The great thing about being published is that you never again have to answer the question:  So, Susan, anyone interested in your book?  The bad thing is that you have to deal with another bone-chilling question, which is:   “So how’s your book doing?”

The short answer is, okay. As far as I can tell. It’s been two months and The Fiction Class is still in the front of a lot of bookstores and my amazon rankings, which I shouldn’t be looking at, but do, because my husband keeps telling me, which is another story, have been quite good. My editor and agent return my calls, which is always a good sign. Of course, I could do the obvious thing and ask someone in authority, but people in authority make me nervous and I’ve discovered that when there is something very bad or very good to tell you, someone always does. (My next book is going to be titled, My Life as a Coward.)

But the point I am making my way toward is that, the reason I know, in my heart, that my book is doing well is because I’ve been getting fan mail. And by fan mail, I don’t mean that people drop a line and say, “Nice book.”  I mean that people, often women, often of about my age—I can tell—write me long, long emails telling me about what The Fiction Class means to them and how they relate to Arabella and how they’ve always dreamed of being writers themselves.  Is there any better feeling than to know you are connecting with the people who are reading your book?  This is why we become writers, right? Because we think we’re strange and we have to put it all down on the page, and then it turns out that everyone feels that way and they are so relieved to find out they are not alone.

Of course I always write a letter back to whoever sends me email, and, I always send bookmarks. Both because I like the idea of doing something physically to say thank you for reaching out to me, and also, because I like to imagine little TFC ripples going on all around the country, with people saying, Have you seen that book with the apple on it? Here, take a book mark! (I get a kick out of tracking where the letters are coming from. They started off in New York, and then a lot came from Virginia and then it started to move west and yesterday I got one from Washington. I picture The Fiction Class seeping its way across the country. ) Seeping and rippling! That reminds me of an exercise I used to do with my class in which you’d write a paragraph about making love but you could only use cooking verbs.

Which reminds me that I have a writing exercise contest.  You can get the info on my web site (www.susanjbreen.com), but the key things to know are that it’s free and every month the exercise changes. This month the exercise is to write a page or two of a story starting with the line, “Why are you wearing that?” Then email it in to me and I’ll pick the best one and post it. (You can check out previous winners on my site.) The winner also gets a free copy of my book!

So what about you? Who do you imagine will connect with your writing?

Some years ago, I was at a conference and my teacher, a brusque and somewhat imperious man, was scheduled to read from his new novel. I went to the reading, of course, and was surprised to see he had a glass of scotch hidden behind the podium—suffice it to say, I recognized the color and that was not Poland Spring. Every time he read a page, he took a swig of scotch. It was a long reading. When it was over, he couldn’t move, and some obeisant MFA student had to cart him off, but I remember thinking at the time, “Oh, get a grip.” And I thought that up until I had my first reading at Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago and looked down at my glass of water on the podium and thought, if only…

Even I think it’s ridiculous that I get so nervous before a reading, particularly given that what I do for a living is stand up in front of people and talk. And I never feel nervous before a class, but there is something about reading your writing in front of people that feels different. There’s a strong autobiographical element to my writing, and so, when I read, I feel as though I am quite literally baring my soul. It would be a little bit like going to a psychiatrist and beginning to talk and then realizing that there were thirty people listening to you.

Matters were not helped along by the fact that I got to my first reading about an hour and a half early. I am chronically punctual, and the positive side of that is that even if a train breaks down, I arrive on time, but the bad side is that I am always roaming around the city, trying to kill time, and in this particular instance I was with my husband, who has a very loud voice. We walked into the store, my husband walked right over to the New Releases table, and remarked, so that any but the deaf might hear, that there were no copies of my book to be seen. I snapped that he was going to get me banned from Barnes & Noble and we argued for a while and then there was an hour and fifteen minutes to go.

So then we went to get something to eat. There was a wonderful bakery on the fourth floor of this particular B&N and I got a latte, but for some God-unknown reason my husband did not want his own latte; he wanted to share mine. (You see how after twenty five years you begin to argue about everything.) I am good about sharing, but I was absolutely convinced he was going to knock the latte onto my shirt—I could literally feel it searing a scar onto my chest—and so every time my husband would reach for the latte, I would knock his hand away. It seems funny to me now, but at the time I was ready to knife him, and things did not get better when he told me to make sure to go to the bathroom before the reading.

