of a first memoir came out, incidentally. Some other bon mots from those that know about such things:
In a culture where we disguise vulnerability with physical perfection and material success, Derfner skewers heartache with Wildean wit . . . [Derfner is] the next No?l Coward.?Out.com
“Searing.” — Washington Blade
“Derfner’s writing is perfect. . . . He’s your best friend. He’s your brother. He is you.” — EDGE Los Angeles
“Sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant, always clever, and unpredictable.” — Philadelphia Gay News
What’s that you say? You’d like me to stop telling you the man can write and let him get on with showing you same? Reasonable enough. Let’s start with the publisher’s blurb for Swish:
Joel Derfner is gayer than you.
Don’t feel too bad about it, though, because he has made being gayer than you his life’s work. At summer day camp, when he was six, Derfner tried to sign up for needlepoint and flower arranging, but the camp counselors wouldn’t let him, because, they said, those activities were for girls only. Derfner, just to be contrary, embarked that very day on a solemn and sacred quest: to become the gayest person ever. Along the way he has become a fierce knitter, an even fiercer musical theater composer, and so totally the fiercest step aerobics instructor (just ask him — he’ll tell you himself).
In Swish, Derfner takes his readers on a flamboyant adventure along the glitter-strewn road from fabulous to divine. Whether he’s confronting the demons of his past at a GLBT summer camp, using the Internet to meet men — many, many men — or plunging headfirst (and nearly naked) into the shady world of go-go dancing, he reveals himself with every gayer-than-thou flourish to be not just a stylish explorer but also a fearless one. So fearless, in fact, that when he sneaks into a conference for people who want to cure themselves of their homosexuality, he turns the experience into one of the most fascinating, deeply moving chapters of the book. Derfner, like King Arthur, Christopher Columbus, and Indiana Jones–but with a better haircut and a much deeper commitment to fad diets–is a hero destined for legend.
Written with wicked humor and keen insight, Swish is at once a hilarious look at contemporary ideas about gay culture and a poignant exploration of identity that will speak to all readers–gay, straight, and in between.
Here again, we smack head-first into that bugbear of memoirists everywhere, the distinction between true and true. All of these statements are factually accurate about the book, but what struck me most about Joel’s memoir, what set my membranes humming, my feet tap-dancing, and my neighbors scurrying into the street to see why I was shouting is not mentioned in this blurb.
What’s missing, in my view? The fact — oh, okay, my opinion — that this is one of the best memoirs ever written on how darned hard it is to be a smart, sensitive human being in a world that habitually rewards neither.
And that, my friends, is what has made this book among the most tattered on my memoir shelf. Occasionally, life will throw a meandering curveball that knocks one of Joel’s beautifully-phrased insights out of my at this point stuffed-to-bursting memory vaults, sending me rushing right back to the text.
Oh, and in the spirit of this series, I should add: the guy’s paid his dues as a writer, and then some. He’s done it with wit, humor, and perseverance in the face of some pretty long odds. All of which has not only garnered my completely ungrudging respect (and you of all people know how high my threshold for grudge-free respect is), but a feeling that somewhere up there in the Muses’ palace, the Ladies in Charge have already reserved some serious shelf space for Joel’s subsequent literary achievements.
Ah, but there’s the rub, isn’t it? After a debut memoir like that, what precisely does one do for an encore?
I asked Joel that question, and rather than fleeing with the flailing arms and piercing screams such a seemingly flippant but subversively difficult question deserves, he gave it the alternately serious and humorous literary attention that has caused me to come to think of him as the memoirist little brother the Muses should have seen to it that I had. (With all requisite apologies to the nonfiction author big brother with whom they actually provided me — oh, you thought my parents would have put up with offspring that didn’t write?)
Here, then, is his response, and I have to say, I wish I had read it before I first sat down to write a memoir. In my checkered experience, it’s not only true — it’s true. Take it away, Joel!
Wait, that wasn’t Joel. Although, come to think of it, I’ve never seen him and Judy Garland in a room together. I’ve never seen Superman and Joel in a room together either, though, so…hey, wait a minute…
Here, then, is Joel as his usual charming self — and his usual wise self vis-?-vis the difficult path of the memoirists. Five, six, seven, eight!
I’m about to sign a contract for the publication of my second real book, whose working title is Lawfully Wedded Husband: How I Tried to Destroy America With my Gay Marriage.
When my last book, Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What Ended Up Happening Instead, came out, many reviewers praised its combination of funny and wistful. It “bounce[d] back and forth,”? wrote one, “from tender and touching and deeply sad to wildly funny, sometimes in the space of a paragraph, or even a single sentence.”?
Yes! I thought when I read this. It’s a good thing this reviewer has a distinctive name, because now I can look him up online and stalk him and make him fall in love with me and then we can be happy together for the rest of our lives.
Part of what had allowed me so to bounce back and forth in Swish was that I was incredibly, incredibly depressed. I hadn’t been quite on the verge of suicide while writing the book, but I had certainly been within spitting distance, and I’d found it easy somehow to reach inside, touch a raw, exposed nerve, and twist it until something funny came out and I started crying.
I began Swish in 2005, and it was published in 2008. At some point in 2009, my agent said to me, “Joel, I need another book from you.” (I realize this sounds incredibly glamorous, but really I’d just begged her for a meeting because all I’d been able to afford for months was Taco Bell and I was hoping she would at least take me to TGIFridays or something.) (She didn’t.) So I said, “Okay, no problem, I’ll start working on another book.” My boyfriend had just proposed to me, and the issue of marriage equality seemed topical enough to be worth writing about, so I went home, turned my computer on, and started typing.
After an hour or so, I looked at what I’d written, realized it wasn’t interesting at all, deleted it, went to the bodega on the corner, bought a couple candy bars, came back, ate them both, and started over again.
A couple hours later, I looked at what I’d written, realized it wasn’t true at all, deleted it, went to the bodega on the corner, bought five candy bars, came back, ate them all, and spent the rest of the evening staring morosely at the television, because I had a very serious problem:
I was no longer unhappy enough.
In the years between 2005 and 2009, I had made a great many positive changes in my life, including but not limited to getting a therapist, going on massive doses of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and moving in with my boyfriend, and all those nerves that had been so raw and exposed before now had a modicum of protective covering. My two-candy-bar attempt had been uninteresting because I hadn’t been twisting any nerves; my five-candy-bar attempt had been dishonest because I was only pretending to twist nerves that weren’t in fact twistable, at least not in the way to which I was accustomed in writing.
My muse had disappeared.
Please don’t think for a second that I’m saying you have to be unhappy to write well. It wasn’t my writing that had suffered, you see; it was my subject matter.
I came quickly to think of this as the Tolstoy problem. Even if you haven’t read Anna Karenina you’re probably familiar with its famous opening sentence, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”?
It was easy to write with deep sadness and wild humor when that was all I had, and I had them in my own way, and could convey them with idiosyncratic verve.
But what was I going to write now? “I cooked my boyfriend dinner. It was yummy. Then we watched Tabatha’s Salon Takeover and went to sleep. I love him.” Who would want to read that for even a page, much less an entire book? I certainly wouldn’t.
But if I faked it–”I cooked spaghetti for my boyfriend and accidentally used only one clove of garlic instead of two in the spaghetti sauce and he didn’t say anything about it so now I’m lying awake staring at my ceiling trying to figure out whether he didn’t notice or he noticed but didn’t want to say anything about it because it was the last straw and he’s going to break up with me tomorrow” — well, that could work for a paragraph or two, maybe even a few pages, but it wasn’t true, and I knew there was no way I could sustain it for an entire book.
So what was I going to do?
This question paralyzed me for about a year. Occasionally I would sit down and start writing something, trying to be both interesting and honest, fail, and then stop thinking about it for another month or two, because not thinking about it allowed me to avoid discovering I could no longer write.
The problem was that not thinking about it was great as a strategy to avoid discovering I could no longer write, but as a strategy to write it left something to be desired. If the only way to avoid confronting my inability to write was refusing to write, then the whole thing sort of turned in on itself until everything collapsed and at some point the bodega was going to run out of candy bars.
So I figured, okay, why don’t I ease into this by writing about the issue itself first, not about my own experiences? If you’re quoting legal statutes you can hardly be expected to be wildly funny and deeply sad.
So I started with a sort of analytical/philosophical/whateverical chapter, and went from there. And as I wrote, I tried to find ways to touch and twist indirectly those nerves to which I no longer had easy access.
I think I’ve succeeded, to some degree. I think that when this book is at its best I’m able to explore things about feeling alone even in a relationship, about what a relationship can’t give you, about the difference between expectation and reality.
I’m sorry not to have a better or clearer way to talk about how I was about to get started again or what those indirect ways are. I think it’s because I’m still in the middle of the story–the story of me writing this book, I mean, not the story the book is telling–and I don’t have the perspective I need to understand what I’m doing differently.
I’m still very afraid that this book isn’t as good as my last one, because its sadness isn’t as deep nor its humor as wild. One reason I went with this particular publisher, though, was that the editor said he liked this book more than Swish, which was incredibly heartening, because it allowed me to hope that whatever I’ve replaced twisting raw nerves with might be equally valuable, or even more valuable–to hope that I’ve found a way, all unawares, to skirt the Tolstoy problem.
And if that’s the case, then, if I’m lucky enough to be invited to post again on this blog in a few years, maybe I can tell you how I did it.
Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and Gay Haiku author Joel Derfner is from South Carolina, where his great-grandmother had an affair with George Gershwin. After fleeing the south as soon as he possibly could, he got a B.A. in linguistics from Harvard. A year after he graduated, his thesis on the Abkhaz language was shown to be completely wrong, as the word he had been translating as “who” turned out to be not a noun but a verb. Realizing that linguistics was not his m?tier, he moved to New York to get an M.F.A. in musical theater writing from the Tisch School of the Arts.
Musicals for which he has written the scores have been produced in London, New York, and various cities in between (going counterclockwise). In an attempt to become the gayest person ever, he joined Cheer New York, New York’s gay and lesbian cheerleading squad, but eventually he had to leave because he was too depressed. In desperation, he started knitting and teaching aerobics, though not at the same time. He hopes to come to a bad end.
Yes, it’s another dead-of-night post, but that seems appropriate for our next guest blogger, YA novelist Kate Evangelista. If her name seems familiar, well, it should: Kate is a longtime Author! Author! community member, a diligent commenter, and, as those of you who tuned in earlier this month may recall, a proud first-time author: her debut, Taste, was released in e-reader format by Crescent Moon Press earlier this month. Now, it’s also available in hard copy at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or, for those of you that prefer patronizing indie booksellers, Powell’s.
Today, by special request (okay, outright blandishment), Kate is here not only to contribute her wit and wisdom to our ongoing series on series writing; she’s also going to share her direct-from-the-front-lines insights on breaking into print in the hyper-competitive YA fantasy market. Can’t you feel the atmosphere crackling with excitement?
You should, because Kate is one of Author! Author!’s homegrown success stories. To apply the overused phrase properly for once, she was once standing (or, more probably, sitting) precisely where most of you fine people are right now — reading through these posts, writing her heart out, hoping someday to break into the biz.
Do I hear an it can be done?
Because Kate is one of our own, I’d like to take a rather unusual approach to giving you a sense of her authorial chops, one that’s more reflective of the progression from composition to published book. First, let’s take a gander at an excerpt from Taste in manuscript form, as we might have seen it if we were lucky enough to participate in the same critique group as today’s guest. As always, if you are having trouble making out the individual words, try holding down the COMMAND key and pressing + to enlarge the image.
Quite the intriguing YA voice, isn’t it? The tone is evocative, yet the prose is nicely spare. Here’s what some reader reviewers — including another longtime member of the Author! Author! community — had to say about Kate’s voice and story:
“Intriguing, mysterious, and a taste is not all you will get! Must read!” — K.M. Whittaker
“My new favorite novel.” — Wendy Russo
“Awesome-sauce! A delicious book to taste and devour.” — Book4Juliet
What is this story of which they speak so highly? Glad you asked. Here’s the publisher’s blurb for her book.
At Barinkoff Academy, there’s only one rule: no students on campus after curfew. Phoenix McKay soon finds out why when she is left behind at sunset. A group calling themselves night students threaten to taste her flesh until she is saved by a mysterious, alluring boy. With his pale skin, dark eyes, and mesmerizing voice, Demitri is both irresistible and impenetrable. He warns her to stay away from his dangerous world of flesh eaters. Unfortunately, the gorgeous and playful Luka has other plans.
When Phoenix is caught between her physical and her emotional attraction, she becomes the keeper of a deadly secret that will rock the foundations of an ancient civilization living beneath Barinkoff Academy. Phoenix doesn’t realize until it is too late that the closer she gets to both Demitri and Luka, the more she is plunging them all into a centuries-old feud.
Or, as the book trailer puts it (and rather well, too):
Rather fun to see her writing move through the stages, is it not? Often, when an aspiring writer is in the throes of nailing down her voice, it’s hard for her to see beyond the page in front of her — or to dream beyond holding the finished book in her hand. But a story goes through many, many more stages than that on its way to publication: the first baby steps toward showing one’s work to others, the incorporation of serious feedback, wrestling it into professional presentation format, working with an editor’s expectations, a blizzard of production decisions, and finally, unveiling it to the world.
Kate has been kind enough to join us under cover of dark to talk about all of these things — and why we should all keep the faith. Speak to your people, Kate — I’m sure they are listening intently.
Gather ‘round, campers. I’m Kate, and I will be your hostess for today. Yes, you too, Charles. *points at skeptical camper in the corner who refuses to join the group*
The awesome-sauce Anne has graciously allowed me to take over Author! Author! for this discussion, and I must say it is both a terrifying and exhilarating experience. Well, maybe more like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute and hoping Superman will catch you before you splat on the very hard ground below.
Now that we’ve all gathered, I would like to begin by asking, does anyone need a bathroom break? *looks at the campers gathered* No? *claps hands once* Well, buckle up, ladies and gents, it’s going to be a long one. Please feel free to raise your hand and ask a question at any point during this discussion. I welcome them, and as one of my professors used to say, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question.†Of course, many of my classmates got sent out of the room for testing this theory one too many times. I suggest we not do that here. *sly smile*
As you can all see from the title of this post, I am here to discuss commitment and when it’s time to cheat.
I see lots of skeptical faces in this group. But, Kate, I thought we were talking about writing today? One or many of you might be thinking.
Put away the pitchforks, folks. We are in fact discussing a few fundamentals of writing. And I’m very happy to help in any way that I can. Here comes the disclaimer: please bear in mind that I am basing what I’m sharing here with all of you based from experience. I am by far not an expert in the topic of writing and everything the profession/hobby/passion/insert-how-you-see-your-writing-here entails. It has just come to my attention that sometimes it’s easy to get attached to a single work for years without any inclinations of moving on.
Ah, I see a raised hand.
Kate, I love the story I have written. It has taken me years to write it and I will submit it over and over again, no matter how many years it takes until it finally finds a home. Are you saying I shouldn’t do that?
All good and valid points. Of course you should keep editing and submitting your work. After all, you never know when an agent or publisher would say: “Hey, there’s something here and I want to represent/publish this.â€
I’m not here to dissuade any of you from improving your work. If fact, I admire your tenacity for continuing to submit. What I’m here for is to hopefully open your minds to a little sum’n sum’n on the side, if you know what I mean. *winks* Surely, as a writer, you have more than one story in you?
Yes, I see you, Tess. *points to the camper with raised hand*
Are you saying we should write more than one story at a time?
*smiles* Bingo! Gold star for Tess.
Writing is a commitment. But where is it set in stone that you should commit to just one story all your life? Surely there are a multitude of characters in your head begging for attention? But before we get into the gritty, I first want to define commitment.
According to Webster, a personal friend of mine, commitment is an instance of being obligated or emotionally impelled. There are three other definitions for commitment, but for this post, we’ll stick to the sense of obligation that comes with committing. Usually, commitment is used in the context of relationships.
In this case, we will see writing as a relationship between the writer and the work. There are many times when we become attached to the work that we no longer see the forest for the trees, or the bigger picture, as some of you might say.
Still with me? *scans the crowd and nods* Okay.
There is nothing wrong with writing more than one story. By all means, I encourage it. Your first work will not begrudge you spending your time on a new WIP (work in progress) now and again. Mistresses are allowed in this union. In fact, this is one of the only times I will give you permission to cheat.
I see your shocked faces. I know. *takes a deep breath* What I’m proposing is crazy.
Kate! *someone stands in indignation* I cannot leave the story I have worked so hard on to start something new! It’s sacrilege, I say.
*raises both hands to calm the increasingly agitated crowd* I understand your concern. Please, take a seat and give me a few more minutes of your time. I never said this discussion would be an easy one. If you step away from this thinking of the possibilities, then my job here is done. I ask for nothing more. Just an open mind and a patient ear would do.
Maybe it will be easier if I immerse this discussion within the context of my personal process as a writer. It would definitely be easier for me. Write what you know, they say.
So, huddle up and give me your eyeballs. Okay, not literally. How morbid would that be? I digress.
When I decided to take my writing seriously, I began with a high fantasy YA novel entitled Queen Rising, which during years of editing evolved into an urban fantasy YA novel entitled ‘Til Death (now a trilogy contracted with Entangled Publishing). I was young and naïve when I started writing Queen Rising. I knew nothing of the publishing business, much less about writing query letters and submitting to agents and publishers.
I didn’t even know the difficulties of breaking into the high fantasy genre. I was horrible at what I was doing, hiding behind the mask of thinking I was actually walking in the right direction. But that’s something I reserve to discuss with my future shrink.
Once I finished writing Queen Rising, I was eager to submit query letters. Note what I wrote in the paragraph above: I knew nothing. This lack of knowledge led to several rejections. Discouraged by these rejections, I thought to start something new. A new story that I’d been thinking about for quite some time.
Why did you let the discouragement of rejections stop you from submitting Queen Rising? you might ask.
Well, I was young and naïve, and very sensitive for my own good. Little did I know that this moment of feeling discouraged would lead me down a better path. One that would lead to three publishing contracts with three different publishers.
As I started writing my second novel (Lunar Heat eventually evolved into Taste, available now where books are sold. Yes, I am not ashamed to plug), I made sure to do my research. I joined several websites that cater to writers. I don’t feel the need to name them here because they are not what this post is about. And I’m sure you know which ones I’m referring to. I also stumbled upon a blog called Author! Author! You might know it. *laughs*
Armed with new knowledge and a new book, I began the submission process again. And this time, while I was waiting for responses, I went back to Queen Rising and began editing. The great thing about my time away from the text (writing something new) is that it allowed me to reenter its world with fresh eyes.
If you stick with one manuscript for years on end, you potentially lose your fresh eyes because you already know what happens in every twist and turn and forget there are other possibilities within the story, new avenues to take. Since I had written Lunar Heat, I discovered different ways to plot, found answers to character motivation, and learned to develop character further, to name a few, that I didn’t know about when I was writing Queen Rising.
With each new novel you write, not only are you increasing the chances of getting published, but you are also evolving as a writer. Each story allows you to be different. To stretch your creative muscles and explore different characters, situations, and writing styles. In this case, cheating actually makes you a better lover to your first.
If your first novel is in the third person point of view, why not try writing in the first person for the next novel?
But that’s not the way I write, Kate.
That’s the point of trying something new, stretching those writing muscles. If you don’t practice, like any skill, you can become stuck and start to stagnate. This is not good for you or your writing mental health. You owe it to your sanity to explore other avenues. And in the process become a better writer because of it.
If you’re still averse to cheating on your current manuscript, let’s take a different tack: during this road to publication, I realized the one thing about writing that writers don’t often mention: The waiting.
There’s a lot of waiting involved when submitting to critique partners, agents, and editors. During this submission process, tweaking your novel on submission can be counterproductive, because anything new added would not be to the knowledge of those who have your manuscript.
I would suggest that while waiting, start a new story. That WIP you’ve been itching to write. That character who’s been bugging you for his or her own novel.
Writing is never a waste of time. If it’s something you truly enjoy, then sticking to just one story is almost like disrespecting your talent. I know there are many published writers out there who only have one book out, but we can’t all be Harper Lee. You’re doing your craft a disservice if you restrain yourself from writing something new, because you never know who will say yes to your latest WIP.
Since you already have one novel under your belt, you have the experience needed to start a second one. The confidence of having completed a novel is invaluable when starting a new WIP.
Your growth as writer can depends on the number of novels or WIPs you’re willing to explore and create. When I broke up with my agent (long and horrible story), I had in my possession four completed YA novels with a fifth on the way. Lunar Heat became Taste. Queen Rising became ‘Til Death. Blind became Reaping Me Softly. And my fourth is called Impulse.
