Roy Miller's Blog, page 305
January 7, 2017
Weekly Round-up: New Approaches for the New Year
Every week our editors publish somewhere between 10 and 15 blog posts—but it can be hard to keep up amidst the busyness of everyday life. To make sure you never miss another post, we’ve created a new weekly round-up series. Each Saturday, find the previous week’s posts all in one place.
What Writers Need in 2017
You may have created an aspirational list of resolutions for the new year. You may have already given up on some (or all) of those resolutions. Don’t worry about it. For a great writing year, here’s what you really need to do:
Opportunities and Agents
Looking for an agent? If you write women’s fiction, here are 7 Literary Agents Seeking Women’s Fiction NOW.
If that’s not enough, check out this week’s new literary agent alert for Shana Kelly of Einstein Literary. Shana is looking for novels with great writing and surprising plots that fall somewhere between commercial and literary.
To capture an agent’s attention, it’s important to understand what they’re looking for. Read an interview with Elise Capron of Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. For even more insight and the opportunity to work one-on-one with an agent, sign up for the Writer’s Digest Boot Camp: How to Craft Query Letters & Other Submission Materials That Get Noticed.
Poetic Asides
For this week’s Wednesday Poetry Prompt, write a something new poem. Then challenge yourself by trying out a poem in diminishing verse.
This year, we’re adding a new Thursday poetry series called Poetry Spotlight. Find out more about the series and the first spotlight (the Rattle Chapbook Prize) here.
Do you struggle with submitting your poetry? Check out Poetry Submission Tips From Other Poets and get submitting.
The Right Approach
Two of the most powerful approaches to writing that writers should try are freewriting and outlining. Find out how to embrace the unstructured nature of freewriting to help you when you’re stuck, and learn how imbue the structured outline with flexibility and discovery.
One of easiest ways to weaken your work is by getting details wrong. Separate the facts from the myths about depression so that your portrayals of characters with the disorder feel real.
Finally, one of the easiest ways to hook young readers is by adding the thrill of suspense. Find out how with 7 Ways to Make a Young Reader’s Hair Stand Up.
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Best of the Week: January 3 – 6, 2017
The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
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LitHub Daily: January 6, 2017
Would Hollywood even exist without books? Your essential literary guide to this Sunday’s Golden Globes. | Literary...
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A Writer’s Tip for Writing Better Sex Scenes: Steal
“As a matter of fact,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “I am a professional literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation.”
And oh, how hot we writers are. We are professional literary thieves, even if we don’t know it; we absorb and take and study. We steal style (think stream-of-consciousness). We steal plot (think The Hours and Cunningham’s adaptation of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway). We steal the “vibe” of something—using epigraphs as a way to get the spirit and energy of another author’s work. And we steal nerve. We’ve probably all felt exhilarated after reading an author who makes us feel differently.
Gabriel García Marquez, after reading the first line of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, wrote: “When I read that line, I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing.”
It is this kind of stealing that I’m most interested in. Indeed, my thievery involves stealing one thing—the nerve to write about sex. Not romance, not porn, but sex, the real mess of it, the moments that don’t go well, the times that do, the embarrassing or vulnerable moments that happen when two people get together, naked.
For nearly two decades, I’ve been paying serious attention to sex scenes in literature: Who was writing sex scenes well? Who was doing it poorly? What made one sex scene moving and another laughable? Who was writing about sex in middle age, or in old age, or in very young age? Which author received the Bad Sex in Fiction award, famously sponsored by the London-based Literary Review? And who was writing about sex as it really is—not just wonderful orgasmic stuff but also the mundane, irritating, manipulative, hurtful, or, yes, the fabulous thing it can be?
If my study revealed one thing, it’s the lack thereof. Frankly, I’ve been surprised by the number of times good authors let the characters wander off into the bedroom, then take a chapter break, and have the story continue on the next day. Really? Nothing intimate or revealing happened there? Years went by in these characters’ lives with no mention of sex or yearning at all? In some cases, I guess I’d be willing to believe it, but in other cases, I thought the authors were caving in to the fact that, yes, it’s hard to write sex scenes. You risk being laughed at, you risk winning bad-sex-writing awards, you risk being accused of wandering from sentiment into sentimentality.
