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And Now for a Word on Unreliable Narrators

Thanks to Alexandra over at Historical Tapestry, who let me go on at some length about one of my favorite subjects: the unreliable narrator.

The Countess on Audible

Great news!  The Countess is now available as an Audible audiobook, in an unabridged edition read by the amazing Leslie Bellair.  Now you can hear the proper pronunciations of the Hungarian names and cities in the book. 

Ignore the artwork on the Audible page--I have a call into them about changing it.

Five Things I Wish I'd Known When Writing My First Novel

Recently I saw this post by Tayari Jones over at She Writes (a great site if you haven’t checked it out yet) about what she wishes she’d known when she published her first book.  I especially love #1:

“No one article or review will make or break me.  When I published my first book, I got a slam from one of the pre-pubs and I was convinced that this was the end of my writing career.  I literally lost sleep imagining bookstore owners, potential readers, librarians, etc. crossing my name off a list labeled GOOD WRITERS.  About bad reviews or weird articles, my good friend Nichelle Tramble said it best—Let it spoil your breakfast, but don’t let it spoil your supper. In other words, mourn it and then keep moving.”

Good advice, no matter if you’re talking about Library Journal or The New York Times Book Review—Lord knows it’s something most all of us are going to need again and again and again.

There are so many things I wish I’d known when I was writing and publishing my first book.  I wish I’d known about process and keeping my sanity.  I wish I’d asked for a year to finish the book when my editor said six months.  I wish I’d known how to keep my own hopes and fears in check, or to ask for Prozac when I couldn’t.  

But even more than that, I wish I’d known that the only thing you have control over is the writing itself.  Everything else is luck and timing.

Here’s what I tell my DePaul students who want to be novelists about the process of actually sitting down to write a novel:

5. Surprise yourself.  I know plenty of writers who like to outline first, but unless you’re a nonfiction writer or John Irving, don’t decide too much, too soon.  Maybe write out a few ideas, a list of major points or beats, but don’t commit to them completely.  Allow yourself to stray from the outline if a great idea occurs to you partway through.  If you can’t surprise yourself, you can’t surprise a reader either.

4. Give yourself small goals every day.  I once went to a talk by Richard Bausch, who was auditioning to be the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  To the inevitable question about process, he said he asks himself: “Did I write today?” If the answer is yes, then he’s satisfied.

A 120,000-word novel doesn’t write itself in a day.  If you try to write as much as possible in one sitting, you won’t have enough left over for the next day.  A small goal (mine is 1500 words a day) will allow you to make progress and still leave you feeling ready for more the next time you sit down.

3. Write quickly.  Just as a novel won’t write itself in a day, it won’t write itself in 10 years either.  If your first novel takes you three years to write (as mine did), you’ll be a different person with different interests and even a different writing style than you were at the beginning.  Getting the first draft done as quickly as possible will be better both for you and the book.

2. Don’t try to write a perfect draft.  My thesis advisor once said that unfinished novels don’t need to be workshopped, they need to be championed.  I wish I’d heeded this advice a little more when writing my first book, because a perfect draft doesn’t exist—that’s why it’s called a draft.   Don’t revise too much, or at all, the first time around.  Get words on the page.  Recognize that the draft is imperfect—makes notes if you want—then move on.  Until you have an ending, you don’t know if you’ve begun in the right place, so there’s no point in finely crafting every clause, every comma, when half of them are going to end up getting cut or moved around anyway.

1. Write the book you want to read.  You’ve got a killer idea, but the genius is always in the execution.  That’s where the little gremlins of doubt and fear creep in: should I make it big?  Small?  Choose a funky point of view, an exotic setting, a big plot twist?  What will improve my chances at winning the National Book Award, of being on the bestseller list, of keeping this book from ending up as toilet paper in the Random House bathroom?  Do I want to be the next William Faulkner, the next James Patterson, the next Jacqueline Howett?  Will my colleagues laugh their asses off when they read it?  Should I use a pseudonym?  I should use a pseudonym, really, shouldn’t I?

