Illiterati

One on One with Nancy Christie - Part II

"For a long time I worried whether or not people were going to take me seriously as a writer, if I would earn their respect, and I think it did more harm than good. You can’t control what other people think, and even the most well-respected and lauded authors have their detractors, sometimes vocal and angry ones. You can’t please everyone.

Now I feel like success is defined by how much fun I’m having. If it’s not fun for me, I’m not going to do it anymore."

Thank you to Nancy Christie at the One on One blog for inviting me to the site during October.

One on One with Nancy Christie - Part I

"The books that really touched me as a kid were works of historical fiction (the Little House on the Prairie books) and speculative fiction (The Lord of the Rings, etc.), and I still have a lot of love for stories in those genres, though later on I was influenced hugely by realist authors like Marilynne Robinson, Alice Munro, Ian McEwan, and absurdists like George Saunders and John Kennedy Toole.

I’m a bit restless as a reader, and I think that carries over to my work as a writer. I love to read nearly every kind of fiction, so I’d like to be able to write every kind of fiction. It’s probably not a smart move on my part, but I’m starting to think my books are all going to be completely different from each other."

Thank you to Nancy Christie for inviting me to the One on One blog during October.

Demented and Sad, but Social Media

When I started working on my first novel, used to be that I would bump into people in real life--at the coffee house, the bookstore, the library.  And class.  I was still in school then, and if there was something on my mind, I'd simply talk it out with one writer friend or another, one mentor or another.  It made writing a novel seem like not such an exotic enterprise--we were all doing it.  No one looked at me funny if I said it was a novel-in-novellas.  No one raised an eyebrow when I cited Alice Munro as a huge influnce on that book or said "Alice who-now?"

Then we graduated, and I kept working on the novel.  Some of my writer friends moved away, temporarily (like me) or permanently.  My friend Corbin started, EarthGoat, a blog where the writers from my class could keep in touch with each other across distances, keep talking books and music and otherwise stay connected with each other's lives.  I started this blog for the same reasons, and for a long time it was a haven for me. I published that book.  I had a baby and moved away myself.   But I was still in touch with the people who mattered to my life, and my writing.

Then Facebook came on the scene, and EarthGoat started to be less where we gathered, and with the baby and the new job and the new book I was writing, the blog started to take a serious backseat.  If I wanted to "check in" with friends, they were, for the most part, on Facebook. I had less time to post, and less interest in posting. 

Two years ago, Brando and I moved again, this time back to the suburbs of Chicago from whence we came.  And like most suburbs, it's a nice quiet place to live, but it ain't exactly an artistic paradise.  Here, when I hang out at the tea house at the end of my street, I'm the only writer in the place.  I've seen Billy Corgan  there a couple of times, but unless I'm able to make him my new best friend (doubtful), I think there's not a lot of chance of talking music.  The local yoga moms and I don't have that much in common, since I don't do yoga.  No one wants to see this ass in Lululemon pants, doing Downward Dog.

And I think that's why I embrace Facebook, despite some of its obvious pitfalls. I like "bumping into" my friends there, seeing what people are up to, what's on their minds.  I like talking books and writing and music there, if not exactly the way we used to, then with enough frequency that I feel like they're still part of my life.

I know a lot of people taking Facebook breaks (and in fact I've had to invest in a copy of MacFreedom for myself, because, hello, look what I'm doing this morning instead of working on the new novel), but most of the time I don't feel the least need to apologize for being a Facebook addict. It's just another morning of shooting the shit around the coffee house before getting back down to work.

Now--get back to work.

Examiner interview

Kayla Posney, the historical fiction editor at The Examiner, kindly asked me to answer a few questions about my favorite time period, castles, etc.  Check it out here.

Interview at WordPlaySound

If you liked the excerpt of The Resurrectionist at WordPlaySound, here's a short interview I did with Ryan Singleton about the genesis of the new book and other things writerly.

New Novel Excerpt at WordPlaySound

Ryan over at WordPlaySound was kind enough to ask me to read a little something recently, so here I am reading the first chapter of The Resurrectionist, my current work-in-progress--hence the long silence here.  Novel-writing takes precedence over blogging.

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?