One of the most intriguing parts of being a new author is that I’m often confronted with unfamiliar situations that require an ethical response, or at least a polite response. Such as:

If someone reviews my book, should I comment? I don’t mean bad reviews here, thank God. What I mean is if someone writes something friendly and nice on her blog about The Fiction Class, should I respond? The obvious answer is yes, but it’s not so simple. For example, recently I read a blog that had a very nice discussion of TFC. Then I, all enthusiasm, posted a friendly comment. Immediately the discussion stopped and everyone went away. I could see the problem. It’s like discussing sex with your friends in front of your mother. No matter what you say you’re in trouble. On the other hand, doesn’t one want to acknowledge people who say nice things about you? I’ve resolved this by using a fifty fifty rule. Half the time I respond and half the time I don’t.

Another conundrum: Should you give yourself five stars on good reads? If you haven’t been to www.goodreads.com, you should go because it’s wonderful. Readers review books and give them a ranking from one to five. Mine was 3.45, as of this writing, which caused me a tremendous amount of depression until I happened to be looking at Anna Karenina and saw that was at 3.9. Taste varies. However if I gave myself a 5, I could bump my ranking up a little. But would that be right? I decided no, though I could be persuaded otherwise. (And I did ask my brother to give me a 5.)

A corollary of this is, do you have to give your friends good reviews? That’s a tough one. I’ve met a lot of people who’ve written books and I like most of them. The problem is that if I give five stars to everything, then I’m devaluing my critical reputation, such as it is. Which is more important: friendship or integrity? I resolved this by not reviewing books by friends, for the most part, but then you get people mad by not posting reviews. I plan to resolve this issue by becoming more friendly with people who don’t write books.

Here’s another one: If you are at a book signing with another author, and her friends come along to buy her book, is it okay to look pitiful so they will buy yours as well. That’s a no-brainer. Of course.

Finally, if you talk to someone who mentions they belong to a book club, should you immediately mention your own book? And a corollary would be, if you are leading a book club, should you recommend your own book? In this case I didn’t but only because I knew that everyone in the book club had already bought it.  And at the moment I’m only leading one book club.

Such are the issues that preoccupy me. What do you think? What would you do?

Bear with me. This is a long story, but I hope an interesting one.

A few weeks ago I had to make an announcement at church about the book club I’m leading. We were reading THREE CUPS OF TEA, which we all liked. After the service my minister told me that one of the elderly gentlemen in church wanted to talk to me about the book. Praise the Lord, I thought. Just what I need. However, in my continuing efforts to lead a decent life, I called up this gentleman, who proposed that I stop by his office on Thursday morning. Even better, I thought. 

He had a small office on Main Street of my town. He met me at the door, smiling, charming, very old. He had a tall, elegant, beautiful secretary. She offered me tea. I noticed that on his walls were photographs of him with every prominent person I could think of from the last thirty years, among them presidents, astronauts and financial leaders. It turned out this gentleman had lived a fascinating life. He’d been a player in some of the news stories I’d worked on when I was a reporter at FORTUNE Magazine. I had a great time, was pleased that I met him. Then he told me he’d written a book. Would I like to read it?

You have to understand I am fanatical about preserving writing time. I don’t talk on the phone during the day, etc. etc. But I figured I’d gone this far. I might just as well go the next step and so I took his manuscript. I put it on my kitchen table and ignored it for the next week. But then, one afternoon, I picked it up and wound up reading the whole thing in one gulp. It was great.

This next part is where I hope this story gets interesting. I knew he’d want to know what I thought of the book. I wanted to give it back him, but when I stopped by his office a few days later it was closed. I couldn’t just leave the manuscript on the front stoop. Our town is safe but this was his life’s work and I didn’t want a dog to come along and pee on it. I could have given it to him at church, but I didn’t want him to have to schlep it around. So I thought, what the heck, I’ll mail it to him. That way there will be no confusion.