Anyway, we finished the latte and now there were about ten minutes to go and we argued over which of us would walk into the auditorium first and whether to put our coats onto an empty chair in a front row and then my son showed up, which was a great treat. And from then on everything went well. It turned out that the reason there were no copies of my book downstairs was because they were all on the fourth floor. There were quite a few people in attendance, some of whom I didn’t even know, and they all smiled and were friendly and clapped and some even bought books, and then we went out with old and new friends for a wonderful dinner.

On the train ride back, Brad and I were both glowing. He seemed to genuinely enjoy the reading and I was relieved to be alive and for the first time in a while I felt relaxed. In fact, I was quite calm and then Brad said, “I have an idea. Let’s check your amazon ranking!” The rest of that discussion I’ll leave to your imagination.

So what about you? Do you get nervous when you have to speak in public?

Today is the official publication date for my book, and contrary to all my expectations, a meteor has not hit the earth. Yet. In fact, the day itself is fairly quiet. I plan to drive over to my local Barnes & Noble to see my books (which are supposed to be in the front of the store—thank you Penguin!). Later today I’m teaching my class and we’ll have a bottle of champagne, which, given that there are fourteen people in the class, is not likely to lead to much debauchery. And then, tonight, some friends are coming over and we will have more champagne.

Not to say that nothing exciting is going on. For one thing, for this week, I am the official blogger for the Penguin web site, which is a big, big honor (and I have put the link in the blogroll). Let me tell you that going to the Penguin site and seeing my name (and face) alongside some of those other authors is just surreal. I spent a good part of my childhood in a library looking at those little penguins on the spines of books and it’s thrilling to be a part of it.

There are lots of other things going on—reviews and articles and readings and so forth, but the whole experience is different than a movie premiere, for example. There is no one moment at which my editor trots out my book and people applaud (unless, of course, she’s not telling me something). When I think of the other major experiences of my life (marriage and having children), they have followed a more traditional narrative arc. There’s all that excitement before the baby is born and then you have that big climactic moment of labor and then, there’s the baby. With a book, the narrative arc is more like a Chekhov story; life goes on and you’re different, but in a quiet way.

Which is really fine with me, because as exciting and wonderful as all this is, the fact of the matter is that I don’t want to do anything that takes me away from writing. At the end of the day, I’m happiest when I’m sitting in front of a computer, thinking about a story. So I’ll drink my champagne, and then I’ll go back to work. 

How about you? What will you do the day your story or book is published?

 

What did I do right?

In two weeks time, I (and hopefully you) will be able to walk into a bookstore and buy my book. For me, this is a sensation that is surreal. Two years ago, my beautiful gleaming book was nothing more than a bunch of notes that I was writing down in a diary in a Whole Foods store near Columbus Circle, and then it was a ream of computer paper piled up on my desk, and then a somewhat neater pile with fewer marks on it. Then there were galleys with editorial marks and then it disappeared into the bowels of Plume and then it came out, all sort of awkward in ARC  (advance review copy) form, and then it came out again, all spiffed up and lovely, with beautiful colors and blurbs. And now it is going on sale and people who are not related to me are thinking about buying it.

Let me tell you, it feels great. People have told me that there’s a lot of angst associated with being published—the reviews, the disappointing sales, the stress of marketing, and so on, and I’m sure that’s true. I’m also sure that it’s very difficult to be beautiful because you never know if people really like you for you or your looks. But neither of these issues is up there with finding a cure to cancer. The fact is that somehow, remarkably, I have beaten the odds. My first novel is being published by a major commercial publisher;  I have done something right. And I keep trying to figure out what that is.

The Fiction Class is the third novel I wrote, but the first that I sold, and so I keep asking myself, how is it different from the other two. The first novel I ever tried to write, Pitch, was the story of a woman whose first lover, an eccentric musician, suddenly reappears in her life, forcing her to choose between the life she has and the life she once thought she wanted.  My second novel, Courting Disaster, was the story of a woman who has been engaged seventeen times and then falls in love. Both novels were finalists for major awards, so I think they were well-written, and yet they never made the cut. In the rejection letters, which I saved, so that I could torture myself, agents and editors praised the writing, but said they just didn’t love the book.