In the end, none of it will get you to The End, and most of it will only make you crazy.  There are dozens of different ways you could turn every idea into a book.  Some of them might be legitimately successful.  Some are probably awful.  Most of them will please some of your readers.  None of them will please all your readers.  In the end, your only job is to write the book you’ve always wanted to read but couldn’t, because no one but you was able to write it. 

So there you have it.  Now what’s your best advice?

To be XX or XY? That is the Question

A lot of my writer friends, male and female, have been as distressed as I have about the recent statistics published by VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts.  And yet I can't say I (or really any of the other women I know who write) were terribly surprised.  Women write a lot of books, and women buy a lot of books, as Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult and others have noted.  But women writers (and by extension women readers) are viewed rather cynically by the "serious" male literary establishment.  One need look no further than Jonathan Franzen's comments about Oprah's Book Club, made in 2001, to see a "literary" author worry that women readers might be his primary audience:

"So much of reading is sustained in this country, I think, by the fact that women read while men are off golfing or watching football on TV or playing with their flight simulator or whatever. I worry — I'm sorry that it's, uh — I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience and I've heard more than one reader in signing lines now at bookstores say 'If I hadn't heard you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women. I would never touch it.' Those are male readers speaking. I see this as my book, my creation." (NPR's Fresh Air)

And who could blame him ?  I too worry my books will be ghettoized this way, that only women will read them--that half my potential audience will look at my first name and pass the book by. 

The problem begins, many believe, in the gender roles assigned to us in childhood.  When I worked in children's publishing, the rule was that girls would read books about both boys and girls, but boys would, as a group, only read about boys.  When they grow up, women will read books by both men and women, while men, in general, tend to read largely male authors.  Far too many of my male writer friends list not a single book by a woman among the works that most influence them.  Yet I can't think of a single woman who does not list a male author, or several male authors, among her influences.

There's no accounting for taste, of course.  As Michael Schaub and Jessa Crispin argued with each other over at Bookslut, taste is a complex cultural and psychological stew.  Do male writers not take women seriously because they're women, or because of what they write about?  Would the same book written under a male name be more palatable to male readers?

I wonder.

The "lady-writer" problem has dogged writers as remarkable at the Bronte sisters and George Eliot, all of whom published under men's names.  And don't even get me started on Jane Austen, who wrote remarkably clever and densely plotted social comedies (a fact that can be easy to forget under the onslaught of bad fan fiction that's appeared recently).  If she'd had a Y chromosome, would she have been lauded as the second coming of Shakespeare?  Even today her stories are dismissed, even by women, as mere "romances."  They all end in weddings, the critics moan.  Would the critics make the same complaint about "Twelfth Night," or "A Midsummer Night's Dream"?  Or would Shakespeare be entirely forgettable if he hadn't written tragedy as well as comedy?

Lest you think this is a nineteenth-century problem, consider: last fall I had lunch with a writer friend, a woman who has won an impressive array of awards for her work and had seen her work appear at least once that I can think of on the New York Times bestseller list.  She has a new book coming out this year, but she knew the Times wouldn't cover it.  Not one of her books has appeared in the Times, in fact.  If she can't get reviewed there, the ivory tower of American literary criticism, who on earth can?

Which leads me to wonder.  I have a book project in my vault, a project that feels to me startingly original and interesting, but I worry: would it be dismissed if I wrote it under my own name?  Should I choose a pseudonym--a male pseudonym--to get it taken seriously, or write it under my initials, like AM Holmes or JK Rowling?

So here's my question, ladies: Have you ever been tempted to write under a man's name?  To see what would be different if you weren't saddled with the specifically feminine?  Have you actually done it, and what happened?

Chicago Sun-Times

A little hometown love for The Countess, by Sun-Times reporter Mary Wisniewski.

The Social (Marketing) Network: Can an Analog Girl Thrive in the Digital World?

One recent Friday morning, as I was dropping off my daughter for preschool, the director stopped me in the hall.  “Congratulations!” she said.  “I didn’t know you were an author.  That must be so exciting.”  I mumbled something about how yes, it’s an interesting job as jobs go, though not one I usually go around announcing randomly—unless, of course, someone asks about my work, which the director most decidedly had not done until that morning.  How had she found me out?