So I went to the post office. I should say that I spend more time in the post office than anyone in America. I’m always mailing out letters or bookmarks or presents or care packages. So I’ve come to know the postal worker quite well, plus, her son wrestles on the same team as my son. I believe she’s from Kenya. We always settle in for a chat when we see each other. When I handed over my package she looked at the address and said, “Main Street?”

I said, “I know. It’s ridiculous. But…” and I started to explain the situation.

She cut me off and said, “But I’ll just deliver this myself. I meet with them every afternoon for tea.” It turned out she and this gentleman and his secretary were good friends.

Why does this all matter to me?

Because I love the fact that these three people, seemingly so different, are friends. Because in learning about the connection, it changed the way I saw each of them. It also made me realize how much I love finding connections in my writing—two characters who seem unalike but share something in common. There’s something combustible about those moments of discovery—there’s energy in it. There’s also surprise, communion, friendship. All good things.

So here is my holiday greeting to all: May you have many connections!

The other day I was talking to a friend about what we were reading. We talked about the subject for ten minutes until I remembered I had just written an essay on that very topic for two great blogs: What are Writers Reading and America Reads. (Of course, I didn’t mention the blog posts to my friend because it seemed presumptuous to cite myself in the middle of a conversation.) However, I did think friendly Bloomer readers might be interested in what I wrote, so, here it is:

Every October when the finalists for the National Book Award are announced, I go out and buy the five books. (I consider that to be my annual Christmas present to myself and the book industry.) Usually I haven’t heard of any of the books, which is part of what makes it so much fun because it exposes me to work that is completely unexpected (and occasionally disagreeable.) After all, most of the time when I sit down with a book, I’ve carefully chosen something I think I’m going to like. I believe it’s important, especially for a writer, to expose myself to new voices.

So far, I’ve read only one of the five books—AMERICAN SALVAGE by Bonnie Jo Campbell. This is a collection of short stories published by the Wayne State University Press. The book itself , a paperback, has a surprising physical heft to it. The cover is smooth and heavy and the pages thick, the type gorgeous. It made me realize how beautiful a book can be—even leaving outside the words that are in it.  The stories in the collection are intense, occasionally funny, occasionally so bleak I felt like someone had put a rock on me. A few of them I loved. The first story, titled “The Trespasser,” is about a family that comes home to find that a trespasser has been living in their house. I loved the way Campbell handled the omniscient point of view, something I’ve always wanted to try in a short story. My favorite story, “Falling,” was about a woman who has to come to terms with a young man who betrayed her trust. The characters were flawed, but good-hearted. The final paragraph was very moving—I love a story that ends with hope of redemption.

Next up on my list of NBA nominees is LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN (Random House) by Colum McCann. Then IN OTHER ROOMS, OTHER WONDERS (W.W. Norton & Co.) by Daniyal Mueenuddin,  LARK AND TERMITE (Alfred A. Knopf) by Jayne Anne Phillips and FAR NORTH (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Marcel Theroux.

How about you? What are you reading now?

I always try to say yes to things, which has worked out pretty well, with a few horrifying exceptions. So when fellow Gotham teacher Masha Hamilton asked me if I’d be interested in helping with the Afghan Women’s Writing Project I said yes and immediately forgot all about it. Several months went by and then she said, “How about now?” With the result that for the last few weeks I’ve been teaching a writing class on-line to a group of young Afghan women and what an experience it has been. What stories they have to tell!

The other night I had an e mail from a young woman, Shogofa, who wrote a lovely essay about the smell of rice. Her family was hungry, but her neighbors had rice; the smell of it was tormenting her. So her mother hugged and comforted her, which made her realize that her mother’s smell was so much more important to her than that of the rice. Then her mother died, but before she did, she asked her husband to take some of the little money they had, to buy her daughter some rice. She wanted her daughter to have that comfort.  The story was heartbreaking, but also inspiring and full of love and intelligence. What a joy to be able to connect to people like this.