I get it. Sex scenes are hard to write. That’s why there are so many articles and classes offered on how to write them, many of these offering really good advice—the same advice I took from the greats. Watch out for names of body parts. Avoid food euphemisms. And above all else, don’t avoid the sex, but at the same time, never, ever make it gratuitous. Sex is in the story for a reason. It furthers the themes and plots and characterizations, just like it does in real life. And it should be real: an elbow whacking a nose, a cramp in the leg, an embarrassing lack of completion. Because that’s what happens, and it’s human, and it’s good. In a society that can be oddly prudish on one hand, and yet pornographic on the other, we have lost sight of the honest portrayal of sex—and the little details that make it so very vulnerable and intimate.
By stealing nerve from great authors, I stretched my own boundaries. I studied Chaucer and Shakespeare, and I learned from contemporary writers like Susan Minot, Sharon Olds, Charles Baxter, Nicholson Baker, John Updike, Erica Jong, Jane Smiley—all of whom, as Philip Roth noted in American Pastoral, seem to agree the body’s surface is “about as serious a thing as there is in life.”
I read these authors, took notes, and gave myself various assignments: Write a scene with unsuccessful sex. Write about sex in which someone has an STD. Write about affairs. Write about sex where the age difference is not socially acceptable.
Not all my writer friends are convinced; many simply don’t want to follow their characters into the bedroom. But I consider writing about sex a privilege—to not only try to tell a good story but to explore and illuminate emotional and psychological truths and get as open, real, and messy as possible.
I will continue to favor writers who are raw with their hearts and souls and bodies—who could never, ever, be accused of being prudish or muted or safe, and I’ll keep stealing from them. I’m proud of my thievery, because it helps me as a writer. I, too, am hot after the best methods of every writer of my generation, especially those who are willing to look under the sheets.
Laura Pritchett’s new novel, The Blue Hour, will be published in February by Counterpoint.
A version of this article appeared in the 01/09/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Literary Sex
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Giveaway: Win Writing Dialogue for Scripts
You’ve just finished the first draft of your screenplay. The plot is solid. The characters are compelling. But your dialogue? Frankly, it stinks.
If dialogue is your personal Achilles heel, take heart: This week we’re giving away a copy of Rib Davis’ Writing Dialogue for Scripts.
“Generally it is the dialogue that cements a script, that holds it together,” writes Davis in the preface. “This book takes a microscope to that cement, and then uses the findings to provide not only some insights into how dialogue works, but also a better understanding of how to go about writing it.”
The book uses real-life movie, TV, and playwriting examples, such as American Hustle, Blue Jasmine, Mad Men, and the play Ruined. David Lane, a lecturer in creative writing at City University, calls it “an undisputed must-have for any student of writing.”
We’re giving away a copy to one lucky reader. Enter by 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday, January 12th to win.
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The Best Audiobooks of 2016
In 2016, our team of audiobook reviewers listened to more than 250 titles. Here are our favorites.
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January 6, 2017
7 Literary Agents Seeking Women’s Fiction NOW
Sometimes it’s difficult to pinpoint which agents are open to submissions at any given time. So with that in mind, I’m creating some new vertical lists of agents seeking queries right now, as of early 2017.
This list is for women’s fiction.
All the agents listed below personally confirmed to me as of early 2017 that they are actively seeking women’s fiction novel submissions NOW. Some gave personal notes about their tastes while some did not. Good luck querying!
1. Katie Grimm (Don Congdon Associates)
Notes: “Looking for women’s fiction with a literary bent, ideally with a social/cultural issue that necessitates a conversation. Unusual structures or concepts are welcome, and I’m open to a wide range of styles – with the intensity of feeling of Elena Ferrante or the irreverence of Maria Semple.”
How to Submit: Take a look at the agency’s full submission guidelines.
2. Tamar Rydzinski (Laura Dail Literary Agency)
Notes: Seeking upmarket commercial women’s fiction.
How to Submit: Send queries to queries [at] ldlainc.com, and take a look at the agency’s full submission guidelines.
3. Patricia Nelson (Marsal Lyon Literary Agency LLC)
Notes: No specific notes given.
How to Submit: Send queries to patricia [at] marsallyonliteraryagency.com, and take a look at the agency’s full submission guidelines.