When I began to write The Fiction Class, I did have a sense that I had stumbled onto a topic that might have wide appeal. I know firsthand that a lot of people want to learn to write and I did think, that if I could do it right, I could probably sell this book. One thing that struck me was that my class evaluations always came back saying that the students felt that I was warm and friendly, but the rejection letters for my novels came back saying I was cold and bitter. So clearly I was doing something different when I was teaching than I was doing when I was writing. Then I realized, when I’m teaching, I’m concerned with keeping my students interested and entertaining them and I’m not thinking about myself quite so much.

So, I decided to pretend that I was teaching my novel to my students. I put imaginary names on post-it notes and stuck them in front of my computer, so that I could imagine a class sitting there, listening to me.  I stood up and spoke the words of the novel out loud.  I became much more conscious of the reader. And the novel almost wrote itself. I have never written anything so quickly and with so much pleasure.

So what’s my advice? As always, write what you have to write, but you might want to think about who you hope is going to read it. How about you? Who do you imagine reading your work?

One side note. I have a bunch of readings coming up and I will be posting the event schedule on my web site (www.susanjbreen.com) very soon. So if you’d like to meet face to face, please stop by and say hello.

Today (Jan. 29) something special is going on in the blogging community, which is that a number of us are getting together in support of a writer, Patry Francis, who is having the trade paperback version of her book released today, but is unfortunately unable to promote it because she is in the midst of dealing with some serious medical issues. Her book is called The Liar’s Diary and it sounds terrific. This is the premise: What would you do if your best friend was murdered—and your teenaged son was accused of the crime? How far would you go to protect him? (Her website is at www.patryfrancis.com and you can read her blog there and order the book. If you want.)

I’ve never met Patry, though I do enjoy her blog, and we are published by the same people (Plume) and our books were both mentioned in an article about potential Oprah picks, though mine was considered unlikely. Which is probably a whole other blog entry, that I should have written a while ago, but the point is that I sympathize and relate with Patry’s story. She struggled for years to get her book written, then published; she has four children and worked as a waitress and at a moment when she should be basking in happiness and reading good reviews, she is having to worry about cancer. Her prognosis actually sounds very good, but  cancer is scary, and you hear that word and your mind shuts down. Or mine does anyway.

Recently I went through a scare myself and I had to meet with a gynecological oncological surgeon, who is truly not anyone you ever want to have to meet. (Although as a person, he seemed quite lovely.) My husband and I had to sit in his waiting room for a while, and my husband is rapidly approaching sainthood in my eyes, because I am not a good patient. I worry a lot, and I express my worry quite vehemently, and the way I express it is by going over and over the words that doctors have said to me, analyzing each and every word for potential nuance. People have approached the Bible with less analysis than I bring to these conversations.  Anyway, after about an hour and a half of sitting in the waiting room and watching it get dark, (and coming to the obvious metaphorical conclusions about my life), we were called in to meet with this doctor.

He seemed very smart and talented, but he just about scared me to death by telling me about every possible thing I might have or ever would have or might pass along to my children, and my husband, desperate to bring some order to this situation, said to him, “We have to make sure Sue’s well because she has a book coming out.” And the doctor looked at me and said, “Oh, and who’s publishing it?” and then, as I sat there, looking, I suspect, as enthusiastic and fresh as a used tissue, he said to me, “And where do you get your ideas?” Which just goes to show, that no matter what the situation, people are always going to be intrigued by writers. 

Anyway, I have to have the wretched surgery, but my prognosis is good and now I’ve wandered away from Patry, who is supposed to be the point of this blog. So all best wishes for courage and health to Patry, along with lots of book sales and fun things. And I think my next entry will be about publicists and will not contain any information at all of a scary nature.
 

What follows is a strange, and yet, I think, inspiring story about how I came to have my short story, “Triplet,” published in anderbo literary magazine.

