Caroline Leavitt's Blog, page 58

Meg Waite Clayton talks about The Race for Paris, the pleasures and perils of historical research, the amazing women correspondents who covered the war, and so much more

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 I've known and loved Meg Waite Clayton for years. She's the kind of person you can call in the middle of the night if you need to, and the kind of person who always has a brow pencil ready when you need to paint on freckles to complete a clown outfit! To me, what is so wonderful is how Meg, after writing four critically acclaimed novels, suddenly changed paths and wrote her first historical--The Race for Paris, and it's incredible. I'm not the only one singing The Race For Paris' praises. Not only is it an Indie Next Pick, a Glamour Magazine recommended read, one of the BBC's Ten Best Summer Reads of 2015, a Bookreporter Bets On Selection, but it's about to enter the world and rack up even more raves. </i></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-right: -.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><br />Meg is also the author of The Wednesday Sisters, one of Entertainment Weekly’s 25 Essential Best Friend Novels of all time. Her first novel, The Language of Light, was a finalist for the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction (now the PEN/Bellwether). She's written for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Runner’s World and public radio, often on the subject of the particular challenges women face.<br /><br />The only thing more thrilling for me than hosting Meg here would be to sit down and have lunch with her. Thanks, Meg!</i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-right: -.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><b>I always ask writers what the “spark” moment was for his or her book. What was haunting you that led to this story?</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-right: -.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b><br />The idea for The Race for Paris actually came to me while I was doing research for my first novel, The Language of Light. I read photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White’s autobiography, Portrait Of Myself. Something she said in that—about motherhood, I think I can say that much without spoiling the plot—really moved me. I had to read the autobiography in the stacks of the Vanderbilt library because it was out of print and couldn’t be checked out, so you can picture me sitting in the stacks, weeping. 
<br /><br />The story really began to take shape when I read about how Martha Gellhorn got to cover the Normandy invasion. Only male journalists were allowed to go. (The excuse: “no women’s latrines there, and we aren’t about to start digging them now”—never mind that the press camps were generally set up in lovely big French chateaus with running water and sometimes whiskey literally on tap.)<br /><br />Martha stowed away in the loo of a hospital ship and went ashore with a stretcher crew, one of the very few correspondents to cover the invasion from French soil. nAnd her reward for her bravery? She was taken into custody on returning to England, and stripped of her military accreditation, her travel papers, and her ration entitlements. She was confined to a nurses’ training camp until she could be shipped back to the U.S.<br /><br />So here’s what she did: She hopped the fence, hitched a ride on a plane to Italy, and covered the war without the benefit of her swanky military credential, sweet-talking wireless operators into send her work out, while all the time looking over her shoulder for the military police charged with apprehending her.<br /><br />While the male correspondents went wherever they wanted, and returned to nice warm press rooms in chateaus and 5-star hotels, the women correspondents who managed to get accredited to France were largely confined to hospitals. They worked at tables they set up in fields when the weather wasn’t terrible, which it mostly was. While men were able to negotiate changes to copy with on site censors at the press camps and send work by wire, women journalists’ work went by pouch—much slower, so not as timely—and was censored in England, where the journalists had no ability to make changes to accommodate the censors. Whatever was left after the censors did their dirty deeds—often not quite the truth and sometimes pure gibberish… well, off it went to their editors anyway, with their names on it.<br /><br />For many women, the only option if they wanted to cover the war in a meaningful way, was to go AWOL—absent without leave—leaving them without resources, often in danger, and with the added challenge of having to evade military police send to take them into custody. Several who did so, including Lee Miller, Catherine Coyne, and Dot Avery, were taken into custody and held at Rennes, and so missed covering the liberation of Paris.<br /><br />When you just look at what these women did during the war, they seem daring and risk-taking and sort of superhuman. But if you peek behind the curtain… Well, let’s just say that as a child attending fortnightly dance classes, Martha Gellhorn hid with a friend in the coatroom rather than have to stand unselected by the boys.<br /><br />One of the things I wanted to do in The Race for Paris was explore how very human and like the rest of us these women really are. I’m not saying they didn’t do extraordinary things—they did. But a lot of women in a lot of circumstances in WWII did, too, and I like to think that even if I might not have, many of my readers would.<br /><br /><b>I always want to know about process. The Race for Paris is richly drawn, multilayered, and gripping--and it’s also your first historical novel, right? How daunting was it to dip into the past?  What was your research like? Did anything surprise you? Did any of the research turn the story you thought you were writing into something completely different?</b><br /><br />Thank you, Caroline. That is high praise coming from you!<br /><br />Daunting, yes—absolutely. I just didn’t want to get it wrong, and I wanted to do these extraordinary folks justice. The women especially, because they are less well known. I suppose that’s perhaps why this book took so much longer than anything else I’ve written. I started it literally before the turn of the century! I’ve written three other novels in the time I’ve been working on it, but this is the one I kept always returning to.<br /><br />The Race for Paris is my first novel being marketed as historical fiction. But because The Wednesday Sisters was set in the 1960s, when I was a child, I’ve always thought of it as historical, too, and the process of researching for this book was much like that in some ways.<br />For this one, I did do the really fun stuff, like spending a month in Paris not once, but twice. I really enjoyed learning about how the press operated during the war, and all the details of what they did. I stayed in a chateau that was a press camp in Normandy, now owned by a man who was born there during the war. That was amazing, to sit by myself and watch the sun come up in a room where extraordinary journalists like Ernie Pyle wrote during the war.