It turns out my cousin, whose kids attend the same preschool, was the one who had let the cat out of the bag earlier in the week, the day my second novel, The Countess, hit bookstores.  “Yes,” said the director, “she mentioned you don’t like to toot your own horn.”  She smiled as if pitying me a little, or maybe that part was my imagination.  “Congrats again!” she gushed.  And I got out of there as fast as I could.

She was right about one thing: I don’t like to toot my own horn.  At all.  I’m a Midwesterner and a woman; bragging about my accomplishments, such as they are, is about as comfortable to me as stripping naked and dancing in the middle of the Edens Expressway.  (Even typing that last sentence I couldn’t keep myself from adding “such as they are,” or risk feeling like the worst kind of gasbag.) 

I get nauseated before appearances; I find blogging terrifying.  I started this blog because the guy who designed my web page said I should, that it would increase my webpage traffic, but the only time I’ve enjoyed working on it was when I was certain no one but a small handful of friends were reading it.  I could bitch about the tornado that hit my house and the endless repairs it engendered, or the multiple rounds of infertility treatments and disappointments my husband and I suffered leading up to the birth of our daughter, and know that maybe three people were even bothering to read it.  Certainly no one was coming there to look up my novel, the reason I had set up the blog in the first place.

And for the most part, that was okay with me.  I often said I became a novelist because I didn’t like talking about myself, because I felt that no one was really interested in me.  I prefer to let my characters do the talking.  Let them be the pushy ones, the attention hogs, so I don’t have to be.  

In the four years since the launch of that first book, a modest critical success that hardly anyone actually read, book-review pages in major newspapers have shrunk, if not completely disappeared.  Book tours are rare and precious, and yet both publishers and authors have more riding on each and every new book launch.  Thus social media platforms have become perhaps the most important widespread tools for authors, especially relatively unknown authors, to get the word out about their books.  And that’s important to me, because my new book is the best thing I have ever written, and I want to get it into people’s hands.

But to say I have mixed feelings about social media is an understatement.  Do Facebook and Twitter and Goodreads and their ilk actually help the process of getting out the word on a new book?  Can the presence of a dozen reader reviews on social-media sites replace even one really great professional review?  And how much am I pissing off my friends by sending them emails and updates about my book when all they probably want to do is play Farmville and watch LOLcats videos and surf the pages of people a hell of a lot more interesting and successful than me?

***

I came to Facebook a couple of years ago for the reasons most people do: I wanted to look up people I knew from high school and see how bald and pouchy they’d all become over the years.  Especially I wanted to see what had become of the bullies who had tormented me during junior high, the ex-boyfriend who’d broken my heart at 16, the girl my husband had dated before we’d met. 

And yes, I wanted to keep in touch with the friends whose presence in my life had once been essential but who had fallen out of touch with years and distance.  As someone who’d moved zip codes a half-dozen or so times in my adult life, there were more of them than I cared to admit, and most of them had found their way to Facebook over the past few years.

Facebook and Twitter are great for allowing people to keep in touch without having to actually touch.  In a world where even writing an email feels like work, updates and tweets offer the appearance of meaningful contact between acquaintances without the icky need to actually contact anyone.  Updates go out into the ether, to be read or ignored by lists of friends who may or may not actually be logged on at any particular moment, and who may or may not give a damn about what your cat just chased, or what you made for dinner, or how you feel about the healthcare bill.

So why should I expect these same friends to be interested in my book?

I ask myself that question every day.  I dread posting Facebook reminders or sending out email announcements about book launches or appearances.  I imagine that the people receiving them, even people who of their own volition decided to “like” my public page, must be getting these reminders in their inboxes, sniffing derisively, and then instantly deleting them as the work of some kind of literary hack too pathetic to be worth the attention of traditional media.  The fact that I myself am often the recipient of these same emails from other writers, and that I don’t mind receiving them in the least, is something I always manage to dismiss as irrelevant.  (Like a lot of writers, I tend to believe people are telling me the truth only when they’re being negative.)