In Masha’s words, the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, was “begun as a way to allow the voices of Afghan women—too often silenced—to enter the world directly, without any mediation.” The women, some of them students at Kabul University, some of them survivors of refugee camps, some of them witnesses to hardships of life under the Taliban, must make their way to a computer, which is a struggle in itself.  The teachers, who sign up for a rotation of a few weeks, post lectures and exercises.  (Write about a place that was important to you, for example. Or, write about a smell.) There’s so much about Afghanistan in the newspapers, but it’s just not the same as reading an account by one woman, as I did the other night, of her meeting with Afghan President Karzai. One of the most important aspects of being a writer is having something to say, and these women definitely do.

So, if you’d like to read more, please go over to the blog site, which is where a lot of these essays are published. You can find it at  http://awwproject.wordpress.com   Then please comment on their essays and add your words to theirs.

Sola! (which means peace.)

First off, some very exciting news. My story, “Triplet,” has been selected for the anthology 2009 BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING. Dave Eggers was editor, Marjane Satrapi wrote the introduction and, as of two days ago, the book was featured in displays in every bookstore I went into.

Which brings me to the next point which is that my story was originally published by anderbo.com, which is an on-line literary magazine edited by Rick Rofihe. One of the subjects my students spend a lot of time talking about, especially toward the end of term, is what do editors want. So, I asked Rick some questions about that and here are his answers:

SB:  Can you describe Anderbo in three words?
RR:  Fiction. Poetry. “fact”.
 
SB: How many submissions do you get and how many do you publish?
RR: We put up about one poet every 3 weeks; one short story every 5 weeks; and one non-fiction (”fact”) piece every 8 weeks. The anderbo.com  acceptance rate is less than 1% overall; probably we receive submissions from 10 poets (up to 6 poems each) daily, along with, say, 4 story submissions and 1 “fact”. We have a LOT of editors weighing in on the fiction, editors who are pretty much more analytical and articulate than I’ll ever be.
 
SB: What qualities does the ideal Anderbo story have?
RR: They’re not what I call “situational/ensemble”; that is, the protagonist gets most — maybe 85% — of the story’s word-space. The light’s on the main character most of the time in the site’s best stories, I think.
 
SB: Do you ever like something, but think it’s not quite there and give the author suggestions?
RR: I might try to lead them to water: only sometimes do they drink….
 
SB: Do you publish works by debut authors?
RR:  Most seem to be. Of all those ones so far, probably Kayla Soyer-Stein’s work was most instantly-astonishing to me: her poem, “To My Landlord”  and her novella, “We Were There and Now We’re Here”

SB: What sort of work would you like to see more of?
RR: Good, well-structured, 1500- to 2500-word stories are not as plentiful as I’d hoped….

Only once in my life have I been punched in the face. So far. And that was a direct result of my writing.

I should backtrack to say I grew up in the Sixties on Long Island, in a neighborhood that was middle class and homogeneous. There were a lot of war veterans on my street and one of my favorite memories is of my neighbor, who had been a parachutist.  On weekend afternoons, after he had a bit to drink, he liked to hitch up his son to a parachute and that to the back of his car and then he’d take off down our road. I can still see my neighbor’s son floating over Cynthia Drive, his father red-faced and gunning the engine.

However, my mother was concerned that my upbringing was too sheltered. Why she wasn’t concerned about my brother I don’t know, but she decided to send me to a camp for children from the inner city. It would be a learning experience. (I’m reminded of Woody Allen’s great line about how he was sent to an interfaith camp where he was beaten up by children of all races and creeds.)

I’m small now, but when I was young I was like a whisper. I had pale white skin and was always either bruised or eaten up by mosquitoes. I was not a threat. However, I did have a journal that I wrote in faithfully. Every night I wrote down my thoughts and put the journal under my pillow. Of course it took all of 23 minutes for my fellow cabin mates to figure this out, and so every day after I trooped off to breakfast, they read my journal out loud and laughed. Unfortunately, I only found this out later.

There was a girl in our bunk who was an Amazon. Huge, powerful, strong, and I wrote down in my journal, meaning it as a compliment, that she could have been the leader of the Black Panthers. She didn’t take that well. I, oblivious, walked into my cabin one afternoon. She held up my journal, read it out loud, lifted me up by my neck and punched me in the face. She got into trouble. I spent the rest of the week with a bandage over my nose and the next summer my mother sent me to a camp where we put on musicals.