Believe it or not, I submitted all of them at the same time…to different people, of course. When one agent rejected one novel, I would submit the next, which helped me maximize the chances of receiving partial and full submission requests. Because of this method, Taste is with Crescent Moon Press and out now. ‘Til Death is a trilogy with Entangled. Reaping Me Softly is another trilogy with Omnific Publishing. Impulse is currently on full submission with Entangled.
It was because I took a chance in writing something new that now all the novels I have written so far have found a home. This is what can happen to you too. *smiles at everyone*
Hide those skeptical faces, ladies and gents. Having more than one novel to offer definitely increases your chances of getting published. Once one door opens for one of your novels, the rest will follow.
There is nothing wrong with taking a chance on writing something new. It doesn’t mean your abandoning your first novel. It means you’re gaining experience so when you return to your first novel you are a whole different writer, a better writer, which could only benefits everyone involved.
So, campers, if I haven’t shocked you into a fainting swoon, switch genres. Explore the possibilities.
You don’t need to commit to just one novel. There are many, many more that you could write, that you could develop. In this commitment, it doesn’t have to be “‘til death do us part.†Open up your relationship. Cheating is very much encouraged because you never know what your new fling might bring.
I end this discussion with a parting thought…well, more like a parting hope: start your new novel today. I can’t repeat it enough.
Okay, that’s about it for my stay here at Author! Author! It’s been a blast sharing my experiences with all of you wonderful campers. *smiles and waves*
I would like to take this moment to thank Anne, not only for allowing me to crash the party today, but for all her guidance. Anne, your posts are invaluable to writers. I wouldn’t have achieved my goals without learning from you. And I don’t think I would have been published without the wonderful insights your blog has given me. Thank you, thank you, thank you! *tackle hugs*
When Kate Evangelista was told she had a knack for writing stories, she did the next best thing: entered medical school. After realizing she wasn’t going to be the next Doogie Howser, M.D., Kate wandered into the Literature department of her university and never looked back. Today, she is in possession of a piece of paper that says to the world she owns a Literature degree. To make matters worse, she took Master’s courses in creative writing.
In the end, she realized to be a writer, none of what she had mattered. What really mattered? Writing. Plain and simple, honest to God, sitting in front of her computer, writing. Today, she has four completed Young Adult novels.
Yes, it’s another dead-of-night post, but that seems appropriate for our next guest blogger, YA novelist Kate Evangelista. If her name seems familiar, well, it should: Kate is a longtime Author! Author! community member, a diligent commenter, and, as those of you who tuned in earlier this month may recall, a proud first-time author: her debut, Taste, was released in e-reader format by Crescent Moon Press earlier this month. Now, it’s also available in hard copy at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or, for those of you that prefer patronizing indie booksellers, Powell’s.
Today, by special request (okay, outright blandishment), Kate is here not only to contribute her wit and wisdom to our ongoing series on series writing; she’s also going to share her direct-from-the-front-lines insights on breaking into print in the hyper-competitive YA fantasy market. Can’t you feel the atmosphere crackling with excitement?
You should, because Kate is one of Author! Author!’s homegrown success stories. To apply the overused phrase properly for once, she was once standing (or, more probably, sitting) precisely where most of you fine people are right now — reading through these posts, writing her heart out, hoping someday to break into the biz.
Do I hear an it can be done?
Because Kate is one of our own, I’d like to take a rather unusual approach to giving you a sense of her authorial chops, one that’s more reflective of the progression from composition to published book. First, let’s take a gander at an excerpt from Taste in manuscript form, as we might have seen it if we were lucky enough to participate in the same critique group as today’s guest. As always, if you are having trouble making out the individual words, try holding down the COMMAND key and pressing + to enlarge the image.
Quite the intriguing YA voice, isn’t it? The tone is evocative, yet the prose is nicely spare. Here’s what some reader reviewers — including another longtime member of the Author! Author! community — had to say about Kate’s voice and story:
“Intriguing, mysterious, and a taste is not all you will get! Must read!” — K.M. Whittaker
“My new favorite novel.” — Wendy Russo
“Awesome-sauce! A delicious book to taste and devour.” — Book4Juliet
What is this story of which they speak so highly? Glad you asked. Here’s the publisher’s blurb for her book.
At Barinkoff Academy, there’s only one rule: no students on campus after curfew. Phoenix McKay soon finds out why when she is left behind at sunset. A group calling themselves night students threaten to taste her flesh until she is saved by a mysterious, alluring boy. With his pale skin, dark eyes, and mesmerizing voice, Demitri is both irresistible and impenetrable. He warns her to stay away from his dangerous world of flesh eaters. Unfortunately, the gorgeous and playful Luka has other plans.
When Phoenix is caught between her physical and her emotional attraction, she becomes the keeper of a deadly secret that will rock the foundations of an ancient civilization living beneath Barinkoff Academy. Phoenix doesn’t realize until it is too late that the closer she gets to both Demitri and Luka, the more she is plunging them all into a centuries-old feud.
Or, as the book trailer puts it (and rather well, too):
Rather fun to see her writing move through the stages, is it not? Often, when an aspiring writer is in the throes of nailing down her voice, it’s hard for her to see beyond the page in front of her — or to dream beyond holding the finished book in her hand. But a story goes through many, many more stages than that on its way to publication: the first baby steps toward showing one’s work to others, the incorporation of serious feedback, wrestling it into professional presentation format, working with an editor’s expectations, a blizzard of production decisions, and finally, unveiling it to the world.
Kate has been kind enough to join us under cover of dark to talk about all of these things — and why we should all keep the faith. Speak to your people, Kate — I’m sure they are listening intently.
Gather ‘round, campers. I’m Kate, and I will be your hostess for today. Yes, you too, Charles. *points at skeptical camper in the corner who refuses to join the group*
The awesome-sauce Anne has graciously allowed me to take over Author! Author! for this discussion, and I must say it is both a terrifying and exhilarating experience. Well, maybe more like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute and hoping Superman will catch you before you splat on the very hard ground below.
Now that we’ve all gathered, I would like to begin by asking, does anyone need a bathroom break? *looks at the campers gathered* No? *claps hands once* Well, buckle up, ladies and gents, it’s going to be a long one. Please feel free to raise your hand and ask a question at any point during this discussion. I welcome them, and as one of my professors used to say, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question.” Of course, many of my classmates got sent out of the room for testing this theory one too many times. I suggest we not do that here. *sly smile*
As you can all see from the title of this post, I am here to discuss commitment and when it’s time to cheat.
I see lots of skeptical faces in this group. But, Kate, I thought we were talking about writing today? One or many of you might be thinking.
Put away the pitchforks, folks. We are in fact discussing a few fundamentals of writing. And I’m very happy to help in any way that I can. Here comes the disclaimer: please bear in mind that I am basing what I’m sharing here with all of you based from experience. I am by far not an expert in the topic of writing and everything the profession/hobby/passion/insert-how-you-see-your-writing-here entails. It has just come to my attention that sometimes it’s easy to get attached to a single work for years without any inclinations of moving on.
Ah, I see a raised hand.
Kate, I love the story I have written. It has taken me years to write it and I will submit it over and over again, no matter how many years it takes until it finally finds a home. Are you saying I shouldn’t do that?
All good and valid points. Of course you should keep editing and submitting your work. After all, you never know when an agent or publisher would say: “Hey, there’s something here and I want to represent/publish this.”
I’m not here to dissuade any of you from improving your work. If fact, I admire your tenacity for continuing to submit. What I’m here for is to hopefully open your minds to a little sum’n sum’n on the side, if you know what I mean. *winks* Surely, as a writer, you have more than one story in you?
Yes, I see you, Tess. *points to the camper with raised hand*
Are you saying we should write more than one story at a time?
*smiles* Bingo! Gold star for Tess.
Writing is a commitment. But where is it set in stone that you should commit to just one story all your life? Surely there are a multitude of characters in your head begging for attention? But before we get into the gritty, I first want to define commitment.
According to Webster, a personal friend of mine, commitment is an instance of being obligated or emotionally impelled. There are three other definitions for commitment, but for this post, we’ll stick to the sense of obligation that comes with committing. Usually, commitment is used in the context of relationships.
In this case, we will see writing as a relationship between the writer and the work. There are many times when we become attached to the work that we no longer see the forest for the trees, or the bigger picture, as some of you might say.
Still with me? *scans the crowd and nods* Okay.
There is nothing wrong with writing more than one story. By all means, I encourage it. Your first work will not begrudge you spending your time on a new WIP (work in progress) now and again. Mistresses are allowed in this union. In fact, this is one of the only times I will give you permission to cheat.
I see your shocked faces. I know. *takes a deep breath* What I’m proposing is crazy.
Kate! *someone stands in indignation* I cannot leave the story I have worked so hard on to start something new! It’s sacrilege, I say.
*raises both hands to calm the increasingly agitated crowd* I understand your concern. Please, take a seat and give me a few more minutes of your time. I never said this discussion would be an easy one. If you step away from this thinking of the possibilities, then my job here is done. I ask for nothing more. Just an open mind and a patient ear would do.
Maybe it will be easier if I immerse this discussion within the context of my personal process as a writer. It would definitely be easier for me. Write what you know, they say.
So, huddle up and give me your eyeballs. Okay, not literally. How morbid would that be? I digress.
When I decided to take my writing seriously, I began with a high fantasy YA novel entitled Queen Rising, which during years of editing evolved into an urban fantasy YA novel entitled ‘Til Death (now a trilogy contracted with Entangled Publishing). I was young and naïve when I started writing Queen Rising. I knew nothing of the publishing business, much less about writing query letters and submitting to agents and publishers.
I didn’t even know the difficulties of breaking into the high fantasy genre. I was horrible at what I was doing, hiding behind the mask of thinking I was actually walking in the right direction. But that’s something I reserve to discuss with my future shrink.
Once I finished writing Queen Rising, I was eager to submit query letters. Note what I wrote in the paragraph above: I knew nothing. This lack of knowledge led to several rejections. Discouraged by these rejections, I thought to start something new. A new story that I’d been thinking about for quite some time.
Why did you let the discouragement of rejections stop you from submitting Queen Rising? you might ask.
Well, I was young and naïve, and very sensitive for my own good. Little did I know that this moment of feeling discouraged would lead me down a better path. One that would lead to three publishing contracts with three different publishers.
As I started writing my second novel (Lunar Heat eventually evolved into Taste, available now where books are sold. Yes, I am not ashamed to plug), I made sure to do my research. I joined several websites that cater to writers. I don’t feel the need to name them here because they are not what this post is about. And I’m sure you know which ones I’m referring to. I also stumbled upon a blog called Author! Author! You might know it. *laughs*
Armed with new knowledge and a new book, I began the submission process again. And this time, while I was waiting for responses, I went back to Queen Rising and began editing. The great thing about my time away from the text (writing something new) is that it allowed me to reenter its world with fresh eyes.
If you stick with one manuscript for years on end, you potentially lose your fresh eyes because you already know what happens in every twist and turn and forget there are other possibilities within the story, new avenues to take. Since I had written Lunar Heat, I discovered different ways to plot, found answers to character motivation, and learned to develop character further, to name a few, that I didn’t know about when I was writing Queen Rising.
With each new novel you write, not only are you increasing the chances of getting published, but you are also evolving as a writer. Each story allows you to be different. To stretch your creative muscles and explore different characters, situations, and writing styles. In this case, cheating actually makes you a better lover to your first.
If your first novel is in the third person point of view, why not try writing in the first person for the next novel?
But that’s not the way I write, Kate.
That’s the point of trying something new, stretching those writing muscles. If you don’t practice, like any skill, you can become stuck and start to stagnate. This is not good for you or your writing mental health. You owe it to your sanity to explore other avenues. And in the process become a better writer because of it.
If you’re still averse to cheating on your current manuscript, let’s take a different tack: during this road to publication, I realized the one thing about writing that writers don’t often mention: The waiting.
There’s a lot of waiting involved when submitting to critique partners, agents, and editors. During this submission process, tweaking your novel on submission can be counterproductive, because anything new added would not be to the knowledge of those who have your manuscript.
I would suggest that while waiting, start a new story. That WIP you’ve been itching to write. That character who’s been bugging you for his or her own novel.
Writing is never a waste of time. If it’s something you truly enjoy, then sticking to just one story is almost like disrespecting your talent. I know there are many published writers out there who only have one book out, but we can’t all be Harper Lee. You’re doing your craft a disservice if you restrain yourself from writing something new, because you never know who will say yes to your latest WIP.
Since you already have one novel under your belt, you have the experience needed to start a second one. The confidence of having completed a novel is invaluable when starting a new WIP.
Your growth as writer can depends on the number of novels or WIPs you’re willing to explore and create. When I broke up with my agent (long and horrible story), I had in my possession four completed YA novels with a fifth on the way. Lunar Heat became Taste. Queen Rising became ‘Til Death. Blind became Reaping Me Softly. And my fourth is called Impulse.
Believe it or not, I submitted all of them at the same time…to different people, of course. When one agent rejected one novel, I would submit the next, which helped me maximize the chances of receiving partial and full submission requests. Because of this method, Taste is with Crescent Moon Press and out now. ‘Til Death is a trilogy with Entangled. Reaping Me Softly is another trilogy with Omnific Publishing. Impulse is currently on full submission with Entangled.
It was because I took a chance in writing something new that now all the novels I have written so far have found a home. This is what can happen to you too. *smiles at everyone*
Hide those skeptical faces, ladies and gents. Having more than one novel to offer definitely increases your chances of getting published. Once one door opens for one of your novels, the rest will follow.
There is nothing wrong with taking a chance on writing something new. It doesn’t mean your abandoning your first novel. It means you’re gaining experience so when you return to your first novel you are a whole different writer, a better writer, which could only benefits everyone involved.
So, campers, if I haven’t shocked you into a fainting swoon, switch genres. Explore the possibilities.
You don’t need to commit to just one novel. There are many, many more that you could write, that you could develop. In this commitment, it doesn’t have to be “‘til death do us part.” Open up your relationship. Cheating is very much encouraged because you never know what your new fling might bring.
I end this discussion with a parting thought…well, more like a parting hope: start your new novel today. I can’t repeat it enough.
Okay, that’s about it for my stay here at Author! Author! It’s been a blast sharing my experiences with all of you wonderful campers. *smiles and waves*
I would like to take this moment to thank Anne, not only for allowing me to crash the party today, but for all her guidance. Anne, your posts are invaluable to writers. I wouldn’t have achieved my goals without learning from you. And I don’t think I would have been published without the wonderful insights your blog has given me. Thank you, thank you, thank you! *tackle hugs*
When Kate Evangelista was told she had a knack for writing stories, she did the next best thing: entered medical school. After realizing she wasn’t going to be the next Doogie Howser, M.D., Kate wandered into the Literature department of her university and never looked back. Today, she is in possession of a piece of paper that says to the world she owns a Literature degree. To make matters worse, she took Master’s courses in creative writing.
In the end, she realized to be a writer, none of what she had mattered. What really mattered? Writing. Plain and simple, honest to God, sitting in front of her computer, writing. Today, she has four completed Young Adult novels.
Welcome back to our ongoing Series Series! No, that’s not a typo, as those of you joining us late just thought very loudly indeed: all last weekend, through this week, and into next weekend, I have been, am, and shall continue to invite some of the hardest-working, most creatively-interesting authors I know to talk about the ins and outs of writing a series.
Today’s guest post is very dear to my community-minded heart: it comes to us from a longtime member of the Author! Author! community, the incisive and lyrical literary novelist, Michael Stutz, author of a beautifully-crafted 2011 debut Circuits of the Wind: A Legend of the Net Age, Volume I. In one of those delightful twists of publishing fate that has only become possible due to the explosion of the Internet and the concomitant diversification of publishing, he’s also recently become the proud author of his second literary novel, Circuits of the Wind: A Legend of the Net Age, Volume II. And I have it on pretty good authority that this third book, entitled — wait for it — Circuits of the Wind: A Legend of the Net Age, Volume III will be coming out this summer.
That’s right, those of you who just turned a bright, minty green with envy: it’s literary fiction; it’s a trilogy; all three parts are coming out essentially at once. You literary fiction aficionados are going to want to hear what he has to say, and pronto.
Especially if you happen to be one of the many, many literary novelists chafing against length restrictions. But perhaps I have already said too much.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how to set up proper suspense. What Michael has to say on the subject is so delightful — and, I suspect will be so helpfully inspiring (and possibly even inspiringly helpful) to those of you agonizing on how to meet the prevailing expectations for first novel length that I would not dream of spoiling the surprise.
Before I back swiftly off the stage and allow Michael to step to the podium, though, I’d like to introduce him via any writer’s best calling card, his writing. Here’s the publisher’s blurb for his first novel, available, appropriately enough for a story of the ‘Net era, not only in trade paper and as a Kindle download, but also in preview form.
VOLUME ONE of the CIRCUITS OF THE WIND trilogy follows a young Raymond from his ’70s childhood — and first gropings with the telephone — to the home computers and bulletin boards of the ’80s, where he leads a double life as a wanderer of the wires. But when even his virtual best friend unplugs, Raymond might have to leave it, too — because isn’t real life supposed to be offline?
Not your garden-variety literary fiction subject matter, is it? Possibly because Michael honed his craft across a variety of writing categories: starting out as a journalist, he’s also published steampunk short stories, memoir, and short-shorts. (Yes, yes, I know: all of you literary fiction writers are clamoring for insights into carrying a literary voice across venues. Levi Asher recently did such a nice interview on the subject with Michael on Literary Kicks, however, that I’m reluctant to tread the same ground here.)
I find the result a pretty potent blend — but again, as literary fiction is the book category for which it is most true that any sane person should let the writing speak for itself, I’m all for letting Michael get on with doing so toute suite. I’m not averse, however, to letting a few reviewers speak for him:
“A link to the entire world may blind you to the world. Circuits of the Wind is the story of Ray Valentine, who became hooked to the Internet in its infancy, and found his adulthood there. A coming of age tale of the early internet and the impact on an unsuspecting world, Circuits of the Wind provides a very human story set on a backdrop of technology few truly understand, very much recommended.”
“Lyrical and moving, Circuits of the Wind ranges from the nightmarishly detached to the passionately connected. Stutz understands that no matter how many hours we spend alone before our computer screens, we’re still what we’ve always been: desperate human beings longing for acclaim, achievement, friendship, and ultimately, love.”
Tony D’Souza, author of Whiteman, The Konkans, and Mule
“As is with the breed of fine American writers, the capacity to dream and hope is as much apart of the writer’s genetic makeup as it is of the literary tradition itself. The desire to reach the unfathomable has always been at the epicentre of the American dream, firmly passing away with the emergence of Modernism.
Michael Stutz introduces us to the Virtual American Dream, a world that exists solely through currents, circuits and waves, but is more alive and teeming with activity than you can ever imagine…Stutz writes with a grandness that exceeds the deadpan expectations that are associated with his generation of writers…The current his boat is against is now the electrical pulse that continues to evolve beyond our human control, showing how we are forever ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past.’”
That Fitzgerald reference is not entirely coincidental: Michael’s narrative rhythm, a strong heartbeat pulsing through the novel, actually is, in the overworked critical phrase, rather reminiscent of THE GREAT GATSBY. See if you can hear the music in the book’s opening lines:
To know the legend of a world that has been lost, first you must go back. To even catch a meagre glimpse at any cost, first you must go back. You have to take the bow of history, pull it back, project yourself onto an orbic stage with phantom cast; then you will be back.
Not hearing it yet? Okay, here’s the opening to the next chapter:
He knew the telephone early. Where there had once been indifference, when first he’d only noted just an olive-colored blemish on the wall, soon came recognition and finally even curiosity. In time the thing took on great significance.
Pretty distinctive, is it not? And that’s speaking as a jaded professional reader. (Which enables me to point out something that those of us that read for a living have often remarked about first novels: did you notice how many times the term first appeared in those two excerpts? That’s one of the charming, unconscious ways that new writers tend to announce without meaning to that they are approaching the literary world with fresh eyes.)
That driving rhythm and sophisticated narrative touch carry over into Volume II — as you may see for yourself in this preview, or, for those of you better able to commit, in trade paper or as a Kindle download. Or, if you’re in a hurry, you could just read the publisher’s blurb:
In VOLUME TWO of the CIRCUITS OF THE WIND trilogy, the net arrives all glimmering when Ray is starting college: it’s brighter, quicker, better than he ever knew. It’s the early 1990s — a time of golden youth and of joyriding on the growing Internet, where he rises as a leader of the global generation, the ones who saw it as the gilded portal to a fabulous new age everyone was about to enter. But he’s coasting aimlessly — and when his college friends move on and fashions change he sees how real life actually might not be working out.