And I covered the path my characters cover in the book—an excuse to see a lot of Europe!<br /><br />I also immersed myself in books about the time, and in primary source materials. Letters and journals of real WWII correspondents. The pieces they wrote and, in the case of Lee Miller, some earlier drafts of pieces she wrote. For me, seeing the world directly through their eyes that way makes their world come alive.<br /><br />I loved gathering the little details of the everyday lives: for example, that they washed their laundry in their helmets, and often stopped menstruating due to the stress. And funny things like that the photojournalists—because it rained all the time in Normandy—would put their spent film in condoms and tie them up to keep them dry. 

The problem wasn’t finding the interesting bits to include in the book, but choosing which to include, because there was so much great material. And then knowing when to stop. I love the research. I was a history major in college with a focus on 20th century American wars, so this is a real sweet spot for me.<br /><br />There was one thing that I found well into the writing of the book that … well, it didn’t exactly turn the direction of the book, but it was just the thing I needed to make it all line up, and it was not the thing I was looking for. I don’t want to say too much, but I read about something that really happened in a cave during World War II, and that led me to an ending that was quite different than I’d envisioned. Who was it who says that an ending should be the “inevitable surprise”? Aristotle? I suppose if an ending doesn’t surprise the writer, then perhaps it can’t be the inevitable surprise that is so satisfying in literature.<br /><br /><b>I love the totally empowering characters of Liv and Jane (and Fletcher), who are determined to be the first to get to Paris and photograph the city’s liberation from the Germans. And I love it even more that she’s based on real-life characters. How did you go about crafting these characters?</b><br />I have to say I just loved drawing from the real experiences of women correspondents who covered the war. I couldn’t have made up some of the things that really happened. It might have been fun to do nonfiction, but the form of the novel allowed me to collect the most interesting of their experiences into one narrative arc that I hope will appeal to readers, but isn’t always there in real life.<br />The way I develop character is generally in a sort of character scrap book, where I gather all sorts of bits until they start to take shape as a whole character. I pull photos from magazines, add poems, little snippets of things they might say, where they might be from, what their backstories might be. And just writing.<br /><br />This story started with Liv, my ambitious photojournalist who carts her Speed Graphic to France intent on covering the liberation of Paris and in the process making both history and her own career. She’s not uncomplicated, no one is. And she’s far from perfect. Perfect in a character is boring. But I think it’s a hard thing for women to embrace ambition. It ends up leaving us considered “bossy” or “unfeminine,” “undesirable.”<br /><br />I wanted to explore the challenge war presents for love, in part because many correspondent marriages did not survive the war. Many marriages didn’t survive the war, for that matter. The Race for Paris isn’t primarily a love story, but it’s not exactly not, either, if that makes any sense. So Charles, Liv’s husband, came along with Liv, and Fletcher sort of showed up in a scene in London that I long ago pulled from the book. (After learning a whole lot about the tea service at the Palm Court and what robot bombs sound like just before they fall!)<br /><br />Jane—my journalist with her lovely foldable Corona typewriter who narrates the novel—actually started as a bit player who disappeared after the early chapters, and was a small homage to my Aunt Annette, who was in Normandy with the Red Cross. When I asked my aunt why she chose to go to war, she said, in a southern accent I can’t replicate, that she was twenty-something, “and the boys were all over there and I was going to be an old maid before they came home, so I thought I’d better get on over to Europe and find me one!” As befitting any character modeled on my Aunt Annette, she eventually took over the telling of the story, and that’s when it all starting falling into place finally.<br /><br /><b>Although these characters are dashing for “the scoop of their lives”, there’s much more to be gained than career goal. Can you talk about that please?</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-right: -.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />While Liv comes to Normandy intent on making her career, what she finds is that that isn’t what she needs or wants after all. Or perhaps a better way to say it is that she finds that “making her career” means something completely different than she thought it did. And I think that is so often true in life, that what we think we need and what we find we do are not the same.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-right: -.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />So I suppose on one level that is what the book is about: the importance of leaving ourselves open to the possibility that what we need isn’t what we want.The book is very much about what we do in war, or on the excuse of war. All my characters come to the war with an idea of our humanity that gets challenged. That is a very important aspect of this novel. I think that like other extremely difficult times—children in hospitals, loved ones dying—being at war scrapes us down to exactly who we are.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-right: -.