Check Out These Great Upcoming Writers Conferences:
Feb. 11, 2017: Writers Conference of Minnesota (St. Paul, MN)
Feb. 16–19, 2017: San Francisco Writers Conference (San Francisco, CA)
Feb. 24, 2017: The Alabama Writers Conference (Birmingham, AL)
Feb. 25, 2017: Atlanta Writing Workshop (Atlanta, GA)
March 25, 2017: Michigan Writers Conference (Detroit, MI)
March 25, 2017: Kansas City Writing Workshop (Kansas City, MO)
April 8, 2017: Philadelphia Writing Workshop (Philadelphia, PA)
April 22, 2017: Get Published in Kentucky Conference (Louisville, KY)
April 22, 2017: New Orleans Writers Conference (New Orleans, LA)
May 6, 2017: Seattle Writers Conference (Seattle, WA)
May 19-21, 2017: PennWriters Conference (Pittsburgh, PA)
June 24, 2017: The Writing Workshop of Chicago (Chicago, IL)
Aug. 18–20, 2017: Writer’s Digest Conference (New York, NY)
4. Suzie Townsend (New Leaf Literary + Media)
Notes: “Looking for upmarket women’s fiction, including novels that would generate great book club discussions, in the vein of Jodi Picoult and novels with an element of mystery or suspense, in the vein of Liane Moriarty.”
How to Submit: Send queries to query [at] newleafliterary.com, and take a look at the agency’s full submission guidelines.
5. Sarah Bush (Trident Media Group)
Notes: “Looking for women’s fiction with original, well-developed plotlines and strong female protagonists.”
How to Submit: Take a look at the agency’s submission guidelines.
6. Bibi Lewis (Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency)
Notes: “Looking for smart and sharp writing. Humor, wit, and mystery are big pluses.”
How to Submit: Take a look at the agency’s full submission guidelines.
7. Quressa Robinson (D4EO Literary Agency)
Notes: “I’m particularly interested in women’s fiction from #ownvoices authors; stories that are upmarket as well as commercial, but with book club appeal. Would love to see nerdy female protagonists.”
How to Submit: Send queries to quressa [at] d4eo.com, and take a look at Quressa’s full submission guidelines.
Your new complete and updated instructional guide
to finding an agent is finally here: The 2015 book
GET A LITERARY AGENT shares advice from more
than 110 literary agents who share advice on querying,
craft, the submission process, researching agents, and
much more. Filled with all the advice you’ll ever need to
find an agent, this resource makes a great partner book to
the agent database, Guide to Literary Agents.
You might also like:
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LitHub Daily: January 6, 2017
The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1917, Maeve Brennan, Irish-born short story writer and journalist, is born.
Would Hollywood even exist without books? Your essential literary guide to this Sunday’s Golden Globes. | Literary Hub
Emily Fridlund offers her personal canon of Gothic tales, from Bronte to Munro. | Literary Hub
On the evolution of sex writing, from Victorian exoticism to first-person immersion. | Literary Hub
“In its antiquity, its pageantry and its evocation of deep English history… I wondered if seeing swan upping firsthand could help me understand a little more about the state I was in.” Helen Macdonald attempts to understand post-Brexit England through an antiquated tradition. | The New York Times Magazine
The National Book Foundation has announced the Book Rich Environment Initiative, which will combat “book deserts” by donating books to residents of public housing. | Los Angeles Times
Beyond Chris Martin’s tepid interpretation: On the extent to which Rumi’s Muslim teaching shaped his ideas and his poetry. | The New Yorker
on A Series of Unfortunate Events, “a book that suggested that maybe it wasn’t so bad, or wrong, or unusual that I lived my life in a .” | BuzzFeed Reader
“Men write dark stories all the time, and rarely is that darkness obsessed over… But when women write dark, all of a sudden it’s a thing. It’s like: Why so dark? I mean, have you seen the world? It’s an appropriate response.” A profile of Roxane Gay. | Vogue
“Yiannopoulos is both the offspring and natural heir of the conservative publishing industry, a market that’s always valued angry bombast over substance.” On conservative imprints’ reliable profitability and their rewarding of hate-mongering. | Jezebel
Fever Dream, Marlena, and more: Sara Nović selects 25 highly-anticipated books by female authors coming out this year. | Elle
Also on Lit Hub: Talking to Mike Mills about 20th Century Women · Watch a great poet talk on the TV (John Berryman!) · From Josip Novakovich’s new story collection
The post LitHub Daily: January 6, 2017 appeared first on Art of Conversation.
When a Book Tour Returns to the Scene of the Crime
“I just hope I don’t get shot,” I said wryly to my publisher, Judith Regan. We both laughed. But I was only half-joking. I was referring to my impending book signings in New Hampshire, the flinty state I’d grown up in. I was returning there the next day to promote my book KooKooLand, a true crime memoir.