With no further ado, then, please join me in welcoming one of our own made very good indeed. Take it away, Michael!
Conceiving, writing, refining, and seeing a book — or a series of them — through to publication is laborious and discouraging and hard. What I’ve learned is that if a part of that process isn’t working, you can’t let yourself lock up. What you can’t lose is time. You have to keep moving, try something different, and not be afraid to experiment. Experiments always yield results. They may not be the expected ones, they may be mystifying, or may even appear stupidly obvious, but there will be some kind of outcome — and they have a way of helping you find your way out when you are stuck.
It happened to me when Circuits of the Wind became a trilogy, because it was not originally planned to be one. Technically, it’s still a unified and single work. But as an undivided novel, yes, by current standards, it’s a bit long — I think it’s about 20,000 words longer than The Corrections. The length had been an issue, even as I knew that some books are double that size, or bigger, yet it seemed to be the way I do things; immediately before this I’d written a book five times as long.
Fortunately, there was a way out of this — it turned out to be a matter of possibility. Circuits of the Wind is being published serially in three volumes: Volume 1 came out late last year, Volume 2 has just been published now, and Volume 3 should arrive some time this summer.
Dividing the novel into multiple books for serial publication is not how I’d initially planned it. I hadn’t considered it even when I was urged to try it. I’d never thought of myself as a series author or an author of “trilogies” — and yet, thinking of it now, in some way the germ of it was always there: I’ve always felt that my work fits tightly together as a single legend, the books all interconnected. I like the idea of weaving all the characters and episodes and scenes together through my books, and I see all of my eventual stories as part of an interconnected world.
But the story of how Circuits of the Wind became a trilogy really begins late in the game, when I had already finished it and was trying to sell it.
I was living in a little bungalow at the time, tucked away in an obscure corner of the nation, far from most everything that was going on — this was the house I’d found myself in not long after escaping college, and despite the love that visitors would give it, telling me constantly how they thought it was so comforting and quaint, and with such a warm inviting rustic air, I didn’t like it at all. In fact I deplored it — the neutralizing 90s “updates” of the previous owner, the backwater location far away from the pulse of the world, the weird layout all constantly got to me.
(My feelings on this have since mellowed: that little town now feels inviting and homey when I’m passing through it, and the townies I knew from back in the day all have kids now but are still happily leading their wooded-lot lives with nights under the fluorescent yellows of the roadside bar, and I see that from the road that house does hold a kind of warmth and agrestic quaintness.)
But even back then I’d admit to anyone that the place had a few great benefits — the first being proximity to airport and highway.
What it also gave, and which was best of all, was a quiet place in which to work. The house was built at the edge of an enchanted wood, where the stone wall of an ancient footbridge lay sunken, broke-backed, into the ditch, and through the daylight hours there would be the varied song and call of many birds.
I had a workroom in the back corner of the house, tiny as a cell, with the same bare, pearl-white walls as the rest of the place. A window overlooked the woods. It had new carpet. This was the perfect place for me to spend my days in work.
The other propitious asset of the place was the neighbor, a bookish retired woman who spent her days reading, talking on the phone and gardening — but mostly reading. She was aware of my work and struggles.
When I’d begun sending out the completed manuscript, I told her about my new dilemma: according to all the rules, first novels “had to be” between about 80,000 and 120,000 words. Anything more was seriously pushing it even for an established novelist, and something nearly three times that length was not so much pushing it anymore as it was thrusting it off in jet-fueled insanity.
She spoke before I was finished with my breath: “Can’t you cut it up into a trilogy? Can’t you make a series out of it?”
I laughed, agreed that at least then I’d have three normal-sized books, but I admit that I didn’t consider it in the least. Trilogies? Series books? That’s genre fiction: bodice-rippers, medieval fantasies, dystopian sci-fi epics, vampire sagas, grisly detective thrillers. They all had their successful trilogies and series books, but my book didn’t fit in with any of those genres or worlds. I was writing something else, what I thought of as mainstream literary fiction — reality fiction — so I shut the door on the idea and didn’t allow myself to even consider it.
It seemed plain that I was right — the world of contemporary literary fiction, at least, didn’t have a place for plot-centered trilogies or series books. And at the time I was latching onto the “literary fiction” tag pretty hard, not out of any special community or bond but because I was attempting to create something outside of those other genres, something that wasn’t in vogue at all. I couldn’t point to another current book as a good concrete example of what I was trying to do; I just knew that it was exactly the kind of book that I desperately wanted to read.
I kept the faith with it, but it eventually turned out that my former neighbor was much more right than I had thought, and it took the help of another friend to see that and to make me realize what I had been doing wrong.
He’s an interesting character, an American slacker archetype: in his twenties he’d lived in New York and LA, dated the daughter of a famous Beat figure, hung out with punk bands and cult filmmakers, seemed to have connections to everyone, he always knew about everything. And then what he chose to do when settling down into his thirties was incredible: he moved to a groggy coastal resort town — one of those places with a picturesque little harbor, a walkable Main Street of tiny boutiques, miles of cottages surrounding it, and brochures on the interstate to let you know which exit to take so that you don’t miss it. He went out there and took a job as the night clerk at the tiny Dari Mart at the far edge of town.
He spends his time on the net, still learning about everything, posting on forums, and he’s always reading a book. Every time I find myself out there, I’ll step into the Dari Mart to pick something up and it ends up being four hours before I walk back out the door. I imagine how the store security cameras record us having these big literary conversations all night, trading references and links across the counter while meanwhile the cottagers are streaming in and out for their smokes and six packs.
One night over a year ago I was telling him about my then-current struggle with the book — how the length had been constantly a dealbreaker, and yet how on the other hand it was structured so symphonically that the entire movement of the book fit into a tight, planned scheme from the first word to the last.
He didn’t even blink. “It’s a trilogy.”
“What?”
“A trilogy. You’ve got a trilogy. You’ve got to cut it up into three separate books. It’s all there.”
As soon as he said that, I thought back to where I used to live, and remembered the advice of my former neighbor who had then just passed away, and I realized how completely dense I’d been: I’d been so adamant to say that no, of course this wasn’t genre work, it had to come out as one big fat literary doorstopper (with deckled edge and dust jacket, naturally, and no trade paperback at all), that I failed to see exactly where I could go, or what I was doing wrong.
The dust jacket and the deckled edge were not important — getting the story out and in front of appreciative readers was the important thing, and I’d lost sight of that. Once I had that realization, everything went easy. Or no — it was still hard, and the road was still long and lonesome, but I was finally moving forward once again.
After I became willing to cut the book into volumes, I’d also realized that many works of literature had been published like that, works that had even influenced me and were in the same vein I’d been writing in, and in fact were even — d’oh! — by some of my favorite authors!
The chapters of Circuits of the Wind had been arranged into titled sections called “books,” six total plus an epilogue, and I’d kept looking at them and not seeing the greater structure. I’d wondered with some dismay at first whether I’d have to remove these “books” and find some other points to divide it.
It actually turned out to be much simpler than that. In the process of “serializing” it, no changes were made to the manuscript at all — it was simply cut into three neat sections, but kept exactly as it had been written.
I saw that those “books” clustered into three main movements of the story — each even has its own voice and inflection, its own time granularity and theme. You have the first hunk, which is the hero’s childhood through to the end of high school, and then comes the quick chaotic rush of his college years, and finally it ends with the first several years in the work world; all of these periods in the hero’s life also coincide perfectly with major periods in the life of the net: the ancient days of home computers, the fever of the early UNIX-based net, and then the huge dialup dot-com explosion of the Web. The volumes reflect and complement each other perfectly, and if you omit the final epilogue they might even function as standalone works.
When I saw that, and realized what I had, the manuscript broke into three piles almost with the sudden force and guidance of an outside power: it was like the parting of the Red Sea. And then getting through it was a cakewalk.
MICHAEL STUTZ coined the phrase “net generation” while working as a reporter for Wired News — and in the early 1990s kicked off the Wikipedia era by being the first to take “open source” beyond software. He lives in Space Age Central, the former home of the NASA rocket scientist who planned the Apollo Project.
Before I introduce today’s installment in our guest blog series by hardworking authors about the ins and outs of moving smoothly from one book to the next, let me ask you: is this not one of the best, most mood-evocative book covers you have ever seen?
It is, for those of you reading this in some strange universe in which the Internet does not come with pictures, the cover art for the always-hilarious Bob Tarte‘s latest foray into memoir, Kitty Cornered. I’m going to have a lot to say in praise of Bob — for my money, one of the consistently funniest memoirists working in American English, and certainly one of the best documenters of the wackiness of life — but first, let’s talk about why this is such a tremendously good book cover.
Actually, scratch that, so to speak: before we slide into first, allow me to pause a moment to let you in on how I know for a fact that this is an unusually eye-catching book cover: my 13-year-old neighbor was absolutely riveted by it when he visited the other day. Not only did he instantly pounce upon the book and begin leafing through it — the moment he walked into my library, he made what can only be called a beeline for it.
Actually ran to get his I’m sorry to report grubby paws upon that book. As if it were — sorry, but it must be said — catnip.
Now that’s a cover that does its job, and then some. Kudos to the marketing and art departments at Algonquin Press for a magnificent achievement in a notoriously difficult medium.
Fair warning: if read this book in a public place, be prepared for total strangers to come running up to you and ask what on earth you’re reading. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. If I were planning into, say, a crowded writers’ conference anytime soon and wanted to make some friends fast, I would nonchalantly tote this book under my arm. (Again, well done, Algonquin.)
Why am I so impressed by this cover? Well, you try to come up with a photo that makes that winsome kitty appear intent upon beating Godzilla in a race to stomp on Tokyo. It provides a great twist on the expected. But that’s not the only reason I like it: it’s rare that a cover captures the spirit of the book within this well. That mad-eyed cat, combined with the offbeat lettering, tell the reader pretty plainly that this is going to be — and having read the book, I’m not too afraid of going out on an interpretive limb here — an uproarious memoir about living with a small battalion of marauding cats.
Which, as luck would have it, is precisely what the book is about. Check out the publisher’s blurb:
Bob Tarte had his first encounter with a cat when he was two and a half years old. He should have learned his lesson then, from Fluffy. But as he says, I listened to my heart instead, and that always leads to trouble.” In this tell-all of how the Tarte household grew from one recalcitrant cat to six — including a hard-to-manage stray named Frannie–Tarte confesses to allowing these interlopers to shape his and his wife’s life, from their dining habits to their sleeping arrangements to the placement and furriness of their furniture.
But more than that, Bob begins seeing Frannie and the other cats as unlikely instructors in the art of achieving contentment, even in the face of illness and injury. Bewitched by the unknowable nature of domesticated cats, he realizes that sometimes wildness and mystery are exactly what he needs.
With the winning humor and uncanny ability to capture the soul of the animal world that made Enslaved by Ducks a success, Tarte shows us that life with animals gives us a way out of our narrow human perspective to glimpse something larger, more enduring, and more grounded in the simplicities of love–and catnip.
Just between us, Bob has a pretty great eye for image composition himself. I would highly encourage those of you interested in marvelous critter pics to check out his Facebook page and/or follow me on Twitter @BobTarte; he posts new bird and beast photos there with charming regularity.
Of course, authors seldom have any direct say over their cover art — you knew that, right? — but they do often provide their author photos. Bob always has superlative ones. Check out his latest:
Bob with Maynard and Frannie
Doesn’t leave you in much doubt about the subject matter of his memoir, does it? Nor does it leave his platform in question: the guy obviously knows cats.
Again, that’s good promotional strategy: what’s more boring than the standard-issue, flatteringly-lit jacket photo? I say hear, hear for author photos that actually make the author look like he might have some real-world experience with his subject matter. And isn’t it a perennial source of astonishment how few author photos actually do?
But all of that is secondary to the purpose of this series: to blandish hardworking, successful authors into sharing their thoughts on something we literary types virtually never talk about amongst ourselves, the difficult task of switching gears — and sometimes authorial voices — between books. That’s a rather strange topic to avoid, from my perspective, because if one is going to be a working author, one presumably will need to tinker with one’s original voice to fit the next story.
Oh. you thought the Voice Fairy stole with little cat feet into writing studios across this fine land of ours, whacking established authors on their august noggins, and twittering, “There, my dear — write away!”
Obviously, that’s not happening — but let’s face it, writers new to writing humor often believe something almost as implausible. They (and, if the author does her job right, her readership) often labor under the mistaken impression that a funny voice pops out of a gifted storyteller as spontaneously as breathing. Or — sacre bleu! — that all a person that’s good at telling amusing anecdotes has to do is provide a transcript of what she might sound like in a bar, and poof! Hilarity ensues.
Cue the Humor Fairy. You’ll find her in the dressing room she shares with the Pathos Pixie, the Dialogue Dervish, and the Opening Grabber Genie.
Mind if I inject a little reality into that fantasy? Yes, a great humorous memoir voice will come across on the page as effortless, but a truly fine, memorable, and in Bob’s case simultaneously side-splitting and deeply honest voice doesn’t happen all by itself. It takes work. And throughout this series, I’m going to be asking authors to be generous and brave enough to talk about that often-difficult process.
I’m particularly delighted to be able to bring you Bob’s thoughts on the process. Not only is he a well-recognized master of spinning a yarn, but he also had to mine his creativity to fine-tune his already quite successful voice to a new breed of story.
And no, I’m not going to cut out the cat puns anytime soon, but thanks for asking.
As tempted as I am to let the cat out of the bag (don’t say I didn’t warn you), far be it from me to stand between a gifted storyteller and his audience. I suspect, though, that what follows will be even more instructive — and even more fun — if I give you a swift guided tour of Bob’s earlier work, on the off chance that some of you have not yet had the opportunity to become familiar with Bob’s work (or perchance missed his earlier guest blogs on developing a unique authorial voice for memoir and dealing with reader expectations).
When Bob Tarte left the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan for the country, he was thinking peace and quiet. He’d write his music reviews in the solitude of his rural home on the outskirts of everything.
Then he married Linda. She wanted a rabbit. How much trouble, he thought, could a bunny be?
Well, after the bunny chewed his way through the electrical wires and then hid inside the wall, Bob realized that he had been outwitted. But that was just the beginning. There were parrots, more rabbits, then ducks and African geese. The orphaned turkeys stranded on a nearby road. The abandoned starlings. The sad duck for sale for 25 cents.
Bob suddenly found himself constructing pens, cages, barriers, buying feed, clearing duck waste, spoonfeeding at mealtime. One day he realized that he no longer had a life of quiet serenity, but that he’d become a servant to a relentlessly demanding family: Stanley Sue, a gender-switching African grey parrot; Hector, a cantankerous shoulder-sitting Muscovy duck; Howard, an amorous ring-neck dove; and a motley crew of others. Somehow, against every instinct in him, Bob had unwittingly become their slave.
He read all the classic animal books — The Parrot Who Owns Me, The Dog who Rescues Cats, Arnie the Darling Starling, That Quail Robert, The Cat Who Came for Christmas — about the joys of animals, the touching moments. But none revealed what it was really like to live with an unruly menagerie.
Bob Tarte’s witty account reveals the truth of animal ownership: who really owns who, the complicated logistics of accommodating many species under one roof, the intricate routines that evolve, and ultimately, the distinct and insistent personalities of every animal in the house – and on its perimeter. Writing as someone who’s been ambushed by the way in which animals — even cranky ones — can wend their way into one’s heart, Bob Tarte is James Herriot by way of Bill Bryson.
Bob Tarte’s second book, Fowl Weather, returns us to the Michigan house where pandemonium is the governing principle, and where 39 animals rule the roost. But as things seem to spiral out of control, as his parents age and his mother’s grasp on reality loosens as she battles Alzheimer’s disease, Bob unexpectedly finds support from the gaggle of animals around him. They provide, in their irrational fashion, models for how to live.
It is their alien presences, their sense of humor, and their unpredictable behaviors that both drive Bob crazy and paradoxically return him to sanity. Whether it’s the knot-tying African grey parrot, the overweight cat who’s trained Bob to hold her water bowl just above the floor, or the duck who bests Bob in a shoving match, this is the menagerie, along with his endlessly optimistic wife Linda, that teaches him about the chaos that’s a necessary part of life.
No less demanding than the animals are the people who torment Bob and Linda. There’s the master gardener who steps on plants, the pet sitter applicant who never met an animal he didn’t want to butcher, and a woman Bob hasn’t seen since elementary school who suddenly butts into his life.
With the same biting humor and ability to capture the soul of the animal world that made Enslaved by Ducks such a rousing success, Bob Tarte shows us that life with animals gives us a way out of our small human perspectives to glimpse something larger, more enduring, and more wholly grounded in the simplicities of love — even across species lines.
With both of those intriguing premises firmly in mind, let’s see what words of wisdom on strategizing voice are wiggling on the end of the string that’s…I mean, let’s get on with stalking…wait — fireman, what’s that up in that nearby tree?
Oh, I give up. Please join me in welcoming back Bob Tarte!
I had big, fat, goose-size hopes for Enslaved by Ducks back in 2003. In my fantasies, the book would become such a huge honking success that I could spend the rest of my days humming cheerily as I effortlessly churned out sequels.
Unfortunately, I had overestimated the clout of readers who kept ducks as pets. The total population of duck owners in the US probably couldn’t fill a single theater in a shopping mall multiplex. In fact, they probably couldn’t fill a jumbo popcorn tub. So their enthusiasm only got me so far. Enslaved by Ducks sold steadily, but slowly. I wanted to do better.
For my second book, I decided that I would break out of the traditional pet book mold and vault into the ample lap of the general public. I didn’t take the ducks, geese, parrots, rabbits, cats, and other critters out of Fowl Weather. Instead I wrote about how they affected my life during a stressful period of time in which I lost my dad, my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and ghost cats haunted our basement. The result was a book that some folks thought was the funniest thing that they had ever read and others decided was mega-depressing.
NPR’s Nancy Pearl occupied the former camp, and thanks to her enthusiastic January 22, 2008 “Under the Radar” review on Morning Edition, Fowl Weather was briefly the sixty-third best selling book on all of Amazon. But after that it sunk like a rock tied to an anvil, never making it out of hardcover — even as Enslaved by Ducks gradually waddled into its thirteenth paperback printing in 2012.
So what went wrong with my sequel? Lots of things. Pushing the animals even slightly into the background wasn’t the smartest approach, since critters were what my readers wanted. And the subject matter was dark compared to Enslaved by Ducks. Because there were so many narrative threads and no single string strong enough to hang a catchy subtitle on, Fowl Weather also proved to be tricky to market. Death and Alzheimer’s weren’t suitable subjects for a humorous back cover blurb. And the non-waterfowl-owning segment of the population that had enjoyed Enslaved by Ducks presumably spotted the duckling on the cover of Fowl Weather and decided that it was a rerun.
In other words, Fowl Weather was simultaneously too different and too similar to my first book. It took me years to figure out how to follow it up, even though the solution lay right under my nose. It was as close as the nearest litter box.
It took me twice as long to write Kitty Cornered as it had to write either of my first two books. It didn’t start out as a cat book. I kept trying to find new ways to write about our birds and other pets. While the cats kept clawing their way into the narrative, I never even considered making them the subjects of a book, because I couldn’t shake loose of the image of myself as the duck guy. I couldn’t shake loose of any good ideas, either. In an attempt to add some verve to a sagging repertoire of avian anecdotes, I concocted an increasingly unlikely series of devices, culminating in — I’m embarrassed to admit — a goose egg crystal ball that revealed incidents from my pre-pet past. This didn’t work out any better than it sounds here.
Fortunately a skittish white-and-black stray cat showed up to rescue me from author’s oblivion. As soon as I decided to write about this complicated little being that we named Frannie, I felt as if a huge goose-size burden had been lifted from my shoulders. I incorporated the strongest aspects of my first two books into Kitty Cornered, keeping the sunny-to-partly-cloudy tone of Enslaved by Ducks and the overlapping narratives of Fowl Weather, all the time returning the focus to Frannie as I wrote about all six cats.
My re-invention as a cat guy seems to have worked. Kitty Cornered was on the independent bookstore indie bestseller list during its first two weeks on the shelves, and when it was just short of a month old, it went into a second printing. Naturally, I’m hoping that it continues to gain momentum. It sure would be great to be able to knock out a couple of sequels, you know?
Bob Tarteand his wife Linda live on the edge of a shoe-sucking swamp near the West Michigan village of Lowell. When not fending off mosquitoes during temperate months and chipping ice out of plastic wading pools in the depths of winter, Bob writes books about his pets.
Emmy Award-winning actress Patricia Heaton has taken on an option on the dramatic rights to Enslaved by Ducks. Fowl Weather was selected as an “Under The Radar” book for 2008 by Nancy Pearl on NPR’s Morning Edition.