Beyond Facebook, I try to update my Twitter accounts regularly (I have one in my name and one in the name of my novel's main character), but I must confess I find the Twitterverse somewhat baffling.  All those hashtags and little bits of embedded code usually leave me wondering what the hell everyone is talking about.  I can’t figure out how everyone else can link to such nice tiny little URLs in their updates when mine are as long and gnarly and twisted as the plot of The Phantom Menace.  I don’t know what a # does.  I just barely understand how to write @someone.  Even admitting to such makes me feel like the old lady on her porch screaming at all those damn kids to get off her lawn.

Worse, my posts and updates never seem as interesting or relevant as those of the darlings of the social-media literary set, the Jessa Crispins and Maud Newtons and Ron Hogans whose posts and tweets I look forward to every morning.  I’m not clever with a comeback or a quip as my social-media idols, and rarely do I come up with anything meaningful as a cultural commentator, especially on the fly.  I need to think about something, and especially to write about it, before I really understand how I feel and what I think.  I’m an analog girl—ponderous and painfully shy and terribly old-fashioned when it comes to writing even a status update.  Will so-and-so see me announce a reading and think I’m the worst kind of self-promoter?  Will I turn into one of those obnoxious Facebook stalkers that people secretly make fun of IRL (in real life)?  Should I bother writing anything at all?

When I do write about something I care about, I’ll rewrite and rewrite again.  I’ve rewritten this post twice already, and will probably do so at least twice more before I let anyone see if.  If I let anyone see it at all.  Rewriting is the novelist’s greatest pleasure, and something that, in the social media universe where timeliness rules all, isn’t terribly important.  By the time I’ve written and rewritten a post to the point where I’m happy with it, Facebookers and the Tweeps are already on to something else, and I’m left standing there with a dumb look on my face, like the girl who took so long getting ready for the prom no one noticed she wasn’t in the limo.

Yet every day, I make myself feed the social-media publicity machine.  I jump on Twitter and send out announcements about events.  I email Facebook fans about book launches and reviews.  And I write long, rambling blog posts making fun of my own ineptitude with it all.  I do it because in a world where the book tour is a dying animal, where book review pages disappear every day, where too many books are published and not enough are read, I want to continue to work.  Because my next book will be the best thing I have ever written.

The Countess in Library Journal

Johns, Rebecca. The Countess. Crown Pub. Group. Oct. 2010. c.304p. ISBN 9780307588456. $25. F

In 1611, Countess Erzsébet Báthory (1560–1614), a Hungarian noblewoman, was walled up inside her castle tower for the murders of dozens of her female servants. In the almost four centuries since her death, folktales and myths sprang up around the Blood Countess and inspired films like the 2006 horror movie Stay Alive. This new retelling of the life of the supposed bather in blood and biter of virgins is a more realistic and historically accurate treatment than previous novels like Andrei Codrescu’s The Blood Countess. Author Johns’s solid first novel, Icebergs, thematically demonstrated the depths of human psyches and how little we reveal to one another. In this new book, it’s not surprising that in the Countess, while given her own words written as letters to her son, we see glimpses of the woman but are left to ponder the complexities and make up our own mind about her guilt. The times were brutal, the authority of the nobility was unchallenged, widowhood left even the most wealthy women unprotected from swindlers, and the underclasses were getting just a bit tired of it all, to name just a few of the factors that might have led to the Countess’s downfall.

Verdict Readers who liked Susan King’s Lady Macbeth will enjoy this title as well. Its understated treatment of an infamous character offers excellent potential for book club discussion.—Mary K Bird-Guilliams, Wichita P.L., KS

--Library Journal

Being Bad, Because It Feels So Good

A couple of years ago, I started to notice something about my writing students.  Specifically my female writing students.

They're too nice.

Not just too nice to each other in workshop, though that certainly can be the case, but too nice to their characters.  They go out of their way to keep their characters out of trouble.  Some of them have so much trouble letting their characters do evil, speak evil, that they will literally turn their plots inside out to avoid the ugly stuff.  Case in point: one student of mine wrote a story in reverse order--literally backwards--to let her protagonist avoid saying or doing anything bitchy or cruel.  In the four semesters she studied with me, she never let her characters cause problems for themselves, or others.  And she wasn't alone.  Most of my female students--the ones who don't write vampire fan fic, anyway--have some difficulty letting their characters be bad.