In writing the book, I’d unearthed some ugly local history involving domestic violence, racism, and injustice, and I was afraid some nut just might want to bury me for it. If he did, I figured he’d get off scot-free. In my book, guys get away with murder, and women pay the price.
The first thing I noticed when I arrived in New Hampshire was a whole bunch of Trump signs. No surprise there. In the February primary, Clinton had gotten her clock cleaned, while 5,000 people braved a blizzard to cheer on Trump. The couple I was staying with could’ve had dueling lawn signs. The wife was Team Clinton, the husband Team Trump. When pressed, the husband conceded Hillary was better qualified. I suddenly had a higher purpose for the trip: flip his vote.
New Hampshire, I often tell people, is like a Southern state dropped down in the North. A reddish state trending blue.
As I unpacked, I was trending blue too. I was homesick for my big blue state of California. But I didn’t have time to mope. I had to head off to my first book event.
When I arrived at Gibson’s in Concord, a bookstore founded in 1898, a good-size crowd had already assembled. A guy whose troubled family figures prominently in the book quickly approached me. I froze. This man had every reason to be pissed. I had portrayed his uncle as a violent bully and his father as ornery and delusional.
“Don’t worry. I’m not mad,” he assured me. He thanked me for writing fairly about his family and even admitted that his father could be pretty ornery.
The trip was not shaping up the way I expected. Maybe I was just projecting my own residual hostilities onto these folks?
My next signing, a few days later, was at the Toadstool Bookshop, in picturesque Peterborough. Unfortunately, it was raining buckets. I apologized to the owner for not bringing my beautiful California weather.
“Oh no, this is great weather for us,” he said. People can’t be outside, so they’ll be here.” I felt like I had wandered into a literary field of dreams. If you build it, they will come.
And come they did; it was a huge turnout. I shared my tale of surviving a hardscrabble New Hampshire housing project, a place my California and New York audiences couldn’t even imagine. “They have projects in New Hampshire?” someone there would invariably ask me. Here, no one asked.
My story reflected real life for these people—a reality they didn’t often see depicted in movies, TV shows, and glossy magazines. A lot of people brought up the prescription-drug epidemic. Drugs had decimated these families of New England. People were desperate for a ray of hope, and I was providing it—in the middle of a downpour.
On the way back from Toadstool, I drove under a vivid rainbow, and when I pulled up to a tollbooth, the operator told me that the previous driver had paid my toll—a random act of kindness. I could never have written that. It was too unbelievable.
My final signing was in my hometown of Manchester. The crowd there was the biggest of all. Even the secretary of state of New Hampshire came. He said he didn’t think I’d portrayed the state in a negative light. In fact, he attributed my success to the toughness I’d acquired from my rocky upbringing in the Granite State.
“You’re a local hero,” one man announced. “You told the story of us.”
Though many people identified with my story, that didn’t necessarily translate into sharing my politics. By week’s end, I hadn’t even managed to flip the vote of my Trump-loving host. But Clinton might not need his vote. She’s ahead of Trump in New Hampshire.
The place I depicted in my book is becoming a thing of the past. And I couldn’t be happier.
Gloria Norris is a screenwriter and film producer whose book KooKooLand was published this year by Regan Arts.
A version of this article appeared in the 09/19/2016 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Rocking the Granite State
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Julianna Baggott: Pure Writer – The Writer
Credit: Laura Ciociola
Julianna Baggott’s young adult novel, Pure, begins with a power paragraph.
“Pressia is lying in the cabinet. This is where she’ll sleep once she turns sixteen in two weeks – the tight press of blackened plywood pinching her shoulders, the muffled air, the stalled motes of ash. She’ll have to be good to survive this – good and quiet, and, at night when OSR patrols the street, hidden.”
In a good novel, the first five words make you forget you’re reading, wrote John Gardner. In six words, Baggott compelled me to read on. By the end of the paragraph, the printed page dropped away, and I was immersed in Pressia’s damaged world.
The paragraph fulfills another requirement of good writing: It leaves us with questions. Why is she hiding in this burned-out place? What does turning 16 have to do with it? Who or what are OSR patrols? The promise is that the author will deliver the answers.