Bob wrote the Technobeat world music review column for The Beat magazine from 1989 to 2009. He has also written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Miami New Times newspapers.
Bob also hosts a podcast for PetLifeRadio.com called What Were You Thinking? that’s supposedly about “exotic pets” as a general topic, but the show just as often turns into a chronicle of life with his own troublesome critters.
Bob and Linda currently serve the whims of parrots, ducks, geese, parakeets, a rabbit, doves, cats, and hens. They also raise and release orphan songbirds (including woodpeckers) for the Wildlife Rehab Center, Ltd. in Grand Rapids and have the scars to prove it.
Ah, the first long weekend of the warm months, a time perfect for relaxing with family, dawdling on a beach, and/or driving that 50+ miles that news organizations always seem so excited to report U.S. residents are planning on embarking upon this weekend every year. Or so I’m told. I wouldn’t know about it, really: writers tend to spend long weekends working on their books. If their kith and kin are out relaxing, beach-combing, or getting stuck in traffic, how would we know? We’re where we always are whenever we can grab a spare minute: wrestling with story, plot, and characterization.
God bless us all, every one.
In that spirit of laudable endeavor, I’ve planned a two-sided treat of all of you stalwart souls plugging away at your computers this weekend, rather than roasting something hefty on a gas-powered grill. Beginning today, I shall be posting a series of guest blogs by hardworking authors about the ins and outs of constructing a series — or making that always surprisingly tough transition from a first book to a second.
Emphasis on hardworking: in pulling together this series, I made a point of asking authors that had paid their dues, and then some. These are the folks that did everything right for years on end. In these days of ostensible overnight successes and surprise bestsellers by authors who have privately been working feverishly for ten or twenty years on craft, I think it’s vital for aspiring writers to understand that publishing is one of the few artistic endeavors where slow and steady not only wins the race in the long run, but tends to produce better books.
This pair is among the most dedicated mystery-writing teams on the planet — and lest you think that’s an exaggeration, let me hasten to add that they live in two different hemispheres, presenting collaboration challenges of which stateside co-authors can only have shuddering nightmares. Yet when I contacted Stan to begimplore ask him to contribute a post to this series on series-writing — and reached him the day before he and his collaborator were slated to complete their fourth novel — he not only instantly said yes, but asked how best to focus the post to assist those of you in the Author! Author! community currently writing series.
That’s what I like to see in an author: generosity, professionalism, and a strong understanding that being an author means being part of a writing community. One never stops paying dues to that community, admittedly, but the rewards are pretty delightful.
Something else I like to see in authors that this team has in spades, doubled and redoubled: a talent for keeping the reader constantly guessing. I’m not the only one to recognize this rare gift, either: their most recent release, Death of the Mantis (also available as an audio book at Audiobookstand), has been racking up accolades like Lincoln logs since its release last year. An entirely representative sample:
Shortlisted for Edgar — Best paperback original Shortlisted for A Minnesota Book Award — Genre Fiction Shortlisted for a Barry — Best paperback original The Strand Magazine 12 best mysteries of 2011. Library Journal top 10 mysteries for 2011
“Impossible to put down, this immensely readable third entry from (Michael Stanley) delivers the goods. Kubu’s painstaking detecting skills make him a sort of Hercule Poirot of the desert.”
“…a must-read for anyone who enjoys clever plotting, terrific writing, and a fascinating glimpse of today’s Africa.”
Charles Todd, New York Times bestselling mystery author
“…the best book yet in one of the best series going… I loved this book.”
Timothy Hallinan, author of The Queen of Patpong and A Nail Through the Heart
“…the best book I’ve read in a very long time…DEATH OF THE MANTIS is a fantastic read. Brilliant!”
Louise Penny, multiple award-winning author of the Inspector Gamache mysteries
Is this where I get to say I told you so? Seriously, in my humble, notoriously-critical-of-English-prose opinion, this is their best book so far. Take a gander at the publisher’s blurb:
Surrounded by a group of Bushmen, a ranger at a game reserve in the Kalahari is discovered at the bottom of a ravine. At first it is assumed that he fell, but it turns out that he was attacked. Although they claim to have chanced upon the injured man, the Bushmen are arrested.
Khumanego, Kubu’s Bushman school friend and now an advocate for the Bushman people, approaches Kubu and asks him to intervene. Khumanego claims the men are innocent and that their arrest is due to racist antagonism from the local police. Kubu investigates the case, resulting in the release of the suspects. But then another man is found murdered in a similar fashion — this time a visitor from neighboring Namibia. The body is discovered by another touring Namibian — an odd coincidence in Kubu’s view — motivating him to follow the clues to Namibia.
Then a third man is murdered and Kubu realizes that the key to the mystery must lie in the depths of the Kalahari itself. And there it is unraveled in a most unpleasant way…
One of the things I like best about Stan and Michael’s work — and in case I haven’t yet made it clear, there are many, many things I like about it — is the impeccable level of detail. These are the kings of show, don’t tell, and that, my friends, takes serious research in a series like this.
I felt some of you twitching at the mention of the r-word, but honestly, you would not believe how often our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, sees stories with mystery storylines (and, let’s face it, many, if not most, fiction storylines contain mysteries of one sort or another) that practically shout, “Hey, Millie, this manuscript needs a fact-checker!” Although experts abound in fiction, it’s actually rare that a protagonist wielding major credentials comes across as genuinely credible.
So says the lady with the Ph.D. Half the doctorate-sporting characters floating around the fictional ether make me cringe with embarrassment and make me want to mail my diploma back to the university. (Then I remember how very becoming my royal purple doctoral Renaissance cap is, and I resist. I worked hard to look that good.)
Speaking of looking good, I am also not the only professional reader that has noticed Stan and Michael’s incredibly nuanced attention to detail. Take a gander at some reviews by those who know stories about Africa far better than I do:
“The information on the Bushmen…is fascinating. Stanley does an exceedingly good job of presenting their plight and culture in an interesting and sympathetic manner. He also conveys the other characters, both black and white, in rich, multi-layered dimensions… a very readable novel that offers fascinating reflections on life in modern Botswana.”
The Canberra Times, November 5, 2011
“…DEATH OF THE MANTIS is a wonderful piece of work, a novel that is quietly perfect in every way…one of those rare books that transcends its rich genre. While there is a mystery at its core, it is also a study of the human condition, of the best and worst of people who do what they do for the best and worst of reasons. And Kubu is one of the best friends you will make between the pages of a book.”
Yes, those are the kinds of plaudits of which every writer dreams, but let me tell you, it did not come without a tremendous amount of persistent, hard work. These are authors that built their writer’s tool kits, just as you are doing now, and my, has it paid off.
Bear that in mind, please, whenever you find your faith in your writing teetering a bit. It can be done. But you’re going to have to pay your dues — and it’s going to be a lot of hard work.
Join me, please, in welcoming a team of authors that help show all of us why this endeavor is so worthwhile. Take it away, Stan and Michael!
When we started writing our first book in 2003, we had no idea that it was going to turn into a series. We actually had no idea that we would even finish the book. This was our first venture into writing fiction, so we were complete novices.
Our initial idea had formed about 15 years earlier when we and four friends were on a flying safari in Botswana. (Stanley is a private pilot) One evening we saw a pack of hyenas attack and kill a wildebeest. By morning there was nothing left except the horns and hooves. Yes, hyenas eat the bones as well as the flesh.
That evening, over a glass or two of wine, we had the idea that should we ever want to get rid of a body, we would leave it out for hyenas. No body, no case!
When we eventually decided to write a novel with that as the premise, our opening scene had a professor (of Ecology) and a game ranger stumbling upon a hyena just before it finished devouring the remains of a human being. The perfect murder was no longer perfect.
You may wonder why there was a professor with the game ranger. Well, we’d been told that we should write what we knew. We were both professors, so we planned to have our professor be our protagonist. However, even in third world countries like Botswana, where our mysteries are set, the police need to be involved. So we sent a Botswana Police detective, David “Kubu” Bengu, from the country’s capital, Gaborone, to the remote tourist camp where the remains of the body lay waiting. By the time Kubu arrived at the camp, he had taken over as the main character.
This was our first lesson — authors aren’t always in charge of the novels they write. Sometimes, the characters take over.
Researching the Okavango Delta in a local dugout, called a mokoro
It took us three years to finish our manuscript. We quite liked it, so decided to try to have it published. After considerable research, it became obvious that we needed an agent to represent us. After some of the usual disappointments, we eventually found an excellent agent in New York. To our complete surprise, she sold the book, titled A CARRION DEATH, to HarperCollins. To our greater surprise, she actually sold a two-book contract.
Yikes! That meant we had to write a second book with the same protagonist, Detective Kubu.
By the way, Kubu means hippopotamus in his native language, Setswana, the common language of Botswana. Hippos are large, normally placid, and the most dangerous mammals in Africa. So Kubu is a large man. He enjoys eating a great deal and loves good wine, when he can afford it. Surprisingly, he is also happily married. Like hippos, he is slow to anger, but when crossed is very dangerous.
Little did we realize what additional difficulties would surface as we started on the second book. Some became apparent as soon as we started plotting, others sneaked up on us at unexpected times during the writing. Here are some issues we discovered during the course of writing our second book, titled THE SECOND DEATH OF GOODLUCK TINUBU in North America, and A DEADLY TRADE elsewhere.
First, the characters from the first book who carried over to the second would have to be adequately introduced for readers who hadn’t read A CARRION DEATH. But not overly so, otherwise readers who had started with A CARRION DEATH may be bored with the repetition.
This wasn’t easy. For example, in A CARRION DEATH, Kubu recalls a time when he went into the desert with a Bushman friend of his, Khumanego. It was Khumanego who taught Kubu to see what was behind the obvious — that what appeared to be a boring patch of sand was actually a world teeming with interesting flora and fauna.
It was this experience that caused Kubu to want to become a detective. In the second book, we obviously needed to provide new readers with the same background, but it had to be done carefully so as not to put previous Kubu readers off. This is obviously true of all characters.
Establishing a sense of place
Second, even though the action in THE SECOND DEATH OF GOODLUCK TINUBU takes place only a few years after that in A CARRION DEATH, the characters needed to evolve. People who read a series in order want to see characters, particularly the protagonist, grow. They want to see the impact of important events on character and outlook. One thing we did in the second book was to put Kubu’s wife in danger, which allowed us to show a different side of Kubu’s normally placid character.
Third, and perhaps the most difficult, we had to remember all the habits, looks, interactions, etc., of the characters in the first book, so we didn’t contradict ourselves in the second. One of the unexpected revelations from our initial book tour was how well many readers knew A CARRION DEATH. We often felt that they knew more than we did — and they certainly remembered more of the detail than we did. So we realized that any slips would be caught immediately by our eagle-eyed readers.
We couldn’t afford to have Kubu look or behave fundamentally differently in the second book — the habits he had shown in the first book needed to carry over. Similarly he couldn’t interact differently with the people in his life — boss, wife, parents, and colleagues — except because of the ways he had matured. For example, because of the passage of time and because of his successes as a detective, the previously prickly relationship with his boss, Director Mabaku, has mellowed a little. Mabaku continues to be testy, but slivers of softness begin to show.
So, as we wrote THE SECOND DEATH OF GOODLUCK TINUBU, we found ourselves going back to A CARRION DEATH time and time again to ensure that we were getting things right.
A supporting character in Chobe National Park
Then we started the third book, DEATH OF THE MANTIS, and most of the issues discussed above grew in importance. How could we make Kubu, for example, interesting to those people who had already read two books about him? Obviously, he continues to have success as a detective, but we did two things differently.
First, he is now a father — unexpectedly, I might say. This provided us the chance to bring out a previously untapped aspect of his character, namely how to deal with pressures at home, as well as pressures at work. It also allowed us to explore some quirks in his character. Specifically, parts of his traditional upbringing clash with his self-image of being a liberated New Age man.
Second, through his own fault, blinded by assumptions, Kubu finds himself in a situation that nearly ends his life. How does he handle himself as he realizes he has been a fool and, as a consequence, is likely to die?
We also realized that it would have been a very good idea to build a biography of the main characters as we wrote. That would have made it easy to find out such things as how much does he weigh, how old is he, what schools did he go to, what did his parents do before retirement, when did he get married, and so on and so on? It would also help us to keep track of when things happened in our characters’ lives, particularly Kubu’s. When did the various cases take place? What was he doing in his private life at the time? How long has he been married? Has he aged chronologically in our books as time has passed?
As we write, we have to know or have access to this sort of information, otherwise we make mistakes. And one thing I can promise is that there will be numerous readers who will catch the errors.
Actually, in order to make our writing easier, we are seriously considering trying to find someone who would prepare a biography for us, perhaps as part of a university project or paper. We think it would be an interesting project.
On the fly in pursuit of new material at Tsodilo Hills
We have just finished writing the fourth Kubu mystery, tentatively called POTIONS OF DEATH. Again the same issues arise. How does one write a book that will be the fourth in a series for some and the first for others? I think we now have shifted the balance a little towards first-time readers — the book has to be compelling on its own.
We hope, of course, that new readers will like it enough that they will go back and read the earlier books. Readers of our earlier books, fortunately for us, really like Kubu and his family, and look forward to new ones. So far, we have had no pushback that later books are repetitious.
How did we maintain interest for series’ readers in POTIONS OF DEATH? Among other things, we introduced the first female detective into the Botswana Criminal Investigation Department — a woman who is driven to bring to justice witch doctors who sell potions made from body parts of people they have killed. Her obsession is fueled by the fact that one of her childhood friends was murdered for just such a reason.
In real life, this is something that happens in parts of Africa, and prosecutions are few and far between because the clients are usually influential politicians or businessmen and because of the very real fear amongst the police that any witch doctor under suspicion would cast a spell on them.
In some ways, we have concerns about how the whole notion of witch doctors will be received by Western readers. We hope the story is not pooh-poohed. The reality is, of course, that witch doctors are real. And many, if not most, people in Africa believe in them, to the extent that there are instances of people dying purely because they believed a spell had been put on them.
Bushman painting at Tsodilo
The final issue that we keep in mind is not to be formulaic. We think interest in a series will wane if readers feel that our new books are basically the same as earlier ones. Our way around this is to change the backstory for each book. A CARRION DEATH is a mystery built on the back-story of blood diamonds. The background of THE SECOND DEATH OF GOODLUCK TINUBU is the nasty civil war in Rhodesia in the 1970s and the impact it had on neighboring countries. DEATH OF THE MANTIS puts Kubu in the middle of the fight for survival of the traditional Bushman peoples of Botswana, and POTIONS OF DEATH is about witch doctors who kill people.
These different back-stories allow us to move the location of the mysteries to different parts of Botswana, as well as providing totally different motivations and environments for the characters and stories.
We are about to start the fifth Detective Kubu mystery. This time, Kubu will be involved in the unpleasant results of a cultural clash between the local Batswana people and Chinese laborers who have been brought in to build paved roads. This is another issue of contemporary significance. Throughout Africa, the Chinese are bartering construction projects for access to Africa’s resource riches — oil, iron, coal, gold, diamonds, platinum, etc. Almost everywhere you travel in Africa today, you will see Chinese people. Our observation is that they do not integrate well or easily with local communities — a perfect back-story for murder and mayhem.
Tim and Vaughn Pearson with Nosipho Qolo showing off Kubu t-shirts
Our last comment about writing a series concerns the protagonist. He or she has to be able to keep readers’ attention over many books. If, after your first book, your main character hasn’t garnered your readers’ affection, or at least attention, you may find a series difficult to sustain. Think about Agatha Christie’s Hercules Poirot, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus, Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, etc. It is almost always the case that it is these characters that make people continue reading the series, not the plots or stories, although these may also be appealing.
We lucked into Kubu — our readers have a real passion for him and can’t wait to find out about his next exploits, about his family life, and whether any of his diets will ever be successful. Please visit our website at http://www.detectivekubu.com to find out more about Kubu and his colleagues. You can also sign up for a newsletter we send out a few times a year.
By the way, if you are going to write a series, a website is an excellent way to keep faithful readers up to date with what is happening to their favorite character. Browse through our site to see how we provide additional information about ourselves, about upcoming books and events, as well as photos and stories related to our books.
We wish you good luck (which is usually needed) and good writing.
Both are retired professors who have worked in academia and business. They were both born in South Africa. Michael is a mathematician, specializing in geological remote sensing. He lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is a tournament bridge player. Stanley is an educational psychologist, specializing in the application of computers to teaching and learning, and a pilot. He splits his time between Knysna, South Africa, and Minneapolis in the United States. He is an avid golfer.
Their first novel, A CARRION DEATH, featuring Detective David “Kubu” Bengu, was published in 2008 and received critical acclaim. The Los Angeles Times listed it as one of its top ten crime novels of 2008. It is a nominee for the Minnesota Book Award, Strand Magazine’s Critics Award for Best First Novel, and Mystery Readers International Macavity Award for Best First Novel.
Has the screen gone all wavy yet? Good. One prefers one’s time travel properly filmic.
As those of you with well-equipped time machines, excellent memories, and/or the curiosity to click on the link to that long-ago post may recall, when I first announced this interesting marketing move, we had a little chat about how much larger a role your garden-variety novelist is expected to play in the marketing of his own book than — how can I put this without exaggeration? — at any point in the last two hundred years. While it long been true that nonfiction and self-published authors were often their own best marketing asset, the notion that book-hawking is an integral part of the fiction-writer’s job description is a relatively new one.
Yes, yes, I hear you groaning, novelists; I know that the prospect strikes many of you as horrifying. “But I don’t know anything about book promotion!” you mewl piteously, and who could blame you? “Isn’t that what my future publisher’s marketing department is for?”
Of course it is, but increasingly, writers of every stripe are expected (there’s that oppressive word again) to take the time — and make the effort — to reach out to potential readers. And honestly, it’s in every author’s interest to do so: as many a writer was shocked to learn from established historical fiction author Patricia O’Brien’s feeling the need to market her sixth novel under a pen name, because her previous novel, the well-reviewed HARRIET AND ISABELLA had not sold well enough, publishers and booksellers alike now have instant access to past sales numbers. These are not the good old days, when elegant ladies in hats and gentlemen in spats glanced over a small-but-serious author’s seventh manuscript and said, “Oh, I like her writing. Maybe this is the book that will make the public notice her at last; she certainly deserves it.”
Does the deathly hush that just fell over the cosmos indicate that some of you had been blissfully unaware that the publishing industry no longer works that way?
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but they can’t afford it. As we have been discussing, publishing houses are seldom non-profit endeavors selflessly devoted to the discovery and promotion of new voices, any more than agencies are. Actually, it’s rather hard to blame them: in any given year, fiction by first-time authors seldom rises above about 4% of sales. And a startlingly high percentage of those don’t make back their advances.
If you are wobbling on your feet, fighting off a swoon because it just hit you what that last factoid might mean for all of those struggling first-time authors trying to sell their second books, you are in fact grasping the situation. In an industry where a first literary fiction release’s selling 4,000 copies used to be considered to have done pretty well, it’s now pretty standard for editors to say — brace yourselves — “Oh, yes, I really enjoyed his first novel, but it didn’t even break the 10,000-copy mark! I’m afraid we’d have a hard time selling his second.”
Or third. Or tenth. The concept of building up a small but devoted readership over the course of several books has lost its currency, at least temporarily.
Do you wonder, then, that as often as I can, I like to place in front of the Author! Author! community new and innovative ideas for writers to promote their own work?
I have been particularly after Mary to share her experiences, as the 99-cent electronic release has been lauded recently as the new frontier of authorial book promotion. It certainly holds a lot of advantages for the reader: for a laughably small investment, a reader can now sample an extraordinary array of different authors’ work. And while I have yet to see an electronic reader that doesn’t resent getting accidentally buried in the sand at the beach or being dropped into the bathtub when the reader’s hands get soapy — oh, you’ve never had either happen with a bound book? — one can’t deny that this method of sampling saves shelf space.
Okay, you caught me: I’m a hard-copy girl, and I suspect that I always shall be. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a good book-marketing concept when I see one.
Before I begin lobbying for Mary’s insights on the subject, however, let me share a bit more about the book in question. As those of you who were excited by Mary’s guest post about writing on verboten topics may recall, COURTING KATHLEEN HANNIGAN is a book that flies in the face of prevailing notions of what goes on in law firms — including those behind-the-scenes thrillers written by authors who, like this one, have spent years in the trenches. Unlike some of those glossier works, though, this reads like the real thing because it is. Here’s the blurb, for your comparing-and-contrasting pleasure with the trailer above:
Courting Kathleen Hannigan tells the story of an ambitious woman lawyer, one of the first to join a male-dominated national law firm in the late seventies, whose rise to the top is threatened by a sex discrimination suit brought against the firm by a junior woman lawyer who is passed over for partnership because she doesn’t wear make-up or jewelry. When Kathleen Hannigan is called to testify, she is faced with a choice between her feminist principles and her own career success.
