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?

I’ve written a lot of short stories and a number of novels and I’ve done them all the same way. I start at the beginning and write through to the end and then I realize that the ending completely changes everything. So I go back to the beginning and revise everything and get to the end and realize it changes everything and so on. With my first novel I did that about 40 times. Literally.

Since then I’ve become a little more efficient, but I’ve always liked the idea of hurling myself forward and not knowing where I’m going. I think that transfers some of my energy into my writing. It’s similar to swimming across a river, I think; when you reach the halfway point (or page 120), you know you don’t want to drown so you have no choice but to push forward. (Or you could turn around, but then you wind up spending a lot of time on the first chapter.)

Recently, though, I started doing something completely different.

In January I began taking an on-line mystery writing class at Gotham, which I am enjoying tremendously. The teacher, Michael Kurland, gives us writing assignments every week, which means that every week I write one scene. But the scenes are not necessarily consecutive and it’s fun to be able to plunge into a situation and not have to worry how you got there or how you’re going to get out of it. All I have to do is think about how to make the scene itself as effective as possible.  (It’s also fun to imagine murdering various people and although I’m not a hostile person, I’m finding it very therapeutic.)

Once the class is done, I should have a pile of ten scenes and, theoretically anyway, I should be able to connect them into something interesting. I hope. To go back to my swimming across the river analogy—it’s like finding out there are islands in the river and you can stop and rest for a bit.

I don’t know if this is going to help my writing or not, but I like the idea of shaking myself up. It’s always good to try something new.  How about you? What’s your process?
 

One of the pleasures of reading biographies is getting  insights into characters so unlike myself. Or anyone I know, for that matter.  Recently I’ve been reading Alison Weir’s biography of the six wives of Henry VIII and I feel as though I’ve hit the mother lode of characterization. Each woman is unique and complex. There’s so much to chew on here that I thought it would be fun to come up with a Wife of King Henry characterization sheet that we could use for our own writing.

So, forth with:

Katherine of Aragon had the virtues of being intelligent and brave, but she was also intransigent. Really, after a point she could have gone to a nunnery and everyone concerned would have been happier. Don’t you know people who are so sure they are right that they are willing to destroy all around them? Are they fueled by pride or virtue?

And then there’s Anne Boleyn, who was charming and seductive, but also seemed to have a bad temper and when she began to panic about her relationship with the King, she behaved so outrageously that she pushed him away. If she could have stopped yelling at Henry a bit, she might have lived longer. Don’t you know people who undercut their relationships with others because of something they do? How does fear change a person’s behavior?

Jane Seymour was docile and a devoted wife. But she was also lonely because she would only associate with people of her stature. Don’t you know people who seem to have it all, but are really lonely on the inside? How do you behave if you think you are better than everyone else?

Then there was poor Anne Cleves, whose misfortune it was to be plain. She suffered an unbelievable insult when Henry put her away (and is there a writer out there who has not known humiliation?) But somehow she wound up happiest of the wives. She found the secret to contentment. Had she lived today she could have written an Oprah book. How do your characters search for happiness?

Fifth, and most tragic, was Katherine Howard, whose biggest problem was that she was young and foolish. Devil Wears Prada except that Meryl Streep has the power to behead you, to mix my media. How often have you seen someone headed for disaster and you know there’s not a thing you can do? In a new novel that I’ve begun working on, I’ve got a young woman out of control and I have to confess I was the sort of young woman who sat in the library reading. So learning about Katherine Howard is helpful. What’s it like to be wild?

And finally Katherine Parr, who has the most modern feel to her because she knew what was going on and worked it. I like her the least because she seems so calculating, but I suppose if I were marrying a man who’d had two of his wives executed, I might be cold too. How far will your characters go to get what they want?

So how about you? Any of the wives remind you of your own characters?

Recently I came close to having a traumatic experience in New Jersey. I was driving to a book club meeting and everything was going well until I realized my GPS system (“Tom Tom”) was telling me to go over the George Washington Bridge. And the one true thing I have learned in my life is that I never want to go on the George Washington Bridge. So I stood up to Tom Tom and changed direction, but unfortunately, because I was going 65 miles an hour, and panicking about the book club, I couldn’t turn him off. With the result that for half an hour I had to listen to a British voice urging me to, “Turn around now! Turn around now!”

My sentiments exactly. In about nine out of every ten situations, my first impulse is to turn around. Now. Get into bed. Pick up a book. Ignore the phone. However, such a philosophy is not conducive to long term mental health or book sales, and so I invariably get out of bed and proceed.

In this case I was more worried than usual because I wasn’t sure the meeting was taking place. The person who had organized it did not seem to have much access to e mail and her phone was turned off, which was worrisome. And about a week before the book club was scheduled, she sent me an e mail that made me think everything had been called off. So I had a terrible feeling I was going to drive two hours and wind up in front of an abandoned house. (I’ve just been reading a mystery by Ruth Rendell in which something similar happens.)