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><b>So much of this fascinating novel is about the limits put on women, and the few who dared to defy them.  It works brilliantly for the time period, but I think it also has a lot to say to women today, don’t you?</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-right: -.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />I do, absolutely. One moral of this story is that if the rules get in your way, go around them or over them, or just break right through them. And that remains so true for women today.<br />Women war journalists still face a whole lot of complications that men don’t. I’m not sure I’ll ever get over seeing photos from Afghanistan of my friend Masha Hamilton…in a headscarf. But what is true for women journalists is still, sadly, true in pretty much every walk of life. There are so many ways in which our expectations for women are shaped in ways we don’t even realize—what I can our embedded gender presumptions.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-right: -.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />No one thinks twice if a male journalist (or soldier, or businessman) leaves his family behind for a week or a month or longer for a job, but if a woman does the same, her maternal instincts are suspect, right? And on the flip side, a stay-at-home dad is suspect, too. I think very few of us thing we discriminate based on gender, but in fact every study ever done shows indisputably that we all do.<br />So I’m a big proponent of “name it change it.” Not that it’s that easy, but I think the more we call out the different ways we see each other based on gender, race, and the like, the more likely we are to be aware and to therefore change. I don’t set out to write on a theme, I start out to write a story, but I can see now over the course of five novels that this is turf that stirs my passions, which is I think where I do my best writing.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-right: -.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />What’s obsessing you now and why? 

I’ve been working on this book for so long that I find myself absolutely obsessed with helping it make its way in the world. But I’m also really longing to get back to the writing. That is the happy place for me, at my little computer with my pretend friends and my fictional worlds that I hope will make readers feel understood. (And then there is the coming election. I’m definitely obsessing about that already!)</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-right: -.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><b>What question didn’t I ask that I should have?</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-right: -.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b><br />Perhaps, “Why Paris?” Why not, say, “The Race for Berlin”?<br />For this story—WWII—Paris was … well, it sort of felt like the liberation of Paris would mean the war was won. The war didn’t end there, of course—the fighting continued to Berlin—but the liberation was symbolically so important. The epigraph I use for the novel was written by Martha Gellhorn in late 1943, shortly after she was accredited as a war correspondent and headed for London:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-right: -.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />I would give anything to be part of the invasion and see Paris right at the beginning and watch the peace. The two were intertwined in people’s minds: Paris being liberated was the peace.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-right: -.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />And Paris is such a romantic, evocative city, even in war. Or perhaps especially in war. If you can walk along the Seine, or just sit out on one of the bridges at night with a bottle of wine … the lighting is lovely, the reflection off the Seine. Now you have the young kids gathering at the tip of the Isle de la Cité just to be together. The warm colors of the sunset and that very fun moment of the Eiffel Tower lighting up. The Hôtel de Ville at night—where the novel opens—is just stunning. Really, if you can’t fall in love in Paris, then you’re probably doomed. If you can’t write in Paris, or about it, you certainly are.</span></div></div>

Val Brelinski talks about The Girl Who Slept With God, growing up Evangelistic, migrant workers, and so much more

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I'm thrilled to host her here because the Girl Who Slept with God is one of my favorite books of the year (And Amazon thinks to so!) </b></i><b><i>Val Brelinski was born and raised in Nampa, Idaho, the daughter of devout evangelical Christians. From 2003 to 2005, she was a <a href="http://creativewriting.stanford.edu/a..." id="yui_3_17_2_1_1438649176409_452" target="_blank">Wallace Stegner Fellow</a> at Stanford University, where she was also a Jones Lecturer in fiction writing. She received an MFA from the <a href="http://www.engl.virginia.edu/creative..." target="_blank">University of Virginia</a>, and her recent writing has been featured in <a href="http://www.vqronline.org/fiction/2015..." target="_blank">VQR</a> and <a href="http://therumpus.net/2010/07/herself-..." target="_blank">The Rumpus</a></i>. She received prizes for her fiction from the <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/magazine/articl..." target="_blank"><i>San Francisco Chronicle</i></a>, <a href="http://www.c-ville.com/" target="_blank"><i>The Charlottesville Weekly</i></a>, and <a href="http://www.boiseweekly.com/" target="_blank"><i>The Boise Weekly</i></a>, and was also a finalist for the <a href="http://www.ronajaffefoundation.org/" target="_blank">Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award</a>. Val lives in Northern California and currently teaches creative writing at Stanford's <a href="http://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/" target="_blank">Continuing Studies Program</a>.Val, thank you so, so much for being here! </b></span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><b>I always want to know what sparks a book? What was haunting or obsessing you at the time that made you feel that this was the book you absolutely had to write?