More than a decade ago, I went to a wedding shower and it was one of the strangest experiences of my life. It took place in a VFW hall in upstate New York and it was bleak and grotesque and the wedding party carried on a running joke about a five foot long hero (sandwich), the memory of which still gives me chills. At that time, I had just started writing short stories, but I was still pretty much defined by my full-time job, which was that I was a mother staying home with my kids. I loved my life, and yet I was feeling somewhat desperate for intellectual conversation, and I remember crying on the drive back, worried that my life was turning into a joke, or even worse, into a cliché.

So, I got home, feeling desperate and unappreciated, which is good mulch for starting a story, and I found myself writing about a woman, who is one of a set of triplets, who must decide if she is going to sleep with a man who is pursuing her because he is obsessed with triplets. Yeah, I don’t know where that came from either, except that there is a house in the story that I saw on my drive home from the shower.

Soon thereafter, I happened to be reading through the classified ads in Poets & Writers and happened to see an ad for a man who was looking to teach writing, one on one.  In his ad, Rick Rofihe said he’d had more stories published in The New Yorker than any other writer, and I was impressed by that, and so I called. And over a period of a few months, we met for coffee and he read my stories, and I learned a lot from him, and I sent off a number of the revised stories, and they were published.  This went on for some time, and I remember we worked on “Triplet,” which is what I wound up naming the story (for good reason) and then I don’t remember what happened except that I got swept up with writing my first novel, and so I didn’t send out “Triplet” for consideration, the way I might have done. Instead I filed it away and sort of forgot about it.

TEN YEARS WENT BY.

 Or possibly eight. But it was a while.

By then I had started teaching at Gotham and I noticed that Rick was on the list of teachers and I may have even said hello to him at a holiday party, but the essential thing to keep in mind was that he had not seen my story in quite a while. And then, one day, I came home from dinner at Pizza Hut and there was a message on my machine from Rick saying that he was starting up a new magazine, called anderbo, and that he had always liked my story, “Triplet,” and he wondered if it had been published. Immediately I dashed up stairs, opened up my file cabinet, and there it was. Just where I had left it all those years ago. I read through it and it was like reading something by somebody else. The person who had written it was long gone, but I liked her and I figured, what the heck. So I sent it out to Rick, and thank heavens, he still liked it.

“Triplet” is still posted and anderbo itself is doing very well, and Rick has recently announced a new contest for novels involving vegetarianism.  (There’s more to it than that, but I can’t remember.) And the other day I got an group e mail from Rick, notifying all subscribers to anderbo that one of his writers (me) was having a book published and the title of his e mail was, “from anderbo to plume/penguin.”

So, there are a bunch of lessons I could take away from this story, but the one that jumps out at me is that there is just no predicting what is going to happen with your writing life. And it’s all probably going to take a lot longer than you think it will. And thank you to Rick and anderbo.

So what about you. What have you written out of desperation?

Some months ago, one of my short stories was rejected by a magazine, whereupon I canceled my subscription to that magazine and threw out all the copies of it that I owned.  And I had been collecting them for years. So, if you are looking for a mature exposition on how to deal with rejection, this is not it. I freely concede all the obvious things: rejection is demoralizing and depressing and painful.

However, I am often struck by how many of my students—and I’m talking about good writers here–want to send out work, but don’t.  (I’m thinking of someone specific here, and you know who you are.)  The unfortunate fact is that it is very difficult to be published without sending your work out. 

I know. The moment I write this, someone is going to say, Aha! I know someone who was at a playground and chatting with a woman, and that woman turned out to be the head of Random House and she offered to read this mother’s manuscript and now it is going to be published.  So she didn’t have to send out her manuscript at all! Actually, I met someone who tortured me one Thanksgiving by telling me a story very similar to this, but then she wound up not writing the book and running off with her garage mechanic instead. Or something like that.  But the point is, that you can’t base your career on the hopes of befriending the head of a major publishing house at a playground.

So my suggestion is to come up with a plan that acknowledges you are likely to get rejected but allows you to move forward.