Hey, I don’t provide blurbs for just any novel. Nor do I blandish every author to share her wisdom and experience with you fine people — and believe me, I went on a blandishing rampage for this one. Let’s take a peek at the results.
Anne: My pleasure. You’ve had a such an interesting history with this novel — it really flies in the face of that ridiculous truism about a book’s success being best measured in the first three weeks after its release. Would you mind giving us an overview?
Mary: I self-published CKH, my first novel, in the fall of 2007, both in paperback and electronically, and I’ve hand-sold about fifteen hundred paper copies in the intervening years.
Anne: Which is many, many times the average sales for a self-published book. Don’t mind that array of thumping sounds; it’s just the multitudes of writers contemplating self-publishing who were not aware of that particular sales trend.
So what prompted you to try lowering the price tag on the electronic version? Most authors would be looking to maximize their shares of the cover price, but you steered in the opposite direction.
Mary: It’s a gimmick, to be sure. I’d like to charge more. A penny is an insult for a paper copy, even for a used one. But once the paperback has run its course (and depleted my marketing energies, which, frankly, I’d rather spend writing), if 99 cents gets my work out there and creates a demand for more, I’m OK with that. Hopefully the next one will be more lucrative.
Anne: From your mouth to the Muses’ ears. How have the sales been going at the lower price?
Mary: It turns out that 99 cents isn’t a magic rocket to the top of the sales chart. I have no idea, frankly, what great confluence of luck, karma, lightening bolts and other phenomena are required to get the kind of success Darcie enjoyed.
Anne: I’m sure a lot of people have been wondering what her secret was. Care to venture any guesses?
Mary: From what the Journal reported, the key seemed to be her listing on mention on a site called Ereader News Today, which posts tips for Kindle readers. By the time the Journal reported her story, she’d sold 419,000 copies.
Anne: Criminy! Did you camp out on the site’s virtual doorstep?
Mary: Sorry, Anne. I didn’t land a review on Ereader News Today. It’s really unclear to me how to make that happen, unless I make a book available for “free.”
Anne: Those quotation marks are telling me that I probably don’t understand what free means in this context.
Mary: Apparently, you can offer an ebook “free” for a short period, and they may feature it, at their discretion. Seems a little chicken and eggy to me: I’d offer it free if I knew it was going to be featured. Otherwise, aren’t I just shooting my self in my other foot, the one I didn’t shoot by reducing the price to 99 cents in the first place?
Anne: Maybe they habitually work with authors with several extra feet. What would you say you have learned about marketing from this experience?
Mary: 99 cents hardly reflects an author’s efforts, but right now, I’m in this for the pleasure I get out of writing and out of being read. In due course, of course, I’d like to collect some royalty checks.
Anne: Again, I would encourage the Muses to pay attention. You’re an unusually prolific writer, too, are you not?
Mary: I have nine more novels and a memoir in my shopping bag, and my agent is still trying to figure out how to sell what she calls “quiet” literary fiction.
Anne: This is me holding my tongue. Watch me not saying anything.
Mary: Yeah, I know — you don’t think of me as “quiet,” but I don’t have a lot of graphic sex, gory crimes, or end-of-the-world chaos. So, my niche is the kind of fiction book clubs might want to read in order to discuss real women facing real-life issues.
Anne: Good fiction aimed at thoughtful readers, in other words. There was a day when that would have been considered mainstream fiction, not literary. I get the categorization, though: your complex characters face extremely complex problems, and there are no easy answers.
Mary: In COURTING KATHLEEN HANNIGAN, both the “good” and the “evil” women characters encounter the glass ceiling and encounter the tricky dynamic between their personal ambition and the cause of women’s equality in the workplace.
Anne: I would think many readers would identify with that. I’ve noticed that, contrary to widespread expectation, the e-book market actually isn’t that different from the regular book market: the same books seem to end up on both types of bestseller lists, generally speaking, and the same demographic that habitually buys the most fiction in bookstore — women between 35 and 60 — seem to be turning out to be the most faithful repeat e-book buyers, too. Does the 99 cent marketing strategy speak to that group of book-buyers?
Mary: Truth is, the 99 cent effort by itself doesn’t do it. I did buy a couple of ads on GoodReads, and even a feature on Publishers Lunch Deluxe, but I didn’t become the next Darcie Chan.
Anne: Dare I ask what that meant in terms of actual sales of the e-book?
Mary: I’d love to share the actual numbers I sold on Kindle, both before and after 99 cents. But my publishing consultant, who set this all up for me, has had a devil of a time getting the info out of Amazon.
Anne: That’s interesting. It must be strange not to know.
Mary: If we ever unlock the stats, we’ll gladly share them. I don’t expect them to be in Darcie’s range.
Still, I believe that electronic publication is the future, and the industry needs to find a way to monetize it. The music industry figured it out. Surely, the publishing industry can do the same.
Anne: I’m sure we’re all curious about how the technical details will be worked out. And the legalities.
Mary: Not sure what effect the Justice Department’s suit against Apple et al will have on ultimate ebook pricing, but I think that if I had a third party publisher, even in ebook format, I’d do better—both in terms of number of readers and in dollars earned—than the 99 cent gambit.
Anne: I’ll be very, very curious to see the sales stats. But what’s the next strategy? Should we all be rushing out to buy it while 99 cents is still the price?
Mary: One of these days I just might go the luxury goods model, and make it so expensive, everyone will want the status of owning their very own copy!
Anne: Actually, I know quite a few authors who have deliberately chosen that route: severely limited editions, extremely high-end binding. Most of them already enjoyed some celebrity or cult status, though, so their publishers had a pretty clear idea of which readers would be interested in a collector’s edition.
Thanks for sharing your insights with us, Mary. And as always, everybody, keep up the good work!
As promised, after so many weeks of concentrating on the practicalities of pitching and submission, I have a treat for you today — a guest post by self-publishing author, blogger, and all-around fab guy D. Andrew McChesney, better known around Author! Author! as thoughtful and incisive inveterate commenter Dave. He’s going to be talking about a matter I know has been dogging many members of our little community’s thoughts in the dead of night throughout these tough, tough days for first-time authors: how does a writer know when it’s time to self-publish?
I’m hoping it will engender some intriguing discussion. Before I introduce Dave and his book in more detail, though, allow me to say: wow, I’ve been stunned by the enthusiastic response to the Author! Author! Perfect Pitch Competition. The deadline isn’t until the end of the month (Friday, September 30 at midnight in your time zone, to be exact), but I guess the prospect of winning a free Mini Consult on one’s opening pages and marketing materials is a pretty strong incentive. I’m also going to be posting and critiquing the winners’ and placers’ keynotes, Hollywood hooks, elevator speeches, and formal pitches in this very forum in October, so we can talk about what does and does not work in formats that brief.
So keep those entries rolling in, everyone. I really am getting a kick out of seeing what my readers have been writing lately.
Did it seem as though my enthusiasm led me to digress for a moment? Actually, I wasn’t: if Dave’s name seems familiar to those of you who have been hanging out here for a while, but not haunting the comments, it’s probably because he took second place for adult fiction in last year’s Great First Page Made Even Better Competition and first place in the essay category of 2009′s Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence. He’s taken the time to amass quite a bit of what I like to call Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy.
In fact, I believe he commented on the post in which I first introduced the ECQLC concept. If memory serves, he made the first comment, even. But that’s not too surprising, as Dave was the very first commenter on Author! Author!, period, way back in the days when I was the Resident Writer for the Organization that Shall Not Be Named. (One of the reasons it shall not be named: despite my spending a year advocating vigorously for readers’ comments to be visible to everyone on that site — technically, the difference between a blog and a column — the organization refused.)
So it’s not too much of a stretch to say that Dave was the first member of the Author! Author! community; he’s certainly one of the thoughtful commenters who has helped it grow. (The How To… section of the archives was his idea, for instance.) He’s also, as a long-time member and current president of the Spokane Authors and Self-Publishers done more than his share to help other aspiring writers.
When he told me that he had decided to take his naval fantasy novel, Beyond the Ocean’s Edge, down the self-publishing path, then, I knew it had not been a light decision. This is a conscientious writer, one who had undoubtedly paid his dues — and had devoted the time to do something that surprisingly few writers considering self-publication do, talk with a wide array of authors who have already taken the self-publishing plunge.
Who better, then, to ask to talk about what factors went into that decision, as well as what he had learned? And who better to entice those of you who are considering or have already decided to self-publish into sharing your experiences, thoughts, hopes, and fears, as well as a little practical advice for those who will tread this relatively less-traveled path behind you?
My, that was a cumbersome sentence, but you get my drift. I want to engender some serious discussion of a topic that aspiring writers too seldom discuss in depth amongst themselves.
Those of you whose eyebrows hit your hairlines upon reading naval fantasy may already have figured out the other reason I thought Dave’s literary decisions might be interesting for us all to consider: this was definitely a hard book to categorize. Fantasy novels set on ships are not unheard-of, of course, but it’s hardly a well-established category. Here’s the blurb:
Hotchkiss continued on. “Ed! You didn’t see it?” The use of his captain’s first name on deck attested to the first lieutenant’s growing apprehension and maddening confusion.
“See what, Isaac, my old friend?” Pierce recognized his comrade’s state of mind and did not correct his lapse of quarterdeck etiquette. Clearly, a more personal and comfortable approach was needed.
“The stars! The stars, sir! We weren’t just looking up at ‘em. We were amongst them. There was the sea, and then there wasn’t. An’ the stars were below us as well! And we were there, right among them, like we were the stars themselves, or the moon, or. . .”
“I’m sure you saw what you’ve described. Unfortunately, I chanced not to see it, although I have had a strange feeling of timelessness.”
Is it possible to sail beyond the ocean’s edge to another world? In 1802, Royal Navy Lieutenant Edward Pierce is ashore on half-pay because of the Peace of Amiens. He fortunately gains command of a vessel searching for a lost, legendary island. When the island is found, Pierce and his shipmates discover that it exists in an entirely different but similar world. Exploring the seas around Stone Island, HMS Island Expedition sails headlong into an arena of mistaken identities, violent naval battles, strange truces, dangerous liaisons, international intrigue, superstition, and ancient prophecies.
Quick: on which shelf would you expect to find this in a brick-and-mortar bookstore? Many a Millicent, I’m sure, has scratched her head sore over that particular problem.
So let’s see what goes into the thought process of a writer professional enough to learn the ropes of traditional publishing — and then decided not to climb them. Take it away, Dave!
If I seem familiar to followers of Anne’s blog, I have it on good authority that I was the first to post a question in the days before Author! Author! existed as it does now. Over the years, the tone of my remarks should indicate that I sought publication by the traditional route. Why then have I recently charted a new course towards self-publishing?
When I finished my initial draft and realized that I might have something others would like to read, I knew nothing about getting published. Boxing up the manuscript, sending it to a publisher, and saying, “here’s my book, print it and send me the money!” didn’t seem to be the way to go about it. Serious about getting my work on the market, I bought the appropriately named Idiot’s Guide to Getting Published. I learned about literary agents, query letters and pitches. I discovered acquisition editors and editorial boards. I found that manuscripts had to survive a long road of competition and a process of elimination on the way to becoming published books. . Dangerously armed with a little knowledge, I set out to become a published author, only to discover the trail is longer, steeper, and more crooked than it seems. Writers groups, either informal gatherings or large regional organizations, smoothed many of the bumps. Online advice columns such as Author! Author! straightened the curves as I came to better understand the publishing industry. My query letters improved and I saw positive results as I sent more out. Increasingly those queries resulted in a request for pages or occasionally the entire manuscript. I attended conferences, soaked up inspiration from guest speakers, and pitched my book to attending agents.
Looking back, could I have been more diligent in my querying? There is always that unanswered question of the next query being the one that would have landed me an agent. Still, I sent out a mass of query letters over the years, even while narrowing my search parameters for agents who would possibly be interested. Of those agents who represented work most like mine, many were no longer taking on new writers. While I didn’t send as many queries or pitch as often as some, I sent enough to realize that traditional publication may not be meant for me.
I looked at independent presses, having heard that many leaned more towards the writing itself instead of the work’s money making potential. Yet a great many of them seemed to focus on writers from a certain geographic area or in specific genres. I did find a few that might be a fit for my work, and a couple even expressed a return interest. As luck would have it, nothing came about as a result of those submissions either.
I’ve been a member of Spokane Authors and Self-Publishers since first setting out on the road to publication. Primarily I joined to associate with other writers and had no thought of self-publishing. Bad things about self-publishing still emanated from many in the traditional industry. Writers opted to self-publish because their work was not good enough to be published in the regular way. Self-publishers refused to learn and work within the industry.
Having read several self-published books, I strongly assert the first assumption is wrong. Dealing with the industry for several years to no avail, I believe the second idea is not factual either.
Still, self-publishing has drawbacks, including the writer paying to be published. Being (among other things) of Scottish ancestry, I am stereotypically cheap. I’d much rather see a big publisher pay to have my book printed and distributed than have the funds come out of my pocket. I did not warm to boxes of books cluttering up my basement and carting cartons around in my car trying to sell them at flea markets and swap meets.
But the face of self-publishing is changing with time. Recently, several firms have come into being which remove many of the traditional roadblocks associated with self-publishing.
In every unpublished writer’s life, a time comes when having one’s book out there, on the market, is more important than how it got there. As 2011 began, I came as close to making a New Year’s Resolution as I ever have. Come the Fourth of July, if I did not have a valid offer of representation or any express interest in publishing my book, I would do it myself. While I could have started to self-publish then, I wanted to allow an agent and an independent publisher looking at the work time to respond. I had also just queried another independent publisher whose submission window had just opened up and wanted time to see what might develop.
As Independence Day approached, I had not had any response from the agent and first independent publisher. Once fulfilling a request for pages from the second publisher, I had had no further correspondence. Thus, on the Fourth of July, I determined that I would indeed self-publish Beyond the Ocean’s Edge. A week later, I signed up with a self–publishing service company.
The next time Anne invites me to visit Author! Author! I’ll talk about some of the other factors that led to the decision to self-publish. Somewhat entangled therein is the process of figuring out which self-publishing service company I would choose to work with. I might also detail the process involved since signing on with that company and the progress we have made to this point.
Following a US Navy career, D. Andrew McChesney continues a passionate interest in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century naval history. Long fascinated with USS Constitution, Dave was aboard “Old Ironsides” for a turn-around cruise in Boston Harbor. Touring HMS Victory in Portsmouth, England provides further inspiration as he crafts the Stone Island Sea Stories, a naval adventure series having fantasy elements. Beyond the Ocean’s Edge and Sailing Dangerous Waters are complete, while work continues on Darnahsian Pirates.
Dave spent his early childhood on a homestead forty-one miles outside Fairbanks, Alaska. In the lower forty-eight, television series such as Walt Disney’s The Swamp Fox kindled an interest in history ranging from the American Revolution through the War of 1812. Fascination with the later conflict grew when his grandfather gave him a drawing of Constitution made during the frigate’s visit to Puget Sound in the 1930s. Discovery of C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower in high school solidified Dave’s interest in that era’s naval history.
He edits the Rear Engine Review, the Inland Northwest Corvair Club’s monthly newsletter. His essay, Tennis Balls and Broadsides won first place in the initial Author! Author! Periodic Awards for Expressive Excellence, and was published in Gray Dog Press’ Spoke Write. Sailing Dangerous Waters garnered second place in the Author! Author! Great First Pages Contest. Dave is President of Spokane Authors and Self Publishers (SASP), and a member of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association (PNWA).
He resides in Spokane, Washington with his wife Eva, daughter Jessica, a Quaker Parrot named He-lo, a corn snake called Teako, a 1962 Corvair Rampside pickup known as Tim, and a 1965 Corvair Monza coupe identified as Ralph. Patiently waiting to win the lotto or for his book(s) to become best sellers, Dave works in janitorial services with a local private club.
Had you noticed that I had abruptly stopped giving you homework, campers? That’s not entirely coincidental: I figure that you already have distractions enough. I’m quite certain that many, if not most, of the Author! Author! community is spending this long holiday weekend (a) prepping queries to send out after Labor Day, (b) prepping requested materials to send out after Labor Day, (c) writing something fabulous and fresh, (d) revising an existing manuscript so it becomes fabulous and fresh, and/or (e) thinking, “Gee, I really ought to be doing (a) (b), (c), and/or (d) today, but the barbecue is already fired up.”
In order to amuse, enlighten, and inform those of you who are tuning in this weekend, I have blandished some very fine authors into sharing a little just-amongst-us literary advice. Yesterday, we talked about fiction. Today, we’re going to concentrate up memoir.
And not just the oft-discussed conundrum how to work up the nerve to be completely transparent on the page — no mean feat in itself — but a burning topic that I do not believe is discussed nearly enough amongst writers: narrative voice in memoir.
To succeed in grabbing the reader, a memoir’s narrative voice must also be a likable and lyrical — wait for it — narrative voice.
Was that loud BOING that just reverberated around the cosmos the sound of memoirists’ jaws bouncing off the floor? I’m not entirely astonished: in the throes of the hugely challenging task of writing one’s own life, the emotional strain of reliving events vividly enough to write about them well can easily trump the imperative to craft lovely sentences. Or even to depict yourself and your environs juicily enough for a reader to long to follow you through 300+ pages.
Let’s face it, there’s more to composing compelling memoir than having had an interesting life and being able to make it sound interesting on the page. There’s even more to it than sounding like yourself.
In order to tackle this recalcitrant problem, I tracked down one of my all-time favorite memoirists, the inimitable and hilarious Bob Tarte, author of the brilliant pet memoirs ENSLAVED BY DUCKS and FOWL WEATHER, and lobbied shamelessly for him to share his insights with the Author! Author! community. Page for page, Bob has one of the strongest memoir voices I’ve ever seen: humorous, honest, and absolutely original.
I’ve said it before, and I shall no doubt say it again: anyone seriously interested in writing humorous memoir should take a gander (so to speak) at his seemingly effortless wit. In case those of you who are not comedy writers are wondering why: there’s nothing more difficult than appearing to be spontaneously funny; it takes careful, meticulous craft.
A great comic premise isn’t a bad idea, either. Here’s the publisher’s blurb for ENSLAVED BY DUCKS:
Enslaved By Ducks How One Man Went from Head of the Household to Bottom of the Pecking Order
When Bob Tarte left the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan for the country, he was thinking peace and quiet. He’d write his music reviews in the solitude of his rural home on the outskirts of everything.
Then he married Linda. She wanted a rabbit. How much trouble, he thought, could a bunny be?
Well, after the bunny chewed his way through the electrical wires and then hid inside the wall, Bob realized that he had been outwitted. But that was just the beginning. There were parrots, more rabbits, then ducks and African geese. The orphaned turkeys stranded on a nearby road. The abandoned starlings. The sad duck for sale for 25 cents.
Bob suddenly found himself constructing pens, cages, barriers, buying feed, clearing duck waste, spoonfeeding at mealtime. One day he realized that he no longer had a life of quiet serenity, but that he’d become a servant to a relentlessly demanding family: Stanley Sue, a gender-switching African grey parrot; Hector, a cantankerous shoulder-sitting Muscovy duck; Howard, an amorous ring-neck dove; and a motley crew of others. Somehow, against every instinct in him, Bob had unwittingly become their slave.
He read all the classic animal books — The Parrot Who Owns Me, The Dog who Rescues Cats, Arnie the Darling Starling, That Quail Robert, The Cat Who Came for Christmas — about the joys of animals, the touching moments. But none revealed what it was really like to live with an unruly menagerie.
Bob Tarte’s witty account reveals the truth of animal ownership: who really owns who, the complicated logistics of accommodating many species under one roof, the intricate routines that evolve, and ultimately, the distinct and insistent personalities of every animal in the house – and on its perimeter. Writing as someone who’s been ambushed by the way in which animals — even cranky ones — can wend their way into one’s heart, Bob Tarte is James Herriott by way of Bill Bryson.
Nor does Bob’s comic genius stop there. FOWL WEATHER was one of NPR’s Nancy Pearl’s Under-the-Radar Books for January 2008. Quoth Dame Nancy: “If you’re longing for a book that will make you laugh out loud, then run, don’t walk, to the nearest library or bookstore and pick up a copy of Bob Tarte’s Fowl Weather.”