But I still remember the horror of the moment when I realized she was holding my journal. That was actually worse than the physical pain. It was the feeling of exposure. People who didn’t know me were reading my words and criticizing them. It’s something I think about at the start of a new semester. I understand when I see how nervous my students are about having strangers read their work and I sympathize. We all just want some mercy.

How about you? Have you ever gotten into trouble with your writing?

Last week I went to Berlin to visit my son. He’s been studying there for five months and I’ve missed him terribly and had been counting down the days to this visit. Being of a somewhat gloomy disposition, however, or perhaps just because I’m battle-scarred, I was convinced that something disastrous was going to happen before I got on the plane to Berlin. I anticipated a litany of things, but what I didn’t expect was that five days before the trip, I walked downstairs and found my dog lying motionless at the foot of the steps.

I’ll interrupt myself to say that the dog is now fine. He had a fever. He’s cured and panting right next to me. However, I didn’t know that at the time and there are few problems more terrible than seeing your beloved Golden Retriever staring at you mournfully and trying to figure out how to move that 110 pound unmoving friend to the vet. Thank God one of my best friends is a nurse and she figured out how to lift him onto a sheet and move him.

But the point of all this is that as I was sitting at the vet’s office, clutching onto Tino’s paw, I was thinking about how if it hadn’t been for my crazy dog, I might never have written a novel. He’s always been a tad high-strung, but when he was young he was an absolute lunatic. My husband had to walk backwards into the house because if Tino saw him full on he started to pee. That was just the least of it. So at one point, when he was at the vet and doing his best to climb onto the poor man’s shoulders, the vet mentioned to me that there were tranquilizers for dogs that worked in much the same way as they did for people.

That fact stayed with me and a few years later I was arrested by an image of a woman who is trying to decide whether or not to take her dog’s medication. Something in the humor and tragedy of that moved me, and that was the original start of my first novel, Pitch. Recently I went back and read through that scene and I thought how wonderful it is for writers that we get to write about those we love.  Furry or otherwise.

So, thank heavens Tino is okay. And I had a great time in Berlin.

How about you? Do you ever write about pets?

I think a lot about how to write—both because I’m trying to teach other people how to do it and because I’m trying to figure it out myself.  So imagine my pleasure when last week I got to hear two quite respectable authors talk about their own processes. One was Arthur Phillips, whose new novel, The Song is You, was just reviewed on the front page of The New York Times, and the other was Lee Child, whose Jack Reacher series of thrillers is one of the most popular out there.

Arthur Phillips was leading a workshop at a Just Words program at the Greenwich Arts Council (and I’ll be teaching a workshop there myself on point of view on May 21). He spoke about the “Mysteries of Structure,” giving a fascinating analysis of how he’d come to construct his four books. He wrote each book in a different way, in one case starting off because he had a feeling about a city he wanted to convey. In another case knowing the ending scene and needing to figure out how to get there. What I found interesting was that he described structuring as though it was a whole separate process—just as you might set aside time to consider a particular character, he set aside time to think about structure. Where should the book begin? End? This seems obvious, and yet it’s very different than the organic approach that many people, myself included, use, which is to set a character in motion and see where she goes.

Lee Child spoke at a meeting of the Westchester Library Association (at which I was honored by receiving a Washington Irving award, which was a great great thrill.) He spoke about how he gets his ideas for his novels and said that he needs three intersecting ideas to get his novels going. For example, in his newest novel, he got one idea from finding out that there was a (secret, I think) list of twelve characteristics of terrorists. If a police officer found a character exhibiting all twelve traits, he was  required to act. The other idea came from his niece, who thought up a name that sparked his interest, and the third idea I forget.  But the important thing was that he required himself to have three ideas before starting.

Interestingly, both men became most enthusiastic when responding to the question of which authors had influenced them—in the case of Phillips it was Vladimir Nabokov, and in the case of Child, Alistair MacLean.  It reminded me, at the end of the day, all writers are people who like to read.  And that’s the best process of all.