For example, I always keep a stack of envelopes, stamped and addressed, with my story inside, and the moment the rejection comes in, I grab one of those envelopes and send it out. I don’t even think about it. I don’t say to myself—oh, they rejected it so now I should rewrite the whole thing. You could spend your life rewriting stories. (I’m assuming, of course, that you waited until the story was done before you sent it out in the first place.)

Also, keep working on something new. The moment you start sending out one story, you should start working on another. I always think my new project is better than my last one, so when the rejection comes in, I say, okay, I would have rejected that too. But this one is better.

Finally, keep in mind that everyone gets rejected.

I’ve had a run of good luck lately. My book is being published and I just found out that Target!!! will be carrying my book. (Along with Barnes & Noble and amazon and lots of wonderful independent bookstores.) But the point is, you’d think I could coast a little. But no, I can’t. Believe me when I say, there are still plenty of editors out there who are just waiting to reject me. My only solace is that I have a somewhat better ego than when I first started out, but that’s not saying a lot.

So, it’s almost the New Year, which is a good time to make resolutions. See if you can get up your courage and let me know what happens.
 

This is the last week of my fall classes and that always makes me a little gloomy because I don’t like for things to end and I thought these classes went especially well. But I did start to think about what characterizes a good class, and I came up with this list.

1. People show up.  This seems basic, but it doesn’t always happen. There is nothing more discouraging than expecting to see fourteen smiling faces and instead seeing three puzzled ones. My worst experience was a few years ago when only one guy showed up. He was very pleasant, and I didn’t want to cancel the class as he had gone to the effort of attending, so we went out for drinks. This is not something Gotham encourages, however.

2. People submit writing. This also seems basic, but it is often the case, especially in a Fiction One class, that people are too nervous to submit anything and so I wind up handing out copies of “The Dead” for our discussion, which is all well and good except that James Joyce does not really need my writing advice. I had one class in which no one submitted any work until the sixth week, and by the time we got there I was so desperate, that the class began to take on the characteristics of group therapy.  “You seem to be feeling very insecure,” I would start off the class by saying, and it went downhill from there.

3. Students are willing to revise. I always get a sinking feeling when someone hands out a story to be critiqued and says, “This is a final draft.” The fact is, you could hand out copies of “The Dead,” and a workshop would find ways to improve it. There is always something to say and it’s not always right, but a lot of the times it is. Several of my students this term have done a masterful job of revising, and have brought their stories up to a publishable level, which brings me to the next point…

4. The students are serious about their craft. Yes, this is adult education and no one gets grades and no one, probably, is going to get thrown out of class. And yet, especially in the classes I taught this semester, I was struck by how seriously the students approached their writing. This is not a hobby. This is something heartfelt and beautiful.

5. The students like each other. It is very hard to teach a class in which students feel contempt for each other, or just don’t care about each other. One of my more discouraging moments came in the tenth week of a class (some years ago) when a woman read an absolutely harrowing story about some type of abuse and the man sitting next to her, who had been sitting next to her for ten weeks, said, “And what’s your name?”  The best case scenario is that the students will form friendships that will continue after class is over, and writing groups. Or that they will reenroll.

6. The students like me. Well, I won’t go into that at length, except to say I have faced down my share of steely looks in the past, and it is much nicer to see a smile.

7. The students are ordering The Fiction Class. This is off topic, but I thought I’d throw it in because, as my publicist is fond of saying (and this is probably worth another blog) every mention counts.

So what about you? Have you taken a class at Gotham, or elsewhere? What would you add to this list?

Every November I have to have a bone scan, which, as you can imagine, is not the high point of my year. If you’ve ever had it done, you’ll know that it requires lying still on a slab while a machine inches its way, slowly, slowly, from your head down to your toes. And back. Best of all, because it starts off at your head, it means that for four minutes you have this whirring, malevolent thing hovering right over your face. As the technician says, in her mournful Russian accent, “Best to close your eyes.”

Of course, closing your eyes with an instrument that portends death over your face isn’t necessarily conducive to calm. Every year I promise myself that I will memorize some wonderful poem before I go through this, generally something by Auden, but the minute that machine starts to creep, my mind empties and I revert to the Lord’s Prayer. Though this year, somewhat to my horror, my mind emptied and then switched to the image of Sabrina in Dancing with the Stars. Wasn’t it Woody Allen who had a routine about being hanged and he said the life that passed before his eyes wasn’t his own?