Before you lose yourself in daydreaming about receiving a review like that, cast your eyes over the blurb:
Fowl Weather How Thirty-Nine Animals and a Sock Monkey Took Over My Life
Bob Tarte’s second book, Fowl Weather, returns us to the Michigan house where pandemonium is the governing principle, and where 39 animals rule the roost. But as things seem to spiral out of control, as his parents age and his mother’s grasp on reality loosens as she battles Alzheimer’s disease, Bob unexpectedly finds support from the gaggle of animals around him. They provide, in their irrational fashion, models for how to live.
It is their alien presences, their sense of humor, and their unpredictable behaviors that both drive Bob crazy and paradoxically return him to sanity. Whether it’s the knot-tying African grey parrot, the overweight cat who’s trained Bob to hold her water bowl just above the floor, or the duck who bests Bob in a shoving match, this is the menagerie, along with his endlessly optimistic wife Linda, that teaches him about the chaos that’s a necessary part of life.
No less demanding than the animals are the people who torment Bob and Linda. There’s the master gardener who steps on plants, the pet sitter applicant who never met an animal he didn’t want to butcher, and a woman Bob hasn’t seen since elementary school who suddenly butts into his life.
With the same biting humor and ability to capture the soul of the animal world that made Enslaved by Ducks such a rousing success, Bob Tarte shows us that life with animals gives us a way out of our small human perspectives to glimpse something larger, more enduring, and more wholly grounded in the simplicities of love — even across species lines.
So the man knows whereat he speaks, memoir-wise. Those of you even considering setting pen to paper to write about the real should pull up a chair and take good notes.
Join me, please, in a big round of applause for today’s guest blogger, Bob Tarte. Take it away, Bob!
You’re probably itching to get started writing your memoir, to sit down with your notes and let the story flow. But before you flow too far, you might want to tighten the tap as you think about refining one of the most important aspects of your writing. And that’s your narrative voice. Check with agents and publishers, and you’ll discover that a unique voice is at the top of their must-have list when they’re looking for new authors.
Voice can be a slippery, elusive element to grab hold of. But if you’ve got good material for your memoir and a strong point of view, you’re probably most of the way there. It’s tempting to use the same voice in your memoir that you’ve been using in your emails, blog, or journal. But don’t just automatically do that. Although your first-person narrator stands at the center of your story, it’s really just another character that needs to be developed. And you need to develop it to a knife’s edge.
The “I” who tells your story is supposed to be you. But it isn’t you exactly. It’s both more and less than that.
In my three pet memoirs,Enslaved by Ducks and Fowl Weather, and Kitty Cornered (which I promise to only mention a dozen more times), my voice isn’t like the real Bob Tarte at all. The voice in my books is whiny, complaining, self-effacing, and funny. And the real Bob isn’t particularly funny. I’m mostly just droopy.
But if I put that droopiness into a book, it wouldn’t even sell to other droopy people. So I’ve gone with the humor angle instead, and it seems to do the trick. I’m never quite sure if I’m a greater or lesser fool than the “I” who inhabits my memoirs, though I suspect the truth.
The important thing is to sculpt a voice that is indisputably in charge of your narrative. And why shouldn’t it be? If you’re not an authority about your own life, nobody is. You just need to pick a personality that convinces your readers of this fact.
Which “I” Are You, Anyway? There’s another problem with using a voice that supposedly reflects who you really are. Who are you? Are you just one “I”? Or are you a bunch of little “Is” that weave in and out of dominance throughout the day?
I often start my morning with a good case of the jitters due to existential angst. Later I might get crabby. Neither of these is the basis for an appealing voice. But if I refuse to write until an ecstatic mood seizes me, I’m going to have to wait until fall or spring when the warblers migrate through our woods. And that leaves a lot of dead space in between.
What’s a memoirist to do? You need to do what I did, which is to create an artificial intelligence that stands in for you, an I, Robot narrative contraption that will do your bidding and tell your story better than a swarm of little “Is” ever could. Harness those elements of your personality that can tell your story in the strongest and most engaging manner, and leave the other bits and pieces on the floor.
Did I mention that the voice needs to be engaging? Early this year, a woman sent me the manuscript for a memoir about her collie. She had a definite flair for writing and she had entertaining anecdotes about her dog. But her voice rarely shifted out of hysteria as it wrenched her narrative from one crisis to another with never an intervening moment of quiet. And on nearly every page, the voice shouted something IN ALL CAPS.
When I suggested that her approach was too exhausting and too repetitive, she told me, “But that’s exactly how it all happened.”
I didn’t believe it. But I didn’t blame her. I blamed her voice instead.
Voice Determines Content, Too If she had chosen a different voice, she would have told her story differently. In her e-mails, she told me how much she loved her collie now that the dog was older and calmer. But in her manuscript she used a voice that was continually caught up in each fresh moment of disaster rather than the voice of experience that reflected who she was now. That more mature voice could have supplied the balance that her story needed not only by changing the tone in which it described events, but also by choosing which events to include and which ones to leave out.
Our elderly cat Moobie passed away while I was writing Kitty Cornered. The voice that I had used in Enslaved by Ducks or Fowl Weather might have worked Moobie’s loss into my book. But the voice of Kitty Cornereddidn’t want anything to do with death. It wanted to keep the story light and funny. So instead of seeing Moobie through her inevitable decline in the book, I ended the tale while she still lolled upon the bed with flashes of kitten-like behavior.
Nobody will notice what I left out, because that’s the coolest thing of all about narrative voice. It’s both transparent and opaque at the same time. It’s a guy who stands holding a pane of glass. Most of the time, you look straight through the glass at the action and get caught up in it without even noticing that the guy is there. From time to time he shifts his body. A cuff or a finger get in the way as he points at something happening through the glass, but you don’t mind the intrusion, because he’s showing you something interesting. He’s kind of a magician. And he’s a lot like you.
The ideal voice might not come to you immediately. It always takes me a while to find it. Sometimes I have to write 50 pages while my voice and material dance with one other before they finally make a connection. It’s frustrating because I don’t know how to tell my story until I discover my “I,” but I can’t discover my “I” without writing. So I just have to wait it out.
And speaking of waiting, I thank you for your patience as I flounder around trying to get these simple ideas across. Part of the problem is that I don’t think I’ve ever quite found my voice here. And I wouldn’t, because I’m writing about writing instead of writing about my life with cats, ducks, parrots, or geese.
Bob Tarteand his wife Linda live on the edge of a shoe-sucking swamp near the West Michigan village of Lowell. When not fending off mosquitoes during temperate months and chipping ice out of plastic wading pools in the depths of winter, Bob writes books about his pets, namely Enslaved by Ducks and Fowl Weather. In April 2012, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill will publish Bob’s new book, Kitty Cornered How Frannie and Five Other Incorrigible Cats Seized Control of Our House and Made It Their Home.
Emmy Award-winning actress Patricia Heaton has taken on an option on the dramatic rights to Enslaved by Ducks. and Fowl Weather was selected as an “Under The Radar” book for 2008 by Nancy Pearl on NPR’s Morning Edition.
Bob wrote the Technobeat world music review column for The Beat magazine from 1989 to 2009. He has also written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Miami New Times newspapers.
Bob also hosts a podcast for PetLifeRadio.com called What Were You Thinking? that’s supposedly about “exotic pets” as a general topic, but the show just as often turns into a chronicle of life with his own troublesome critters.
Bob and Linda currently serve the whims of parrots, ducks, geese, parakeets, a rabbit, doves, cats, and hens. They also raise and release orphan songbirds (including woodpeckers) for the Wildlife Rehab Center, Ltd. in Grand Rapids and have the scars to prove it.
Bob Tarte’s website includes photos of Bob, Linda, and the animals, information about Bob’s books, links to Bob’s music review website and pet podcast, Bob’s email address, and several videos of Bob and his animals.
After spending so many weeks talking about the ins and outs of book pitching, as wells as devoting a significant portion of yesterday’s post on the soul-satisfying and practical virtues of making friends with other writers, I’ve decided to put my proverbial money where my metaphorical mouth is. The world needs more good examples of conference pitches, and let’s face it, what aspiring writer could not use more Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy (or ECQLC, as we like to call it around here)?
For the first time ever, Author! Author! will be holding a pitching contest. The rules follow below.
As if that weren’t sufficient reason for the masses to rejoice — heck, take a long weekend out of petty cash — I have treat for us all, as a reward for having had the moxie and perseverance to work so diligently through the Pitchingpalooza series. Today, I have the great pleasure of bringing you the kind of guest post I love to share, one that I think will be a true inspiration to writers everywhere.
I am delighted to introduce Author! Author! to Julie Wu, a literary fiction author whose lyrical first book, THE THIRD SON, will be coming out from Algonquin Books in the autumn of 2012, a triumph she talks about in this interesting interview on Book Architecture. If her name sounds familiar to those of you who have been hanging around here at Author! Author! for a while, there’s a good reason: back in April, I rhapsodized about a wonderful essay on rejection and literary success that she had just published. It’s rare that published authors are as forthcoming — or as honest — about the difficulties of getting into print. I highly recommend its perusal.
She’s also, in the interests of full disclosure, the college roommate I mentioned yesterday, the one whose initial book sale made my month. I’ve known Julie since I was 17, when this California girl dragged a 60-pound suitcase up three flights of stairs in Harvard Yard to meet the three East Coasters to whom I had (I assumed) been randomly assigned as a roommate. I had never been to New England before; she was kind enough to fill me in on Massachusetts ways. (The leaves change? Really? Why?) She introduced me to Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, a phenomenon my upbringing had previously neglected to reveal to me; we used to make it in the dead of night before midterms in the electric wok my mother had for some reason decided was absolutely indispensible to dorm life. She also probably saved my life by instructing me on the delicate art of crossing Massachusetts Avenue on foot without being flattened like a pancake.
The local joke at the time was that Cambridge traffic tended to separate Harvard students into two categories: the quick and the dead.
In fact, she was the person who calmed me down when it first occurred to me that brick buildings covered in ivy would not be a particularly safe place to be if the region were hit by the earthquakes my West Coast-trained body had come to expect. (That line was funnier a month ago, when I originally wrote it, by the way. It just goes to show you: a writer can never predict what’s going to seem dated by the time it hits print.)
It became apparent pretty quickly, in short, that it hadn’t been a random assignment; it couldn’t have been. Otherwise, what would be the chances that two of the four residents of Wigglesworth B-32 would both grow up to be authors? Or that a third roommate would have spent the summer before college working as a Millicent at a publishing house then, as now, renowned for literary fiction?
Perhaps I should not have been surprised. At the time, Harvard’s freshman housing questionnaire was significantly longer than the application to get in, and certainly more detailed.
So I had plenty of reasons to rejoice when I learned that Julie had sold her first novel — and frankly, I think readers of interesting literary fiction will be pretty pleased next fall, too. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:
The Third Son, set in the oppressive political and social climate of World War II Taiwan, is about a Taiwanese boy whose only happy childhood memory is of meeting and saving a kind girl in an air raid. When he finds this girl, grown up and at his oldest brother’s side, he fights to claim her, and to prove that he is worthy of her. His journey takes him to 1950′s America and the Space Race, but even across the world he struggles against the bonds of oppression that have followed him.
Sounds fascinating, eh? Sounds, in fact, like precisely the kind of substantive, serious novel aspiring writers are constantly being told at conferences has gone the way of the dodo. I’m really looking forward to Julie’s proving that never-particularly-true truism wrong.
She also, like me, is a great believer in writers helping one another down the long and curvy path to publication. So psst, Boston-area novelists: Julie will be teaching a class on scene structure and revision at Grub Street on September 14. It looks really yummy:
Raising the Titanic: Giving Power to Weak Novel Scenes
Drafts of many novels contain scenes that sink the book. They are flat, meandering, tangential, or just plain boring. Attempts to spruce up the prose or dialogue may not fix such scenes because they lack crucial structural elements. Don’t waste time rearranging deck chairs! In this seminar you will bring a troublesome scene from your novel and we will discuss not only how to give your scene internal propulsion, but also how to nail your scene to the novel’s central story arc and drive it forward. Land, ho!
I’m a huge fan of seminars where writer work on their own early drafts, rather than composing fresh material in class. Oh, the latter can be very useful, especially when a writer is first starting out, but few of us were actually born knowing the internal mechanics of a scene, anymore than we toddled into kindergarten already familiar with the strictures of standard format.
Okay, so I did,. Perhaps that’s why the Harvard Housing Office saw fit to make me Julie’s freshman roommate.
My point, should you care to know it, is that out of the literally thousands of classes out there aimed at aspiring writers, relatively few seem to be focused upon the all-important art of revision. I find that strange, not only as an editor, but as a writer: no one’s first drafts are perfect. There’s a monumental difference between writing that matches the image in the writer’s head and writing that successfully transmits that image to the reader.
Wow, that would be a fabulous segue into Julie’s guest blog; I should have planned it that way. (See what I mean about how first drafts are not necessarily perfect the moment they fall off one’s fingertips?) But I promised you a contest, and a contest you shall have.
In the fine tradition of the Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence (and as part of my ongoing quest to provide good writers with much-needed ECQLC), I am proud to announce:
Author! Author! Perfect Pitch Competition of 2011
In order to celebrate the end of Pitchingpalooza and encourage the practical application of the skills learned and polished there, Author! Author! is calling upon its talented readers to enter pitches for their books into healthy competition. Winners will not only receive fabulous prizes (see below), but will have their pitches, the first page of their manuscripts, and an author photo featured in a post here at Author! Author! for all the world to see and admire.
Sound good? Wait, it gets better. To make the experience more interesting for onlookers, pitchers may present their fabulous premises in three distinct categories:
Category II: The elevator speech, a 100-word or less presentation of your book’s premise and central conflict
Category III: The formal 2-minute pitch, a 250-word introduction of your protagonist, the central conflict, and what’s at stake in your story OR the problem that your nonfiction book addresses
All entries must be submitted via e-mail to contest@annemini(dot)com by Friday, September 30, at midnight in your time zone. Late entries will not be considered.
Entrants may enter more than one category. Please submit each entry in a separate e-mail, in accordance with the rules below.
The grand prize winner in each category will receive a half-hour Mini Consult on his or her query, synopsis, and first 10 pages, as well as having the winning entry, the first page, and an author photo posted on Author! Author! Runners-up will see their entries, first pages, and photos posted and critiqued as well, as vivid examples of how good a pitch can be when it is done right.
Because winners will also be awarded life-long bragging rights and coveted ECQLC , the judges reserve the right to award as many (or as few) prizes as the quality of the entry pool warrants. Awards are purely up to the discretion of the judging panel.
Those are the general rules. Here are the specific steps required to win. Do read them all carefully, as I am anticipating vigorous competition.
1. Polish your pitch to a high gloss and save it as a Word document. Only .doc entries in Word will be accepted — not TextEdit, PDF, or any other formats, please. Please title the Word file with either your name or the title of your book, not just as contest entry. (The last time I ran a contest like this, I received 37 with that file name.)
2. Make sure that the entry is properly formatted. All entries must be in standard format for book manuscripts. No exceptions, I’m afraid. If it is not double-spaced, in 12-point type, and featuring a slug line with your name and the book’s title at the top of the page, the judges will not consider it.
3. On a separate page of the same Word document, write the book’s title, the book category, and a BRIEF ( In other words, what is fresh about your book? (Hint: this question will be significantly easier to answer if you mention what your book category of choice is.) Please be as specific as you can about what is new and different about your book. Vague claims of being the best novel since WAR AND PEACE probably won’t impress the judges.
4. On the same page, include your contact information. Name, address, and e-mail address will suffice. You want us to be able to let you know if you have won, don’t you?
6. Attach the Word document you’ve created to an e-mail. Please include PERFECT PITCH ENTRY in the subject line, and mention the category you’re entering in the body of the e-mail. (It makes it easier to process the entries.) Make sure to say who you are, too, so we don’t get entries mixed up.
It’s also a nice touch to say something pleasant (like “Happy Labor Day, Anne!”) in the e-mail itself. I just mention.
7. E-mail the whole shebang to anneminicontest@gmail(dot)com by Friday, September 30, at midnight in your time zone. Do I need to explain that the (dot) should be rendered as a period when you are typing the address? Nah, probably not.
Those are the rules! I am hoping to see a broad array of wonderful stories — and some great examples from which those brand-new to pitching can learn.
Of course, to benefit fully from winning this contest — or from giving a good pitch at a conference, for that matter — you will need to whip your manuscript into fabulous shape. Many a great premise has been lost to posterity for lack of necessary revision.
It’s easy to lose faith in mid-revision, though — and even easier to reject the notion of revision at all. Because we’ve all felt the insidious pull of both, I am delighted to present Julie Wu’s words of inspiration to revisers everywhere.
You might want to bookmark this post, for re-reading when your revision energies start to ebb. Just so you know, though, I’m not the roommate mentioned in the piece; I couldn’t throw a pot to save my life. Which, too, probably came up on the housing application.
Take it away, Julie!
My roommate once made a clay pot in art school. Threw it on the wheel, drew up its walls between the tips of her fingers, fired it, glazed it. When she and her classmates held up their finished pots, gleaming and beautiful, the instructor led the students to a pit and ordered them to throw down their pots. The point was, he said, not to become attached to a particular piece of work. You can always make more.
Some students cried. My roommate was traumatized, still bitter about the experience years later when she told me about it.
Hearing her story made my stomach twist. I had written a few short stories, and they were my precious babies, conjured up as I sat cross-legged in the dark in an apartment overlooking the Hudson River. My stories were praised in student workshops, but their strengths were no more robust or reproducible than the street lights’ glinting on the water’s surface. Even after the literary magazine rejections came in, I revised only a sentence here or there, hoping that would be enough.
Because I was afraid that if I revised more, I would ruin what was good and never get it back again. I was one of those art students, crying and clutching my pot at the edge of the pit.
Here’s the thing: that instructor was right. It has taken me ten years to understand that. Make one beautiful pot–maybe you were lucky. Make another from the ground up, and another, still more beautiful, and you are an artist. It takes practice, study, the making and smashing of many pots beautiful, average, and ugly, to really know that clay, to know exactly how to push your hands into it to get what you want.
It took me ten years to understand, because it took me ten years to write my first novel. I revised it countless times—a little when it first didn’t sell, then more and more. Eventually, I changed its structure, its point of view, its tone, its style. With each revision I received comments and started over, page one. Each time, I learned more, until I could revise without fear. And it was then that I sold the book.
In writing we have a safety net: the computer. Open a new file and you have smashed your pot and kept a picture of it at the same time. How to proceed at that point is a study in humility, in open-mindedness, in self examination. It’s remembering all the advice you read about in the craft books—that you must have an interesting protagonist, a need, lots of conflict—and admitting you need to take that advice yourself. It’s hearing all the feedback from your readers—that the protagonist is unsympathetic, that nothing happens, that what happens is implausible—and admitting that they are true. It’s realizing that there’s power in depth, and that depth is a function of your narrative arc. It’s an equation of equal parts emotion and mechanics, and it’s fueled by that elusive beast, imagination.
After so many years, book one is done. I’m thinking about book two. I’ve got clay in my hands again, but I feel different now. Because I’m not afraid. Because I know now I can make a pretty good pot. And because if it doesn’t turn out well, I don’t have to cry. I can throw it into the pit, and make something better.
Sorry about the several-day silence, campers — I’ve been trying to adjust to a new set-up. Since my car crash last July, I haven’t been able to write at a desk, so I had become accustomed to writing my blog posts on a laptop while reclining like an ancient Roman at a feast. When the docs told me this week to stop taking that whole laptop thing so literally, I had to figure out a new way to recline whilst typing. It turns out to be doable, but very, very slow.
What’s that you say? That the point of the advice may have been to stop me from typing altogether? I may not be hearing you correctly, what with my fingers stuck in my ears and all.
Besides, my will to communicate is just too strong. This does, however, seem like a dandy time to post another in what I hope will be a long and productive series of interviews with published authors about the craft of writing and the often rocky road to publication. After the rollicking success of February’s highly interesting discussion of literary fiction with debut novelist Heidi Durrow, I’ve been blandishing all kinds of authors into sitting down to chat about their first books.
Why first books, rather than just their most recent offerings? Well, frankly, I feel that there are already quite a few venues for the latter, but surprisingly few where authors, particularly those with recent debuts, are encouraged to talk about the day-to-day challenges, hurdles, and triumphs of writing, at least at the level of specificity we prefer here at Author! Author! I wanted to talk to writers with interesting voices about how they developed them. And to be blunt about it, I wanted to grill them on your behalf about how they went about landing their agents.
Today’s interview with literary fiction author Layne Maheu will cover all of that, of course. But as the second offering in this series, it seems particularly appropriate to be talking to an author positioned at what used to be universally acknowledged as a crucial point in his career: after having produced a well-received first novel, he is finishing up revisions on his second. We began the interview, not entirely surprisingly, by chatting about the inspiration for his first.