Is it a "lady writer" problem?  Perhaps.  But I think it's also a Midwestern problem.  It's what we're taught from birth: Be nice.  Play nice with others.  Don't rock the boat.

Which might be fine in life.  But in fiction, niceness is death.

Playing nice does not make for good writing, and most especially it does not make for good reading.  Where would we be if if Captain Ahab had decided to turn the other cheek, if Humbert Humbert had seen a qualified therapist, if Dracula had stayed home in Transylvania and not bothered the neighbors with his insatiable thirst for human blood?

After I started noticing this issue in my students, of course, I started noticing it in myself as well.  Where were my troublemakers, my angry young women, my larger-than-life nasty bitches?  My mother might be proud to have raised a "nice girl," but my babies--my fictional ones--needed to have a little bit more bite.

One might say that Erzsebet Bathory might be taking this desire for badness a bit too far.  She's about as far a cry from the nice Midwestern protagonists of Icebergs as you can get.  She's vain and selfish and cruel as hell, and what's more, she's completely indifferent to the sufferings of others. 

But oh my God, was she fun to write.  That might seem like a strange thing to say about a woman accused of being the world's most notorious female serial killer, but it's true. 

I've finally learned what the bad girls have known all along: being bad, at least in fiction, is much more fun than being good.

Little Voices

So today I managed to do something I always recommend to my students and other aspiring writers but rarely manage to do myself: I shut off the internal editor, that little voice in my head that's always telling me the words I'm putting down aren't good enough, aren't smart enough, and slapped out a cool 1,000 words in less than two hours.  It's been a very, very long time since I wrote that much at one sitting with so little hand-wringing.  And let me tell you, it felt GOOD.  It felt like a good long beam of sunshine in the middle of the winter, even though it was overcast and snowing today.

There's nothing quite as destructive to the writing process as that little voice telling you you're not good enough, give it up, don't bother.  It gets even worse when your book is out and reviewed and some of the reviewers agreed with that little voice.  Luckily I've gone deaf in that ear, or I'd never bother putting pen to paper again.

In other good news, the baby has started moving around in earnest, poking and prodding me through much of last night's Super Bowl, perhaps to get my attention in pointing out that Eli Manning looks to a frightening degree like my brother-in-law, Chris.

We still aren't out of the danger zone yet (please visit Mary Ellen and give her your best wishes, since she just lost her triplets in week 20 after a harrowing pregnancy) but the BIG ultrasound is this Friday down in Milwaukee, the one that will tell us if anything is horribly wrong with our little one.  That OTHER little voice is harder to ignore, the one that says everything we've been building up, all our hopes for this baby, could coming crashing down in an instant.  It's happened before; it could happen again.  Cross your fingers for us that we get through this hurdle, because if not, I don't know how we'll deal with it.

But for today, at least, things are looking up, and the voices can go to hell.

Beautiful Color

Got back last night from my second weekend in a row of doing a library event in Chicago.  It was a terrific event, but I'm gettin' mighty sick of riding in the car.  Still, yesterday afternoon was gorgeous, the kind of blue-and-gold afternoon we have in the UP that make you wonder why you ever lived anywhere else, geese in long Vs wheeling overhead, the skies so clear they could break your heart.  The high-elevation areas outside of Marquette are close to peak color, so it was a great time to drive through the Hiawatha National Forest.  Here in town we're still a week or so away.  Fall's coming a bit early due to the drought, I suppose, but should be spectacular, and I'm planning on making the most of it before winter closes in.

At any rate I'm glad to be home, and DYING (did I say dying?) to get back to writing.  That's the way things seem to go: when you have time to work, you feel blocked, and when you don't feel blocked, you don't have enough time.  But things should ease up a tad this week, and I'm looking forward to it in a way I haven't for two years now.  When I do these library events people always want to know about the new book, so I suppose I should quit being such a loser and get to it.

There's something about fall, too--I've always noticed it, especially in the years when I wasn't in school or teaching it--that brings to mind new possibilities, fresh starts.  It's almost New Yearsesque.  We shed our old selves in preparation for something new.  As good a time as any to start a new book, I suppose.