The scope of Baggott’s imagination is breathtaking, and it’s impossible to pin her work to one genre. In Pure, she creates a “narrative that owes as much to fairy tale and myth as it does to science fiction,” wrote reviewer Clare Clark in the New York Times.
The writing pulls us into a strange mutilated world where nuclear blasts called “Detonations” divide humankind into the Pures, untouched survivors who live protected under the Dome, and the damaged “wretches” who live outside the Dome. These survivors are disfigured in bizarre ways, fused to other objects, people or animals by the force and heat of the explosions. A doll’s head is fused to Pressia’s hand. Birds are fused to the back of another character, and another carries his younger brother attached to his back. At the same time, under the sterile Dome, the young Pures are “coded” to create super physical powers and obedient behavior and are being trained as soldiers.
The humanity of the characters overcomes any initial resistance a reader might have to such grotesqueries. “When people say that Pure is too bleak for them, I refuse to apologize. What we’ve done to our fellow man is far more horrific than anything I wrote. Pure isn’t about the apocalypse. It’s about what endures – hope, faith, love,” Baggott told Roxanne Gay in an interview for therumpus.net.
Baggott is a prolific writer. She has authored 22 books, including novels for adults and young adults, children’s books and books of poetry. Her short stories and essays are widely published in literary and general interest publications. Two early novels for adults, Girl Talk and The Miss America Family, were best-sellers. Pure was a 2012 New York Times Notable Book.
The output is so great she uses two pseudonyms: N. E. Bode for children and Bridget Asher, for what she calls commercial work. A review in Kirkus of her 2015 Asher novel All of Us and Everything praises her “unique voice.”
Baggott not only writes across genres but also across generations. After I read Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders, a New York Times Editor’s Choice for adult readers, I found myself recommending it to my teenage granddaughter. Likewise, I recommended Pure to some adult friends who enjoy futuristic themes.
“Julianna has stunningly protean gifts as a writer,” said Robert Olen Butler, creative writing professor at Florida State University, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 12 novels and one nonfiction book From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction (a bible among MFA students). Butler calls Harriet Wolf a “metafictional, family fictional, love-story fictional and literary fictional.”
“Not that all these elements stand out individually,” he said. “Her genius is to do all that and make it seamlessly whole. Unified, I’d say, by her unique vision of things. Through her entire oeuvre, under her various shape-shifting writing names, she is smart and complex and full of human yearning and at times funny as hell.”
In Harriet Wolf, Baggott explores the “real” world of lost love, broken marriages, neglected children and mother-daughter conflicts. Disturbing in parts? Yes. But dreary it’s not. Absurd, funny and life-affirming? Absolutely. There’s a wild mind at work in this sprawling family story that spans the 20th century and three generations.
The novel begins: “This is how the story goes: I was born dead – or so my mother was told.” It misses Gardner’s five-word rule, but who can stop reading there?
The reclusive author Harriet Wolf, who has written a beloved six-book series, retreats into a fictional world to avoid the pain of her childhood spent in the “stink and misery” of the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children. She was placed there by mistake until a doctor discovered she was actually a genius. She has secrets – plenty of them, which she reveals in a letter to her daughter and two granddaughters to be read after her death. It’s a love story and mystery intertwined. The question plaguing family and fans is whether a manuscript for the seventh and final book exists, and if so, where is it?
Part of Baggott’s particular skill lies in making the right choices for voice and perspective. In Pure, she alternates the point of view between several characters but stays in close-third person. For Harriet Wolf, she uses four first-person storytellers: Harriet; her daughter Eleanor, who sees danger everywhere; Eleanor’s angry, rebellious daughter Ruth, who returns home after her mother falls ill to rescue her younger sister Tilton; and the childlike Tilton, who, confined to the house by her overprotective mother, explains the world around her in lyrical language befitting a poet.
In Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa wrote: “All fictions are structures of fantasy and craft erected around certain acts, people, or circumstances that stand out in the writer’s memory and stimulate his imagination.”
Baggott told me that she could put her finger down in one of her own books and, in the spirit of Vargas Llosa, know what experience in her life that line came from. “Certainly I rummage through my daily life in my work,” she said. “I have a lot of little obsessions, a lot of things I want to stitch together.” That’s not to say her work is autobiographical, only that memories fuel her imagination.
For example, Baggott remembers stories her grandmother told of being in and out of children’s homes when she was a child, which led the author to investigate a defunct school for the so-called “feeble minded” children. Access to the buildings, grounds and archives yielded details she needed to create the fictional institution.