That Layne Maheu‘s debut novel, Song of the Crow (Unbridled Books, 2006), was hailed by critics is unquestionable, and with good reason. He’s precisely the sort of novelist that was known for most of the 20th century as small but serious: his lyrical first novel, a fresh spin on the well-worn story of Noah’s Ark, surprised and delighted readers of literary fiction; here, critics said, was a voice to watch.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about it at the time:
In a surprising take on the tale of Noah’s ark and the flood, Maheu’s beguiling debut unfolds from the perspective of a crow. The crow-narrator (named “I Am”) first spies Noah (the beastman) from his nest in a tree (the Giant) that Noah is trying to chop down. From the start, I Am does not trust or understand the Man who lives in the “underworld.” As I Am grows up, orphaned by his parents, his survival is a daily challenge: he flies to elude predators and rummage for food, often with another bird called Plum Black, sometimes consulting with elder Old Bone. I Am soon discovers that he can recognize the words of the God Crow, who speaks to Noah with zeal and commands him to continue building the ark. Suddenly, I Am realizes that he can also understand human speech, and eventually, just before the floods, he sneaks onto Noah’s ark…Maheu’s fable works beautifully, probing the relationship between creatures of the heavens and those of the underworld..
Hands up, everyone who has dreamed for years of PM’s reviewing her first novel that well. If you really want to set your heart a-flutter, take a peek at what Library Journal had to say:
After reading this remarkable book, you will marvel at every crow you see along the side of the road and maybe even begin to listen to their songs. Highly recommended for all collections.
Heck, even the toughest critic I know gave it a glowing review:
Layne Maheu’s the kind of writer destined to make other writers of literary prose violently jealous, and deservedly so — and the story, the well-worn tale of Noah’s ark told from the point of view of a crow, is astonishingly compelling, considering that pretty much any adult reader in the Western world already knows what is going to happen. (Spoiler alert: the waters eventually recede.) But long before the protagonist crow’s prophesying aunt is shellacked onto the prow of the ark — I defy anyone who reads the book to dismiss that image quickly — the absolutely plausible sensual details had seduced me entirely into this crow’s world.
Quite an achievement, considering that it would be hard to find a darker story — not to ruin the plot for anyone, but God does wipe out virtually the entire population of the world in a not entirely explicable fit of pique. Watery graves, victims of violent predation, and resentfully crowded and confined beasts of the earth, air, and sea abound.
Yet this book has genuinely funny moments that do not feel at all forced. Our crow guide is a bit sardonic from time to time, and Noah’s sulkiness in the face of clearly unreasonable heavenly requirements is a joy to behold, but the humor is never light-hearted. This is the humor of, if not the grave, then very near it indeed.
Okay, so I wrote that one. And actually, I’m the second-toughest critic I know — but my mother liked this book, too.
I sense those of you in the throes of reworking your manuscripts shifting in your desk chairs, do I not? “Psst! Anne!” you whisper. “Ask him how many times he revised his book before getting it to that critic-pleasing degree of polish. At this point, I feel as though I’ve been reworking the same two or three scenes for eons! I want to start sending it out, already!”
An excellent question, faithful revisers. I asked him that very thing.
Some of you have had your hands in the air since practically the beginning of that conversation. “But Anne, why would an author whose first book met with such acclaim concentrate so hard on revising his next? Surely, he no longer needs to convince anyone that he can write!”
Actually, the very intensity of the applause for his first renders that level of scrutiny a sterling idea. Why? Well, there are a couple of ways to look at a chorus of praise this harmonious. Obviously, any author is pleased to see strong reviews, as is every publishing house. But the greater the initial applause, the higher the pressure on the next book. Will it live up to the promise of the author’s first?
That’s a much, much more serious question than it used to be, incidentally. Prior to the mid-1980s, it used to be quite common for publishing houses to nurse a promising literary novelist’s career along, publishing four or five small-but-serious books that did not necessarily sell well, but were a joy to read. If the critics liked his voice (and it was usually a him), the logic went, he would build up an audience. Or his next book might hit the big time.
Oh, that may seem like a long shot now, from the instant-celebrity perspective of today, but it used to be far from unheard-of for a small-but-serious author’s first books to sell only a few thousand copies — and then suddenly get rushed back into print after a later book hit the bestseller lists. John Irving’s earlier books enjoyed a considerable renaissance of popularity after THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP came out, for instance; Alice Walker had published several well-reviewed novels prior to THE COLOR PURPLE, and the dedicated readers who had followed Annie Proulx’s career for years was darned pleased when THE SHIPPING NEWS brought her to the attention of, well, everybody else.
Hey, there’s a reason that agents and editors have historically been so prone to asking writers they’ve just discovered, “So what is your next book about?” As distressing as the question could be to a writer who has just spent years refining that first book — and years tracking down an agent for it — it was a perfectly reasonable one. If the first book did well, either critically or financially, the writer would be under tremendous pressure to follow it up with another, and as soon as possible.
That pressure on the second-time author still exists (and so does the ubiquity of the question; be ready for the agent of your dreams to ask it), but the slow-built, lovingly-supported literary career has become something of a rarity. One does still hear of — and applaud for tenacity — overnight successes who have been polishing their craft for decades, but in the current tight literary market, it’s significantly harder for a publisher to find the resources to nurture the small-but-serious author.
And no, Virginia, that’s not because the people who decide what books get published have lost their love for good writing. Book sales matter more now, not only because publishers have to work with a more uncertain market, smaller profit margins, and an explosion in the actual number of books published every year in the U.S., but because computerized statistics make it possible for a bookstore to check how many copies of that small-but-serious author’s last book sold. If it appealed to only a small group of devoted readers, the bookstore’s management might be reluctant to give the next book much shelf space.
I bring all of this up not to depress those of you who had envisioned finding an editor who would nurse your small-but-serious career along, or even to encourage those of you who write for small niche markets to run, not walk to a good course on internet book marketing, but so we may understand just how many expectations hover around a well-reviewed debut novelist’s second book — and how they have been intensified in recent years.
Believe it or not, you will want to be in this position some day; it will mean that your first book did well. When that happy-but-nerve-wracking day arrives, however, you will want the advice of authors who have tread that precarious path before you.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You wanted to know how a writer can tell when it’s time to stop revising and send it out, already, right?
Speaking of sea changes in the publishing industry, it’s probably worth noting that back when Layne landed his agent (and, if I’m honest about it, back when I did), it used to be quite normal to get feedback from agents who rejected one’s manuscript. Not necessarily on a query — the form-letter rejection for those dates back to at least the 1950s — but if an agent asked to see pages and those pages showed promise, she would often take the time to give the writer a little encouraging advice.
These days, the sheer volume of submissions usually precludes that kind of individualized response. Indeed, some agencies have a policy of only contacting a submitter if the answer is yes. That means, in practice, that it’s much, much harder now for an aspiring writer to learn how to improve his manuscript; near-misses and wow-this-needs-a-lot-of-work submissions generally receive precisely the same rejection. Or, even less informative, the same silence.
It’s at least as important as it has ever been, however, for an agent and a book to be a good fit — and that fit is as vital for the agent as for the writer. Hard as it may be to believe from the aspiring writer’s side of the submission process, when a great agent commits to a book, it’s a serious commitment. Her time is, after all, limited, and selling even superlative books is hard. So while she might be attracted to a variety of voices, she can only devote herself to the few that she feels confident she can sell.
In a sense, first-time authors, too, have to be more committed to their books than writers of similar books in the past, and for precisely the reason I mentioned above: sales have a considerably greater impact upon the ability to interest a publisher in one’s next book. With publishing houses downsizing, the author is expected to take on a far more active role in promoting his book than ever before. This comes, as you might imagine, as a great big surprise to many first-time authors.
Here, as promised, is the link to Layne’s blog. It’s a good idea for aspiring writers to study established authors’ blogs, particularly those of first- and second-time authors, to start to form an idea of what you would like yours to be like. Not only cosmetically — although you may be surprised at how little aesthetic thought seemed to have been devoted to many sites — but in terms of how you would like to present yourself and your book to your reader.
Or, to turn it around, what will your ideal reader want to know about you? What will your book offer them that is unique, and how will it improve their lives? Once you’ve figured that out (and nobody’s saying it isn’t a tall order), how could your website reflect those qualities? What will bring your ideal reader back to it a second time?
Yes, yes, I realize that you’re a busy person who squeezes writing into an already busy schedule. You will also be a busy person who writes when the editor of your dreams says before the ink is dry on your publishing contract, “Great — I want these revisions, and you should start establishing an Internet presence. Have you ever considered blogging?”
You will be a far, far happier human being at that juncture if you have already devoted some serious thought to how you might reach your target reader online. Trust me on this one.
Do those bloodshot eyes and drooping shoulders mean that I have wearied you with enough talk of book promotion for one day? Fair enough. Let’s talk craft.
And because I always enjoy stumping established authors, let’s dive right into that perennial mystery: how do you define literary fiction?
I love how the question of what constitutes good writing gets fire flashing in the eyes of serious writers, published and as-yet-to-be-published both — and I wish we would talk about it more amongst ourselves. Oh, there’s plenty of discussion online about what will and won’t sell, or what agents and editors do and do not want to see, but it tends to be, well, a tad prosaic.
That’s a shame, I think, because we’re engaged in what is arguably the highest manifestation of the human spirit, intellect, and ingenuity. Unlike many other arts, writing begins with nothing, creating beauty, truth, and, yes, an entertaining plot out of pure mental energy. If it feels like a Herculean task, that’s because it is: the writer has chosen to compress complex reality to a few well-chosen words. How on earth could that be easy?
But it’s a noble pursuit, and a great one. Here’s to us for contributing so much to humanity.
And while we’re at it, here’s to readers as well. No everyone is alive to the delightful shock of discovering a marvelous new voice or worldview.
Ah, there’s the rub, right? In the conclusion of this interview, Layne and I shall be talking about the proverbial nuts and bolts of constructing a narrative solid enough to stand the test of time.
In the meantime, read widely, revise well, and keep up the good work!
Welcome back, campers! How was your week? Mine was, as predicted, hectic, but the niece is married, the dishes washed (no mean feat, considering the family produced a five-course sit-down dinner for the wedding reception), and we are now living on leftovers.
How stressful was it all? Well, let me put it this way: my doctor offered to write me a note to excuse me from all of this ostensible frivolity.
But off with the shackles of the past — on to a monumental new development in the ever-evolving Author! Author! community offerings. Today, I am delighted to bring you the first in what I hope will be may in-depth conversations with wonderful recently-published authors about not only their books, but also the art and craft of writing itself.
You know, the kind of chat that writers find fascinating, but disillusions non-writers and those who would prefer to believe that good writing simply falls from the heavens into the author’s mind, with no actual work involved.
In this series, I’m going to be talking with these authors about the actual work of writing. I’m very excited about this, not only because I suspect that these conversations will prove inspirational and educational to members of the Author! Author! community — and to that end, please feel free to post questions and comments; I shall forward them to the authors — but also because, frankly, when a book comes out, 99% of interviewers will ask precisely the same set of questions.
All of us who read author interviews are familiar with the standards, right? So how did you get the idea for this book? Is this novel autobiographical? How did you get started writing in the first place? Did you always want to be a writer — as opposed to, say, a fireman? Are any of the characters based upon real people? What’s your next book about? No, really, what part of this novel is based upon real life?
It’s all fun and interesting for the author the first dozen or so times, but after that, one begins to feel that one’s part in the interview process could very adequately be played by a tape recorder. Nor is this phenomenon new: I spent a large part of my childhood and adolescence helping science fiction author Philip K. Dick prepare for interviews — oh, you thought that established authors didn’t rehearse? In what sense is an author interview not a public performance? — and believe me, in any given year, we could count the original questions interviewers asked on the fingers of two hands.
Believe me, we longed to be able to start counting on our toes.
So part of my goal in this interview series is to allow good authors more latitude than they are generally allowed in literary interviews — because, let’s face it, what is likely to interest other writers about a book is not necessarily what will fascinate other readers. These interviews will be by writers, for writers.
Are you picturing yourselves chatting with me when your first book comes out? Excellent — you’re in the perfect mindset to enjoy my January 11, 2011 conversation with the exceptionally talented Heidi Durrow, author of the recent literary fiction debut, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, now available in paperback.
If Heidi’s name sounds familiar, you’ve probably either been perusing Best Books of 2010 lists or were hanging out here at Author! Author! in recent months. For those of you who missed my glowing tribute to what I consider the best debut of last year, allow me to introduce you to a writer I believe is going to be remembered as one of the greats. Take a peek at the publisher’s blurb:
Take a gander at the publisher’s blurb:
Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy after a fateful morning on their Chicago rooftop.
Forced to move to a new city, with her strict African-American grandmother as her guardian, Rachel is thrust for the first time into a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and beauty bring a constant stream of attention her way. It’s there, as she grows up and tries to swallow her grief, that she comes to understand how the mystery and tragedy of her mother might be connected to her own uncertain identity.
This searing and heartwrenching portrait of a young biracial girl dealing with society’s ideas of race and class is the winner of the Bellwether Prize for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice. In the tradition of Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John,Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, here is a portrait of a young girl—and society’s ideas of race, class, and beauty.
The book has developed something of a cult following amongst lovers of serious literary fiction. How much do its fans respect it? Well, let me put it this way: when I first discovered the novel in a wee bookstore in Lexington, Kentucky, the clerk nearly knocked me over, so eager was she to rush to my side to recommend the book.
Apparently, that enthusiasm was catching, for by the time my plane was over the Rockies, heading home to Seattle, was already raving about the book to everyone in the seats near me. Flight attendants will remember that as the time two of them sidled down the aisle to ask, “Um, why are all of you talking about falling from the sky? Flying is perfectly safe, you know.”
The intriguing mystery of just how and why an entire family fell from a Chicago apartment building’s roof — yes, veteran interviewers, based upon a real-life incident — may be the unusual premise of the story, but the core of the writing is centered upon the growth and development of incredibly real-feeling characters.
As I mentioned before, Heidi pursued character in a completely original manner, calculated to delight those intrigued by the interesting use of language: via punctuation in dialogue. THE GIRL WHO FELL FROM THE SKY depicts social class and intellectual development through such subtle nuances in the characters’ speech patterns that at first, I kept having to re-read lines to make sure I was not imagining it.
I wasn’t; it’s one of the most brilliant uses of dialogue I’ve seen in years. (And trust me, I read a lot of dialogue in any given year.) Join me, please, for a discussion of it, conducted at the ever-fabulous Third Place Books, just north of Seattle.
A quick technical note before you click on the video: my apologies for the background noise; the Author! Author! staff did not realize that the microphone would pick it up so well, or that it should have been placed a trifle closer to Heidi. Turning up the volume on your computer before you start watching might prove helpful.
The conference mentioned in that clip, by the way, was New Orleans’ Words and Music conference, held every November. We were both speaking there in 2010, and I hope that I, at least, will be teaching there again next year. (Hint, hint, calendar-markers.)
As you may see, I was — and remain — awfully excited about Heidi’s fresh approach to dialogue. Even in the relatively innovation-friendly literary fiction market, genuinely experimental writing has a hard time getting published. Dialogue as fresh as Heidi’s is as rare as a yeti sighting in downtown Manhattan.
And that’s odd, considering that one of the standard definitions of literary fiction is a narrative that deliberately deviates from mainstream storytelling norms in order to illuminate character while stretching the language in new and lovely ways. (A few other defining features of the breed: typically, its vocabulary and sentence structure assumes a college-educated readership, and characterization, rather than plot, provides the driving force of the narrative.)
Oh, quite a few new offerings are labeled as experimental, but that’s usually because the works in question resemble other, earlier books that were experimental in their day. The moniker has become as often an indicator of a certain school of literary writing as a neon sign flashing FIND SOMETHING NEW HERE.
So why was it so difficult to find a publisher brave enough to take on THE GIRL WHO FELL FROM THE SKY? Why, in fact, was this brilliant debut novel not published until after it won the prestigious the Bellwether Prize, a competition that includes a publishing contract as a prize?
Search me. If I ran the universe — or even the literary portion of it — this would not be the case; genuinely innovative writing that stretches the definitions of its book category would be recognized, rewarded, and published far more easily than it is today. But then, if I ran the universe, good books actually would always find a home, libraries and bookstores would be as common as Starbucks franchises, and Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, and Madame de Staël’s birthdays would be national holidays.
Nay, international holidays. But let’s get back to talking about craft. Specifically, let’s hear about how dialogue can be used as a tool to develop character.
Nice to hear an author speaking of craft, character, and plot choices as inextricably linked, isn’t it? That’s never truer than in good literary fiction: literary fiction is not, as so many aspiring writers tend to assume, simply a non-genre story told in beautiful language. In theory, really good literary fiction adds something new to the reader’s understanding of the inherent possibilities of the language, rather than adapting an already-successful author’s approach (and bag of narrative tricks) to a new story.
The too-common expectation that a plot must follow established themes and storylines can be painfully constricting for an imaginative writer. What happens, though, when a writer resists easy plot resolution, choosing instead to follow her characters’ individual development arcs where they lead her?
Since the first mention of literary fiction in this post — and debut literary fiction at that — I could feel the hearts of all of you who write it palpitating with excitement. “But Anne,” you ask, descending with a bump from the heights of abstract discussion, “I could talk craft all day, but I’m faced with a practical dilemma. I’ve been having a really hard time finding an agent who both represents literary fiction and is open to new writers. Any advice about how to go about finding one?”
Glad you asked, palpitators. Heidi and I had a little chat on that very subject.
Since every good writer receives quite a few rave rejections — those infamous I love your writing/this story/everything about this manuscript, but I’m going to have to pass statements that leave aspiring writers so nonplused — I cannot overemphasize the importance of continuing to query and submit even if the agent currently reading your requested materials has already praised the book. All too often, submitters relax at this point (if a writer with an agent considering a manuscript can ever be considered relaxed), thinking that their querying days are over, but remember, a nice conversation with an agent is just a nice conversation with an agent; don’t stop seeking the right representation for your book until you have received an actual offer from an agent.
It’s also a good idea, as Heidi mentioned, to keep working any connections you may have, in order to garner recommendations to agents; for a few tips on how to ask for such a recommendation without being a pest, please see the posts under the REFERRALS TO AGENTS category on the archive list conveniently located at the lower right-hand corner of this page.
Done bookmarking those links? Good. Let’s move on to just how much winning the Bellwether Prize changed Heidi’s writing life.
As promised, I did look up the deadline for the next Bellwether Prize. Entries are accepted in the Septembers of odd-numbered years — which means, for those of you playing along at home, you can apply this coming September. Mark your calendars!
You also might want to drop by the prize’s website, just to see what interesting things are being written on social justice issues lately. Barbara Kingsolver, author of such bestselling novels as The Lacuna established the prize, and the winning books tend to be fascinating. Algonquin Books publishes the top honorees; 2006 winner Hillary Jordan’s lovely debut, Mudbound, is already out.
And, of course, THE GIRL WHO FELL FROM THE SKY is now available in paperback at Amazon, or, if you prefer to patronize an independent bookseller, Powell’s.
Please join me in thanking Heidi for being generous enough to share her insights and experience with everyone in the Author! Author! community. And, as always, keep up the good work!
I’m taking a quick break from Synopsispalooza to bring you a treat, campers: a conversation on comedy writing between two of the best out there: Jonathan Selwood, author of one of my all-time favorite comic novels, The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse, and Mike Sacks’, one of the authors of Random House’s recently-released SEX: OUR BODIES, OUR JUNK. Since FAAB (Friend of Author! Author! Blog) Jonathan has already regaled us with a couple of funny and insightful guest posts on the art of writing dark comedy (links: post 1 and post 2), I asked him to sit down with Mike to talk about being funny in general and being funny about sex in particular.
The result was absolutely hilarious, in a very explicit way, as one might expect from two authors who write about sex. I wish I could share that interview with you, but if I did, every parental Internet blocking program and every public library’s web screener would light up like a Christmas tree.
Which is, in a way, very much to Jonathan and Mike’s credit: they know their respective audiences. But if I shared that particular interview with mine, my teen readers might not be able to read it; I am very committed to keeping this site accessible to them. So I asked the gentlemen concerned to do a nuts-and-bolts interview on comedy writing instead, something in the style of Mike’s guest post last year, a fabulous discussion of the art of being funny with legendary comedy writer Merrill Markoe, and they graciously assented.
As some of you may recall from my announcement of Mike’s book release in August, this was not the first time I had run into this problem. If I so much as posted the publisher’s blurb for SEX verbatim, as is my wont with new releases, most Internet filters of the type employed by parents and public libraries would have blocked the post. At the time, we all tittered together at a screening program’s not being bright enough to tell the difference between comedy and {WORD EXPUNGED}, but such is the world in which we live.