How about you? What’s your writing process?  

It’s not often you witness passion (if you’re not watching a Russell Crowe movie), but I got a firsthand look this weekend when I visited the NY Botanical Garden. My sister-in-law Peggy is a botanical illustrator and she was visiting and it seemed like a fun place to go. I like plants and trees (and, in fact, a tree plays a very important role in my new novel!!!) So, I expected to have a nice time.

But the moment Peggy stepped onto the gardens, she was transformed. It was like being on a field trip with Joan of Arc. She quivered with excitement as she looked at every plant and bush; she knew the story behind each plant (and there are wonderful stories) and then we went into the botanical library, which had never truly beckoned me before. The librarians were setting up an exhibition by George Ehret.  I know. I’d never heard of him either, but Peggy almost fell right over. He was a very influential illustrator, and even though he was a stranger to me, as I saw him through Peggy’s eyes, he became someone miraculous.

One of the things I encourage my students to do is write about their obsessions, but not until I watched Peggy at the botanical gardens did I truly realize how important passion is for a writer. For one thing, you want to share your passion and you desperately want to draw the reader in.  Peggy could not fully enjoy the exhibit unless she knew that I was enjoying  it too, and in order for that to happen, she had to make me understand who Ehret was.  Isn’t this the impulse that makes us want to write—the desire to shout, “You have to hear this story!”

Also, passion is big-hearted. Literally, I think your heart swells when you feel strongly about something, and that great-heartedness is the foundation of great writing. Passion is also specific. Peggy didn’t adore Ehret because she thought his drawing was nice. She adored him because of the specific colors and techniques he used, and she was precise in explaining them to me. Passion is also defining. I looked at Peggy differently after our botanical visit—I felt as though we’d shared something special.

And, speaking of passionate people, one of my favorite just had her first story accepted for publication. Michelle Chan is a frequent commenter on this blog, and a truly fearless writer, and her first story is to be published in Sinister Tales Magazine.  Many, many congratulations.

So what about you? What are you passionate about?

I was at a book club recently and someone asked me a question that no one has before. How, she wondered, was it possible that it took me seven years to write my first book? What did I spend my time doing?

So, this is the answer.

I started off as a short story writer and spent ten years doing that, and when I decided to work on a novel, it took a while to get the hang of prolonging a story from chapter to chapter. It took a lot of reading of novels and outlining and thinking to figure all that out.  (I probably could have saved myself a lot of time by enrolling in an MFA program, but I had too little money and too many kids.)

So, after a while, about a year, when I had one hundred pages written, I went to a conference, met with an editor and she said, Your writing is good but your main character is boring. She needs a job. Unfortunately, I had written one hundred pages of a character sitting in her house and thinking.

So I gave her a job (piano teacher) and spent another year rewriting the novel and went to another conference and this time it was voted best novel there and the prize was an agent. So I was delighted and she said this novel is great, but you need to rewrite it because you need more conflict. Plus, I hadn’t actually finished it yet.

So, that took a year of going back and forth and then it was done, or I thought it was done, but one unhappy thing led to another and at the end of the day the agent and I parted ways and I needed to find a new one. By now I was four years into this.

So I set about finding a new agent and that took some doing, but I did, and she loved my book, but thought it should be rewritten. Of course at any point here I could have said, no. I don’t want to do that, but the fact is this agent, like many of the people in publishing that I’ve dealt with, was very smart and very generous with her ideas and the fact is, I thought she was right. The flaws she saw were real and I wanted the book to be as good as possible.

Anyway, after some more revising and submitting and rejecting, I started a new novel and, after four years, that went in a similar direction and then one miraculous day, I sat down and began thinking about The Fiction Class. My experience with The Fiction Class was completely different than all the previous years of aggravation. I found an editor and agent who loved my book more or less as it was and it was published, etc. And instead of taking me seven years to write, it took about a year.

So, what do I take away from that? You have to love what you’re doing and take pleasure in the writing and hope that everything else will fall into place. How about you? How long have you been working on your novel/short story?