Memories of the fear of nuclear attack during the Cold War and Civil Defense school drills led her to research Hiroshima and Nagasaki while drafting Pure. (Pressia is half Japanese.)
Baggott also collects scrapes of information: observations, conversations, newspaper stories and odd events. “It’s not unusual for me to have notes all over my hands while I’m teaching,” said Baggott, who is on the faculty of College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband and creative business partner, David Scott, and their children. She also travels throughout the year to teach at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts.
If you walked into her home office, you might find stacks of paper notes in bins labeled “contemporary,” “comedic,” “otherworldly.” “If there’s a novel I can’t get to, I throw ideas for it into a bin so I can work on it later,” she said. “For Pure, I used a number of failed short stories to help create the world and its characters. Failed works become part of a junkyard of sorts that can be very fertile terrain.”
A freewheeling imagination is her gift; a highly disciplined approach to writing is her craft. She hones her worlds with precise, cinematic language. Reading Pure, I felt at times like I was watching a movie. Each detail helps build a flesh-and-blood character and a world the reader will believe in and enter. She attributes her intentionality to reading and writing poetry.
“Fiction writers should read poetry for two reasons,” she said. “First, poets often write epiphanies, and beautifully so. Second, poets choose one image and really rely on it to stain the reader’s mind. Before I studied poetry, I had less confidence in the power of the image and would clutter the page, piling them on. Poetry teaches the power of restraint,” she said.
As an MFA student, Baggott was “an absolute original writer who celebrated and investigated the role imagination played in saving and destroying people,” said Lee Zacharias, author of the memoir The Only Sounds We Make. She directed Baggott’s MFA thesis at North Carolina University at Greensboro, where she is now professor emerita. “She was a pioneer in constructing a world in which the real and the imaginative co-exist. Her stories were magical – not in the sense of science fiction or magical realism – but in their assumptions: They might begin at a time when man was so new most had just outgrown their gills or one’s parents might become woolly and hooved over and evolve into sheep or a sandman might live in dusty drawers left over from childhood.”
Throughout several phone and email conversations, Baggott was open and generous, ready to address any question. She talked about her creative process and sources of inspiration, writing for teens and adults, and people who have helped her. We didn’t meet face-to-face, but I was struck by a kind of bright energy that came through in her voice. Near the end of our talks, I asked: “Why do you write?”
“I could write a book in response – everything from watching one of my grandmothers lose her memory and becoming a hoarder of stories to the chip on my shoulder to my field hockey days to my Southern roots – but on the simplest level, it’s how I breathe,” she said.
How is writing young adult novels different from writing for adults?
No difference. Each novel teaches me how to write it, and before I can truly understand what I’m writing, I need to imagine the one person to whom I’m whispering the story urgently. Sometimes that person is an adult, sometimes my oldest daughter, as it was with Pure, and sometimes a childhood version of myself. The ear receiving the story changes, but once it’s chosen, the story becomes far easier to write. That said, I could write two hundred pages and not quite yet know. Those are dangerous, messy pages that will change drastically.
The beginning of Pure makes a strong visual impact. What inspired these vivid details?
The ash and coal dust that’s found throughout Pure comes from my father’s childhood. He was raised in West Virginia and talked of snow turning gray before hitting the ground. The grandfather who’s missing a leg is based on my own grandfather, who was a double-amputee from World War II. His stump wasn’t clotted in wires, but it was calloused. It made a huge impact on me as a child. The small fan whirring in [her grandfather’s] throat comes from my grandmother who needed a fan on her while she lay naked in a hospital bed in a hospice home. I write a lot from what’s been stored in my memory.
What gave you the idea for Pressia’s disfigured hand?
My house is filled with toys. I used to be an athlete. From across the room, I shoot toys – including baby dolls – into the toy box. One day, I palmed a baby-doll head. The idea of a doll’s head fused to a fist struck. I was reading George Saunders and Aimee Bender at the time and wrote a failed short story about a 23-year-old woman with this affliction. But at the same time, I was feeling visually restless, cinematically ambitious and once I started to world-build, Pressia found the story in which she truly belonged.
How do you decide on the first words of a novel?
If I feel there’s not something going on that I’m in love with, I can’t go forward. I have to have a feeling that there’s a good foundation where the language is interesting to me and there’s some texture on the page. Once I have that feeling, I can start writing forward.