“Don’t go,” my husband said. “You need to rest.’

He always thinks I need to rest. He’s been telling me that for twenty five years.

In this case, however, I thought he had a point, but I just wasn’t sure, and so I went to www.absolutewrite.com, which is a message board for writers and one of my favorite places to hang out, and I asked for advice and everyone said, Go! And thank God I did, because when I got to the house, I found fifteen absolutely wonderful women sitting in a circle, smiling at me. Fresh apple crumb cake in the kitchen. And pumpkin pie and cookies that were baked from Hillary Clinton’s recipe. And lots of other stuff as well, all of which I ate.

The moral of the story, of course, is that whenever you are invited to New Jersey, you should go. And that it’s good to take risks. And that I shouldn’t listen to my husband. And book clubs rule!
So, who do you ask for advice when you’re not sure what to do?

Two bits of news:

 The Fiction Class is coming out in a large print version and the cover is completely different than either the U.S. or UK version, as you can see below.
 

Also, The Fiction Class was chosen as a selection for Reading Group Choices 2009 (www.readinggroupchoices.com) This is an annual anthology geared to book clubs, and so it’s a wonderful boost to my book.

TFC has now been out in print for nine months, which is about 3,000 years in publishing terms. One of the major things I’ve learned as a new author is how little time you have to make an impact. Basically four months. And by that point, you’re either selling or you’re not. So it’s a great relief to me that I’m still selling and that TFC seems to have some traction. In fact, one of the things I like the most is seeing the way my book is seeping through the country. I love getting e mails from all over the place, and I get a kick out of the fact that so many are from small towns in the South.

When I was writing short stories, almost every magazine that published me was from the South—Tennessee, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and so on. And what struck me as odd at the time was that I was connecting with southerners and yet I could not be more of a New Yorker—born and raised in Queens, studied in Rochester and Manhattan, live in Westchester. And I think I conform to just about every stereotype I have about New Yorkers, so it is intriguing to me that my writing connects with people who I imagine as being so different. Maybe it’s my religious background? Maybe it’s the topics I write about? Maybe it’s a statistical fluke? I don’t know, but I treasure that connection because I think writing should about building bridges.

How about you? What surprises have you had as a writer?

Last weekend I worked at my church’s Attic Sale, which is a must-do event for any writer because you would be pretty hopeless if you couldn’t come up with a book’s worth of stories about the things that go on at this sale. The drama! The sale starts at 10 and by 9:30 there is a line of people literally pushing against the door to the church, desperate to get in. Every item has value to someone, and people often tell you the story of why it is significant to them. This ratty blouse reminds them of something her mother wore in the sixties, or this tea cup belongs in a museum. Lots and lots of little babies that people carry facing outward, so you have a parade of big soulful eyes staring at you as you write up the receipts. And the cutest little white dog I’ve ever seen (sorry Spencer) and someone left it on a table and it just sat there and shook. But then the owner came back. And ham salad sandwiches. I’ve noticed in my classes that people tap into some of their best writing when they write about smell, and there were people at this sale who were holding up the ham sandwich and sniffing at it as though it could bring back a lost time.

Anyway, I was a puddle through most of this sale, but that’s not the point. The interesting thing was that I was working in the book department (a promotion—last year I was in the children’s clothes department and was a disaster because I got tired of refolding things and just chatted most of the day). The interesting thing about the book department is that best sellers don’t sell. We had stacks and stacks of books and I (or possibly someone else) hit on the idea of separating out the best sellers (Patterson, King, Cornwall, Forsythe) and lining them up on a separate table. Alphabetically! The idea was that people would snap up these books. Brand new they would sell for more than $20 apiece, but we were just charging $2, and they were all in almost brand new condition.

Then there was a separate section of “book club” books. These were the trade paperbacks that sell, new, for around $14. A lot of Barbara Kingsolver here and Ann Patchett and you know who I mean. (No copies of The Fiction Class, but I hope that’s because no one from the church wanted to get rid of their copy.)  And here is the moral of the story, which is that these books kept selling and the hardcovers didn’t.

Periodically I would look over at the hardcover table, which represented thousands of dollars worth of books, and probably millions of dollars worth of advances, and I would cogitate. Obviously someone had gone off and bought these books in the first place, and even if James Patterson’s 1000th book is not as good as his 17th, it has to be a reasonably good read. Lots of people are buying it new. By the second day of the sale we had marked the books down to $1, and by the end of the second day we were giving out bags that you could fill up for $2. And still, when the sale ended, the book club rack was almost empty, and all those hardcovers were still sitting there. (Goodwill took them.)

What does it all mean? Perhaps people who read new hardcovers don’t go to attic sales. (More men, perhaps?) Perhaps the pleasure of owning a hardcover is in owning something new?  I don’t know the answer, in case you’re wondering. What do you think?