So how did I end up handling it? I did in fact post the publisher’s blurb in my publication announcement, but to ascertain that the post would be accessible to as many of my regular readers as possible, though, I placed a few discreet visual barriers in front of the words and concepts that might prove problematic. Here is the result.
GOOD GOD—YOU’RE DOING IT ALL WRONG . . .
The Association for the Betterment of Sex (A.B.S.) presents Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk, a radical and invaluable resource for improving your sexual communication—whether you have been in a committed relationship for years, or have just moments ago removed the shrinkwrap from your new {EXPUNGED}.
Here are just a few sensual revelations you’ll find within these pages:
– The precise location of the female {EXPUNGED} (latitude and longitude)
– “Going on tour with Midnight Oil” and more outmoded {EXPUNGED}slang
– Forced perspective and other techniques for visually enhancing the size of {EXPUNGED}
– The Top Five pastry-related euphemisms for {EXPUNGED}
– How to score big at your next {EXPUNGED} party, with our crowd-pleasing ambrosia-salad recipe
– Listings of “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” dry-cleaning services, for freshening up your vinyl {EXPUNGED} or adult-sized {EXPUNGED}costume
– Your first {EXPUNGED}, and how the ancient Mayans predicted it wouldn’t go over so hot
Exhaustively researched and fully illustrated, Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk is a must-read for you, your sexual partner(s), and anyone who wishes there was more to sex than {EXPUNGED} for a few seconds and begging for forgiveness.
Nor is Jonathan, our interviewer du jour, to be outdone on the subversive comedy on sexuality front. His novel’s frank, hilarious presentations of {EXPUNGED} reconstructive surgery and {EXPUNGED}{EXPUNGED}{EXPUNGED} during an earthquake set the LA ethos on its proverbial ear. Here’s the relatively clean publisher’s blurb for THE PINBALL THEORY OF APOCALYPSE:
For years, painter Isabel Raven has made an almost-living forging Impressionist masterpieces to decorate the McMansions of the not-quite-Sotheby’s-auction rich. But when she serendipitously hits on an idea that turns her into the It Girl of the L.A. art scene, her career takes off just as the rest of her life heads south. Her personal-chef boyfriend is having a wild sexual dalliance with the teenage self-styled Latina Britney Spears. If Isabel refuses to participate in an excruciatingly humiliating ad campaign, her sociopathic art dealer is threatening to gut her like an emu. And her reclusive physicist father has conclusively proven that the end of the world is just around the corner.
Now, with the Apocalypse looming — and with only a disaffected Dutch-Eskimo billionaire philanthropist and his dissolute thirteen-year-old adopted daughter to guide her — there’s barely enough time remaining for Isabel to reexamine her fragile delusional existence…and the delusional reality of her schizophrenic native city.
As I said, these two authors had a lot to talk about, and I genuinely regret that I cannot bring you their original, unexpurgated conversation. But what would have been the fun of your trying to decipher what they had to say between all of those {EXPUNGED} barriers? Here instead, for the benefit of all of you aspiring comedy writers out there, is their second conversation. Enjoy!
Oh, and Synopsispalooza will be starting up again on Saturday evening — I’m taking a couple of days off to celebrate my birthday. Back to the grindstone soon!
Jonathan Selwood: First, could you please give a brief (ahem, PG-13) description of your new book, SEX: OUR BODIES, OUR JUNK for any of our blog readers who have yet to pick up a copy?
Mike Sacks: Sure. It’s a parody of a sex manual, the type you might have found
next to your parents’ bed when you were growing up. You know the kind:
illustrations of aging hippies, strange words, even stranger
descriptions. The premise of our book is that it was written by an
association in Washington DC called The Association for the Betterment
of Sex. It’s run by five guys (us), all of whom know very little about
sex. We find women very mysterious and sex sort of puzzling. In short,
we’re idiots, not to be trusted.
How did you get into comedy writing? Was it something you always knew you wanted to do?
I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I was growing up, but I read a
lot of books and I always loved comedy. For a time I wanted to be a
pilot and then a surgeon. Alas, my grades were really mediocre, so I
began to write, just for fun. After college I worked in a record store
for a few years until I figured that writing was a more interesting
way to make a living than retail, which is the worst. I began to sell
articles to Cracked magazine, as well as MAD and National Lampoon. And
there began my rise to the middle.
I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Many “serious” writers (and readers) fail to recognize how hard it is to be truly funny on the page. Are you ever frustrated by the fact that so many people believe funny = easy?
You worked with four other top tier comedy writers in writing SEX: OUR BODIES, OUR JUNK. Do you find that this type of collaboration leads more towards supportive teamwork or cutthroat competition? In other words, are you helping each other along the way, or always trying to one-up each other with your jokes?
No, at a certain level, a writer knows that a group project shouldn’t
be looked at as a competition. If a joke doesn’t work, it doesn’t
work. And if that bothers you, you should probably not write with
others. The end product is what matters. If another writer’s joke is
better than yours, you should go with that. You can always use your
joke in another piece, down the road. I loved working with these guys.
In a sense, it was a lot easier than writing alone. I’m now associated
with jokes that I didn’t write and never could have thought of for
myself. It was a pleasure. But you do have to be willing to be a
little flexible and put aside your ego for the common good.
I often find that once I can nail down the appropriate “tone” in a comedic work, things start to fall into place. How important is finding the right tone in your own work, and how on earth did you manage to keep a consistent tone with so many different writers on SEX: OUR BODIES, OUR JUNK?
Well, that is extremely important, especially when you work with
others. We started the project with a general idea of what we wanted
to do, and through trial and error, finally came up with a tone that
we were all happy with. It was pretty easy sticking with that tone
throughout the process of writing the book. We all just sort of fell
into it. And if one of us strayed from it, we would just tweak that
joke to make it more consistent. But, yes, finding that right tone is
a vital part of the process in writing any humor piece.
As a follow-up, do you ever sacrifice a joke to keep the appropriate tone (no matter how funny it is), or does a great joke trump consistency of tone?
There are definitely cases where a joke is not “pitch perfect” with
the rest of the jokes, but as long as they hold true to the
characters, then we kept it in. There was some margin for error–as
it’s not a serious sex book. Also, all of the characters are sort of
moronic and capable of saying anything. So that worked in our favor.
When you have stupid characters, you’re allowed more freedom.
Do you have any pre-writing rituals to put yourself in a comedic mindset? Say, putting on a pair of fuzzy bunny slippers, or chugging a half-gallon of cheap scotch?
No. Just booting up the computer, putting on headphones and wearing my
“DO NOT DISTURB” baseball cap.
And last, now that book is done and bestsellerdom is merely a technicality, what’s next for Mike Sacks? More work with the SEX: OUR BODIES, OUR JUNK team? Or do you have solo projects in mind?
I have a third book coming out in March 2011 from Tin House Books.
It’s a collection of 55 published short humor pieces from The New
Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair, McSweeney’s and other publications. It’s
called “Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reality.” After that, I’m free.
Free for what I don’t know yet, but I’ll be free. In the meantime,
write to me at mikebsacks(at)gmail(dot)com Or just send me a new “DO NOT
DISTURB” cap.
Jonathan Selwood is the author of the dark comedy THE PINBALL THEORY OF APOCALYPSE. Like all native Oregonians, Selwood was born in California. He enjoys talking very loudly when intoxicated, composting kitchen scraps, excessively rolling his Rs when ordering burrrrrritos… using ellipses…
Mike Sacks has written for Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, The New Yorker, Time, McSweeney’s, Radar, MAD, New York Observer, Premiere, Believer, Vice, Maxim, Women’s Health, and Salon. He has worked at The Washington Post, and is currently on the editorial staff of Vanity Fair.
I have a real treat in store for you today, campers. Actually, more than just a treat: a treat plus a writing challenge.
Remember my last post, when I waxed indignant about the fact that U.S.-based fans of longtime member of the Author! Author! community Shaun Attwood would have a harder time (so to speak) obtaining a copy of his just-released memoir, HARD TIME: A Brit in America’s Toughest Jail (Mainstream Press/Random House) than readers in the U.K. or Canada? All they would have to do — and I would encourage it, if you are at all interested in the challenges of turning personal experience into compelling narrative — is waltz into a bookstore.
Heck, U.K. readers wouldn’t even have to budge from their respective desk chairs to obtain a copy: Amazon UK would be perfectly happy to deliver it to their doorsteps (with free shipping, even). Canadian readers willing to invest a few clicks of a mouse would have similar success in negotiations with Amazon Canada.
But here in the U.S. — which, lest we forget, is where most of the story in the memoir takes place — hopeful readers must throw themselves upon the mercy of foreign nationals to obtain a copy. The only option for those of us wielding good, hard American currency is to take advantage of a U.K. online bookseller’s,the Book Depository, willingness to ship to North America for free. (Which may be the less expensive option for Canadian readers, incidentally; would-be online purchasers north of the border may wish to do a bit of comparison-shopping.)
I’m glad that we have this option, but (as, again, some of you may recall from yesterday) it strikes me as a trifle silly. Here we have an in-depth, first-hand account of the inside of a jail that not only is on my side of the Atlantic, but whose sheriff has been appearing on the national news constantly in recent weeks. For anyone who has been following the intense controversy over the civil rights of illegal aliens in Arizona, I would think that it would be intensely interesting to learn how people awaiting trial there might be treated.
Because I feel very strongly that this is both an important story and a good book, I’m going to do something unusual today: with the permission of Shaun and his publisher, I am posting the first page of HARD TIME here. That way, at least page 1 will be directly available to U.S. readers, albeit in a slightly modified form.
Modified how, you ask? Shaun has very kindly edited the language to be family-friendly, so that I may post it here. (In case you hadn’t noticed, I routinely avoid profanity out of deference to my teenage readers, whose Internet viewing may be constrained by parental control programs, and readers whose access is through library computers, which often feature similar controls. I remain deeply committed to making sure that every aspiring writer with Internet access can take full advantage of the resources here at Author! Author!)
Even if prison memoir is not your proverbial cup of tea — even if memoir isn’t your usual reading material — consider it as a first page. Purely on a story level, I think you’ll agree that it is a grabber. Those of you currently working on memoirs might also want to check out Shaun’s bio, located at the very end of this post: since what a memoirist is selling in a proposal is not just pretty writing, it might be helpful to gain further insight on what got his agent and publisher excited about his life story.
Here, then, is that first page, presented for the first time on my native soil. I am proud to bring it to you; this author has taken a tremendous number of risks to bring this story to us.
16 May 2002
“Tempe Police Department! We have a warrant! Open the door!”
The stock quotes on my computer screen lost all importance as I rushed to the peephole. It was blacked out. Boots thudded up the outdoor stairs to our apartment.
Bang, bang, bang, bang!
Wearing only boxer shorts, I ran to the bedroom. “Claudia, wake up! It’s the cops!”
“Tempe Police Department! Open the door!”
My girlfriend scrambled from the California king. “What should we do?” she asked, anxiously fixing her pink pajamas.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!
“Open the door!”
We searched each other’s faces.
“Better open it,” I said, but before I could make it to the door – boom! – it leapt off its hinges.
Big men in black fatigues and ballistic armour blitzed through the doorframe, aiming guns at us. Afraid of being shot, I froze. I gaped as they proceeded to convert my living room into a scene from a war movie.
“Tempe Police Department! Get on the ground now!”
“Police! Police! On your bellies now!”
“Hands above your heads!”
“Don’t move!”
As I dropped to the floor, they fell upon me. There was a beating in my chest as if I had more than one heart. Crushed by hands, elbows, knees, and boots, I could barely breathe. Cold steel snapped around my wrists. I was hoisted like a puppet onto my feet. As they yanked Claudia up by the cuffs, she pinched her eyes shut; when she opened them, tears spilled out.
That, my friends, is an opening. No false suspense there, eh?
So much for the treat. On to the challenge. Let’s give away some books.
While we’re at it, let’s talk about an opportunity for all of you to generate what we here at Author! Author! like to call ECQLC (eye-catching query letter candy), nifty little credentials to plump up author bios and that pesky background paragraph in one’s query letter. The response to the recent Author! Author!/WHISPER Great First Pages Made Even Better contest was so overwhelming that I’ve been thinking very seriously about how difficult it can be for hard-working, conscientious aspiring writers to come up with ECQLC. Literary contests can be both expensive and extremely time-consuming to enter.
Now, I’m relatively positive that all of you are already aware that I do not rule the universe. If I did, talented writers would be granted three extra hours per week, over and above the time available to the rest of humanity, in which to pursue their craft. Millicent the agency screener would be a well-paid, literature-loving reader allowed both the time to read pages and pages of submissions before making up her mind and the discretion to say more often, “To heck with current market trends — I really like this writer’s voice!” And, of course, published exposés of government-run institutions would be readily available for purchase within easy driving distance of those institutions.
Need further evidence that I’m not in charge? Do cows give free chocolate milk to every child they encounter?
I can, however, do my bit to help make life a trifle easier for aspiring writers, a goal near and dear to my heart. My next effort in that direction: I shall be hosting writing contests here more often — and to maximize their ECQLC-generating oomph, I shall be publishing the winning entries here on a regular basis.
Speaking of which, I am pleased to announce…
The Author! Author!/HARD TIME Words Across the Water Contest Since the difficulties of acquainting readers in one country with the work of writers in another has been much on my mind over the past couple of days, and because I was delighted to see that entries to my last contest came from all over the English-speaking world, I think it might be interesting to ask writers inside and outside the U.S. to share their experiences a little. I would also, given our recent series on self-editing, like an excuse to encourage all of you to show, rather than tell, and to make your point through specifics, instead of generalities.
The prizes
In addition to boasting rights and ECQLC, the grand prize winner will receive a free MiniConsult: a half-hour telephone consultation with me to talk about any aspect of your writing career that strikes you as relevant. In the past, writers have used MiniConsults to refine pitches for literary conferences, professionalize their query letters, nail down a book category, discuss marketing options…if it’s about your writing, it’s fair game.
Top-placing entries in each category (hold your horses; I’m getting to that) will be published here at Author! Author!, accompanied by an explanation of precisely why each was so darned good. (Hey, talented writers often go for years without hearing either praise or feedback more specific than a hearty, “Well done!”)
U.S.-based entrants will also be eligible to win copies of HARD TIME. (Had I mentioned that it was kind of hard to find in the States?) Non-U.S.-based entrants, will, I’m afraid, have to track down the book for themselves at any of the fine local emporia that happen to carry it. To level the prize pool, the judges reserve the right to create a sub-category of winners specific to these entries.
Piqued your interest yet? Good. Let’s talk about how to win those prizes.
The rules
1. Compose a short scene — 500 words or less, please — that shows (not tells!) something about being a creative person in your native land that you think will surprise and enlighten writers who live elsewhere.
Or, to put it another way:
U.S.-based entrants: what about American creative life would you most like writers in other countries to find fascinating?
Non-U.S.-based entrants: what’s the single aspect of your country’s (or province, or region’s) creative life of which would you most like writers in the U.S. to be aware?
Now’s your chance, folks. Have at it.
2. Either fiction or nonfiction narratives may be entered, but only scenes will be considered. Only one entry per writer, please.
This is the show, don’t tell part, folks. Lectures on international relations will not work here. Nor will diatribes. Create some characters, already, and don’t skimp on the telling details.
3. On a separate page within the entry document, please include your name, country and city of origin or current residence, e-mail address, and, if you are under 25, your age. Hey, if I receive a lot of good entries from young writers, I’m open to creating another category for prizes.
4. All entries must be in standard format for book manuscripts, as well as previously unpublished in the English-speaking world. They must also be free of profanity.
If you don’t know how book format differs from short story format — or that either had a regulation format — please avail yourself of the abundant explanations and practical examples under the HOW TO FORMAT A MANUSCRIPT category on the archive list at right. And if there’s a formatting point that confuses you, for heaven’s sake, leave a comment asking about it.
On the non-profanity front: did you miss my explanation above about my teenage readership? Let’s all do our part to make this forum accessible to them.
5. Make it your best writing — and proofread, for heaven’s sake. In response to many, many requests, this time around, the judging will be based purely upon literary merit, interest of story, and, of course, adherence to these rules. For once, let’s take a vacation from marketability and just tell one another some stories.
6. All entries must be submitted as a Word document, attached to an e-mail. No exceptions. Word is the industry standard, so if you are writing in some other word processing program, you will need to get used to translating your documents in order to work with an agent or editor anyway.
7. Attach the Word document you’ve created to an e-mail. Include your last name in the subject line. Believe me, I’ve seen my inbox crammed with messages all entitled Anne Mini contest often enough for this lifetime. Give yours a subject line that will enable me to differentiate it from the other 150 entries, please.
Oh, and would it kill you to include a polite note in the body of the e-mail? That’s always nice to see.
8. Send your entry to anneminicontest@gmail(dot)com by midnight on September 6, 2010. That’s Labor Day in the U.S., for the benefit of those of you living elsewhere. As always, the deadline is midnight your time, not mine.
Has that gotten your creative juices flowing? I certainly hope so; I’m genuinely looking forward to what all of you have to say. Not to mention sharing Shaun’s memoir with a few of my compatriots.
Hey, I’m not entirely sure I don’t have all of the copies currently in the U.S. sitting on the corner of my desk at the moment. Let’s get some international dialogue going, folks — and, as always, keep up the good work!
P.S.: memoirists, here’s that promised bio.
Shaun Attwood grew up in North West England where he was an early participant in the burgeoning rave scene that soon took over the whole country. Graduating from Liverpool University in 1991 with a business degree, he immigrated to Phoenix, Arizona to try his luck in the world of finance, and rose quickly through the ranks to become a top-producing stockbroker.
But it was not quite plain sailing. Shaun lost control of his life and finances in the mid-nineties, declared bankruptcy and quit his job.
The rave bug had never left him, and Shaun started to throw raves in Arizona while investing in technology stocks online. By 1999, he was living in a luxurious mountainside home in Tucson’s Sin Vacas, working as a day trader in the day and partying at night. It was the time of the dot-com bubble and he made over a million on paper, but the bubble was soon to burst and Shaun lost most of his fortune and moved back to Phoenix.
In May 2002, he was arrested in Scottsdale during a SWAT-team dawn raid, and alleged to be the head of an organisation involved in a club-drug conspiracy. The local media described him as “bigger than Sammy the Bull.” Facing a life sentence, he entered a lengthy legal battle.
In 2004, Shaun started the blog, Jon’s Jail Journal, documenting the inhumane conditions at the cockroach-infested Madison Street jail run by Sheriff Joe Arpaio. After two years of being held on remand while three trial dates were cancelled, Shaun signed a plea bargain admitting guilt to money laundering and drug offences. He was sentenced to 9 ½ years, of which he served almost 6.
Shaun had only read finance books prior to his arrest. While incarcerated, he submerged himself in literature – reading 268 books in 2006 alone, including many literary classics. By reading original texts in philosophy and psychology he sought to better understand himself and his past behaviour. His sister sent him a book on yoga, which he still practices.
In September 2004, blog excerpts were published in The Guardian attracting further media attention, including several BBC news stories.
Shaun was released in December 2007, and has since kept Jon’s Jail Journal going by posting prison stories sent to him from the friends he made inside. In July 2008, Shaun won a first prize, a Koestler/Hamish Hamilton Award, for a short story, which he read to an audience at the Royal Festival Hall. In February 2009, Shaun moved to London to work for the McLellan Practice speaking to audiences of youths about his jail experiences and the consequences of his drug taking. He has been working on his memoir ever since.
It’s 1943. As air-raid sirens blare in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, eight-year-old Saburo walks through the peach forests of Taoyuan. The least favored son of a Taiwanese politician, Saburo is in no hurry to get home to the taunting and abuse he suffers at the hands of his parents and older brother. In the forest he meets Yoshiko, whose descriptions of her loving family are to Saburo like a glimpse of paradise. Meeting her is a moment he will remember forever, and for years he will try to find her again. When he finally does, she is by the side of his oldest brother and greatest rival.
When Bob Tarte left the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan for the country, he was thinking peace and quiet. He’d write his music reviews in the solitude of his rural home on the outskirts of everything.
Bob Tarte’s second book, Fowl Weather, returns us to the Michigan house where pandemonium is the governing principle, and where 39 animals rule the roost. But as things seem to spiral out of control, as his parents age and his mother’s grasp on reality loosens as she battles Alzheimer’s disease, Bob unexpectedly finds support from the gaggle of animals around him. They provide, in their irrational fashion, models for how to live.
Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy after a fateful morning on their Chicago rooftop. 