A bit of writing advice from John Irving: The intrigue for the reader turns from what will happen to how it will happen, which I find richer.
What advice do you give your students about beginnings?
I quote novelist Valerie Martin, who wrote, “The desire at the start is not to say anything, not to make meanings, but to create for the unwary reader a sudden experience of reality.” Of course, I also suggest sometimes that they tell the plot – spill it. If there’s going to be a dead body, mention the dead body, and then the reader will be patient because you’ve made a promise.
Once you’re happy with the beginning, do you go forward, revise?
Eventually, I stop looking back and being prissy about the beginning, but I’m pretty prissy about it for a long while. At a certain point, I only go forward. I allow myself to write a chunk where I can say, “You know, I don’t know what I’m really doing here. It’s a bit messy.” I cut myself some slack. I can also write with blind spots where I say, “I know I’m going to have to figure this out later. I don’t know what the answer is right now, but that’s OK,” and I can keep writing.
In Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders and Pure, you create a vivid sense of place that is a physical and a powerful psychological presence in the reader’s mind. How do you achieve that?
Funny. I’m struggling right now with a world I’m trying to build, and it’s stalled me. I have to nail it down and dig in deeply before I can write another word. Writers are such heady creatures that we often forget our characters have bodies and senses. To fully imagine a life, one has to supply undeniable details about the exterior world so that when the novelist has to make the truly improbable leap to the interior world of another human being, the reader is primed to believe us.
What’s an example of an “undeniable truth?”
The barbershop in Pure offered a lot of details of the old world: blue Barbasol, shaving cream canisters, white smocks that snap at the neck. In choosing a specific location, not just a lean-to, I was allowed to draw on those details and allow them to build the world around the characters.
You lecture on “efficient creativity.” What do you mean by that phrase?
Putting those two words together makes people nervous because people feel you can’t force ideas. However, you can acknowledge the environment that [sparked your imagination]. Were you listening to music? Who did you just talk to? Were you being physically active? The main thing for writers and for those who are innovative in different ways is to acknowledge you have a creative process. Take a moment to lift your head and look at that environment. The more you can work with it rather than against it, the better. Creative people don’t want to think about their creative process. They like to think about it as the muse and not mess with it, which I think is counterproductive.
How does that work for you?
I’ve asked myself these questions, and I know that when my brain cells are freshest. I protect that time. I know when I’m in a good mood, I’m more generative. When in a foul mood, I should be editing. I know that I can plot to music, but not write to it. I know when to take a walk with my husband and talk through the story. I know when to hand something off and when to hold it close. Perhaps most importantly, I know when to eat dark chocolate.
My process has gotten better over the years because I’ve become aware of it, and bow to it. As I said earlier, each novel teaches me how to write it, but what I learn about my process follows me from project to project – even as my process evolves – and being aware of it is a great advantage.
What is your writing process?
If we believe the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of dedication to get to the height of your craft, I wasn’t going to get [those] hours while sitting at a computer. I have four kids [8 to 20 years old] and my life is very demanding, loud, messy and chaotic. I had to get into these spaces mentally where I was creating and visualizing scenes while cutting vegetables, driving in a car pool or waiting for somebody’s soccer practice to be finished. If I found myself thinking about things that were not really important, I would stop myself and envision a scene. I would envision it again, something else [in the scene] would happen. By the time I got to the computer, I would be four drafts into the process. Making that a practice has made my work more visual. I’m a much more visual writer than if I were sitting at a desk, which tends to make me more of a language writer.
Who or what has influenced your writing?
My mother told family stories that were, by and large, of the Southern Gothic tradition. Combine that with our Catholicism – a highly vivid religion where the Passion of Christ is portrayed in great detail – and there is no denying a Flannery O’Connor influence. I adore her brutality. Hemingway may have been running with the bulls, but he strikes me as a soft romantic compared to O’Connor. I was influenced by playwrights – Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Neil Simon. I really developed my ear while going to theater as a kid, and of course, Mamet taught me how to curse. Later, I was influenced by poets like Marie Howe, whose work in particular taught me a lot about how a narrative takes form, moment to moment, spanning a book-length work. Poets are great teachers of the power of a singular image and how to write epiphany. I’ve also loved many magical realists.
Have you had writing mentors and, if so, how have they helped you?