Anyway, the point here is actually the technician and not me. I have become very fond of this woman over the years because she is kind and she always winks at me to let me know I’m all right, even though she should have the doctor tell me. She happens to have a daughter the same age as my son and we went through the application to college experience together.

She’s always walked with a cane, but this year she mentioned that she had M.S. and it was getting worse. She’s having trouble walking; she’s tired, and she’s not sure how much longer she’s going to be able to work. Then she told me that recently she went up to

Boston to visit her daughter, who is in college there. She knew she’d have trouble walking around the city and doing things with her daughter, and she wanted to have fun, and so she decided to use a wheelchair, for the first time. This was a scary decision because she had to accept the fact that she was becoming an invalid, but she decided to make the best of her decision. She wore nice clothes, she put on a lot of make up and she wound up having a great time. “I looked good,” she said. “Not at all middle aged.”I was so inspired by her story—by her courage and the way she embraced joy in her life. This is what I would love to be like myself and this is what I want my writing to convey. I’m not exactly sure how to do it, but I have to believe that if you fill your mind with joyful and courageous thoughts that some of that will translate onto the page.

Of course, I left the hospital feeling cheerful and inspired and decided, as a treat, that I would go to the bakery and get myself a muffin. And I was sitting in the bakery parking lot, eating said muffin, when I became conscious of the fact that there were four helicopters overhead and police cars racing by. I asked someone what was happening and he said, “Oh, there’s a sniper on the Saw Mill.” And so does life conspire to undermine my best intentions. I still went home and wrote, but I locked the doors.

So how about you? Who inspires you?

During the long, long years that I worked on my various novels, I often fantasized about what it would be like to get an offer from an editor. I also daydreamed about what the cover of my book would look like, who would be cast in the movie version, what songs the soundtrack would include and even, on one particularly unproductive afternoon, what it would be like to win the Nobel Prize. But somehow, in all this fantasizing, I never once considered what it would be like to have a book reviewed. Quite honestly, it seemed like such a monumental accomplishment to get a book published, that it never occurred to me that there would be something to worry about after that.  

Imagine my consternation then when one evening I was driving to a meeting at my church and my cell phone rang and there was my agent, calling to tell me that the review in Publisher’s Weekly had come out. I had no idea I should even be worrying about reviews yet because The Fiction Class is not out until February 26. Automatically I said, How is it? And he said, Great, which, after a year and a half of knowing this man I have come to realize means that I am in trouble. Every time he says “Great,” I should duck. 

Actually, the review was not that bad. If it were a grade on a report card, I would say it was a B. (I’m not going to reprint the review here, because why should I aggravate myself, but if you want to see it you can go to the amazon site, and then, if you’re feeling merciful, you can always pre-order my book.) But even a B is upsetting if you’re hoping for an A, and frankly, what I’ve come to realize is that I don’t deal with criticism well. I know you are not supposed to take these things personally, but I don’t believe that. I draw so much on my own experiences in my writing that it is hard not to connect the review with the person, which is me. Which is probably not healthy. 

My family jumped into the fray immediately. My sisters-in-law, who are lovely and supportive, (and have read the book) both sent me emails saying that the review was completely uncalled for and wrong. My brother, who is even more supportive, said that it had never occurred to him that anyone could find anything wrong with the book. My daughter pointed out that there are millions of people hoping to get a book published and I shouldn’t complain and my husband asked me if there was anything I could learn from the review and use toward my next book. Then he went online to see if I’d been reviewed anywhere else. 

The good news is I was reviewed by a number of other places, and all the rest of the reviews were terrific, especially the one by Booklist, which is also on the amazon site.  (I will just quote some relevant words, which are “surprisingly touching” and “poignant yet amusing.”) So all is good, for the moment, except that I know somewhere out there is some miserable reviewer who has just had a fight with his wife, ate bad Chinese food, and had too much to drink last night, and he is about to sit down and read my book.  

So how about you? Have you ever been reviewed? Or critiqued?