Fred Chappell and Lee Zacharias profoundly affected me as a writer in graduate school. Lee was very hands-on about character and structure. Fred’s magical realism and his ability to write both brutality and humor were important to me. He modeled cross-genre writing and, in retrospect, that became vital. He read our work in class, which resonated with me deeply because I write so much from what is in the air, aloud. Reading aloud makes it painfully clear what parts are alive and which dead on the page. Mainly, however, he was generous with his spirit. It’s hard to explain that quality in a teacher, but the ones who see you as a fellow sufferer make a difference.
What do you do when you’re not writing?
My husband is always terrified when I finish a project, and my kids don’t care for it either. I become overly interested in my children’s lives and the messy house. Writing allows me to control one world. When I’m not doing that, I go off and try to control parts of my own world or other people’s lives. The Catch-22 is that I do get tired of writing and have to find ways and be intentional about walking away. Having four kids is great for me because they don’t allow me to write all the time, and they keep me in balance.
Elfrieda Abbe is a Wisconsin-based freelance writer, editor and book critic. She was formerly the editor and publisher of this magazine.
➜An excerpt from Pure by Julianna Baggott
Pressia: CabinetsPRESSIA IS LYING IN THE CABINET. This is where she’ll sleep once she turns sixteen in two weeks – the tight press of blackened plywood pinching her shoulders, the muffled air, the stalled motes of ash. She’ll have to be good to survive this – good and quiet and, at night when OSR patrols the streets, hidden.
She nudges the door open with her elbow, and there sits her grandfather, settled into his chair next to the alley door. The fan lodged in his throat whirs quietly; the small plastic blades spin one way when he draws in a breath and the opposite way when he breathes out. She’s so used to the fan that she’ll go months without really noticing it, but then there will be a moment, like this one, when she feels disengaged from her life and everything surprises.
“So, do you think you can sleep in there?” he asks. “Do you like it?”
She hates the cabinet, but she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings. “I feel like a comb in a box,” she says. They live in the back storage room of a burned-out barbershop. It’s a small room with a table, two chairs, two old pallets on the floor, one where her grandfather now sleeps and her old one, and a handmade birdcage hung from a hook in the ceiling. They come and go through the storage room’s back door, which leads to an alley. During the Before, this cabinet held barbershop supplies – boxes of black combs, bottles of blue Barbasol, shaving-cream canisters, neatly folded hand towels, white smocks that snapped around the neck. She’s pretty sure that she’ll have dreams of being blue Barbasol trapped in a bottle.
Her grandfather starts coughing; the fan spins wildly. His face flushes to a rubied purple. Pressia climbs out of the cabinet, walks quickly to him, and claps him on the back, pounds his ribs. Because of the cough, people have stopped coming around for his services – he was a mortician during the Before and then became known as the flesh-tailor, applying his skills with the dead to the living. She used to help him keep the wounds clean with alcohol, line up the instruments, sometimes helping hold down a kid who was flailing. Now people think he’s infected.
Excerpt reprinted with permission from Julianna
Baggott © 2012, Grand Central Publishing.
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NBF Launches the Book Rich Environment Initiative
In a new partnership with the federal government and nonprofit organizations, the National Book Foundation (NBF) has launched the Book Rich Environment Initiative—a book drive benefitting public housing communities that will unfold over the course of 2017.
NBF teamed up with the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Urban Library Council, and the Campaign for Grade Level Reading on the initiative, which will bring books and other literacy tools to more than four million children and their families who live in HUD-assisted housing.
“By collaborating with these key national partners, we are able to build the foundation’s reach and further our mission of making sure that books matter, and that they matter everywhere,” said NBF board chairman David Steinberger, according to a press release.
Publishers such as Hachette Book Group and Macmillan Publishers are participating by making large donations, and Penguin Random House is in the lead with 200,000 books committed to the initiative. Over thirty public housing authorities and local library partners across the country have also pledged their support.
According to Lisa Lucas, executive director of the NBF, the new initiative will help the foundation expand its free afterschool program, BookUp, which has donated over 30,000 books to young people. “Through the Book Rich Environment Initiative, we will expand that to over 300,000 books by the end of 2017,” she said in a press release.
A public launch event in Washington, D.C., on January 5 included remarks from partners and stakeholders such as Susan Benton, president and CEO of the Urban Libraries Council; Broderick Johnson, White House Cabinet Secretary and Chair of My Brother’s Keeper Task Force; and many more. Following the initial donation, NBF will seek donations from additional publishers, implement accompanying community programming that supports local libraries, and help connect communities with authors.
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