</b></span></div><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blo..." imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blo..." imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><span style="font-size: small;"><br />My family’s strict evangelicalism has colored absolutely every part of my life, so it was very natural that when I finally began to write at age 40 (!), thoughts about my unusual upbringing poured out of me and onto the page in a nearly effortless stream. My novel is a fictional account of one girl’s adolescence that very closely resembles my own. I felt so very strongly about this female and her family and their agonized interactions because they are essentially me and my sisters and my parents, only slightly rearranged.<br /><b><br />Your novel is so soulful and so spiritual, as it tackles big questions of faith and family--both of which can help us and offer comfort, or they can destroy us. Can you talk about that, please?</b><br /><br />I know that my parents believed utterly that their faith and the choices they made because of it were in their daughters’ best interests. They genuinely worried that my sisters and I might go to hell if we didn’t follow their fundamentalist dictates—a problematic situation because I was a curious and stubborn kid and a fun-loving adolescent. I strained mightily against the endless and picayune rules that our church imposed, and my attitude became a bone of contention between my parents and me. My father loved me utterly, but in many ways he placed his own personal beliefs above the long-term welfare of his children, sometimes to each of his daughters’ detriment. I have nothing but admiration for sincere believers whose personal lives reflect their religious faith on a daily basis, but I don’t agree with those who force their friends and family members to do the same. Proselytizing and enforced belief never bring anything but misery. Faith should be an individual choice that does not infringe on the rights of others to believe differently.<br /><b><br />What kind of writer are you? Do you have rituals, do you outline, do you have to have a pound of chocolate before you begin? I’m curious what you learned from writing this novel and if you think you’ll take it into your next novel? I mean both in terms of writing techniques and the issues and themes you were working with.</b><br /><br />I only wish I had a writing routine! I write when I have something to say, when something has been percolating in my head for a bit. I have to feel a particular desire in order to really begin, otherwise whatever I write tends to be a bit scattershot. When I first began writing (a decade ago), I wrote daily as a sort of exercise, but now I tend to work with more firm direction because I’m the type of writer who could write endlessly about everything and have reams of stories that head off into outer space. I still have a box full of old legal pads filled with my early scratchings.<br /><br />I don’t usually outline, but I will definitely have a pretty good idea of where I am headed before I even begin writing a story. My agent had me outline my novel after I had written it, and this was an excellent tool for seeing where I needed to fill things in further and where I had devoted too much space to a certain event or character. I am sadly not very organized, but I usually do have a story’s plotline (even certain sentences and images) figured out in my head before I sit down at my laptop. However, this doesn’t mean that I am not often surprised about what comes out once I begin!<br /><br />I walk and run out in the country every night, and this is often when I do my best thinking and imagining. My dog and I trot along, and I conjure up storylines and dialogue in my head. I think I have done this since I was a child as a form of escape from the actual world I was living in. Back then I was a horse and a Native American and occasionally Helen Keller or Johnny Quest (does anyone remember him now?).<br /><b><br />What’s obsessing you now and why? What question didn’t I ask that I should have?</b><br /><br />I am currently working on a novel about some migrant workers in Idaho during and after the Depression (sounds exciting, doesn’t it?), and a memoir about my own rather traumatic early twenties. My first (and teenaged) husband robbed a federal bank and ended up going to jail when we were first married—a strange situation that I still find scary and fascinating.<br /><br />You very tactfully didn’t ask me why on earth it took me so long to begin my writing career. On the day of my first writing workshop at Stanford, my professor, John L’Heureux, took me aside and sweetly said, “Harriet Doerr didn’t publish Stones for Ibarra until she was 73, so you’ve got a little time left.” I laughed, but he wasn’t that far off. Thanks to my evangelical background which told me that writing novels was a frivolous, sinful and “worldly” occupation, I didn’t start writing until my fourth decade of life. And even then, I had difficulty taking myself seriously. I was raised to be a dutiful wife and mother and nothing more. When I got the news that I had received a Stegner Fellowship, I called my parents and told them that I was going to go to Stanford to be paid to write stories. There was a long moment’s silence on the other end of the phone and then my mother said, “Why would you want to do that?” This sums up my family’s notions about fiction writing.<br /><br />Since then however, my younger sister has also become a writer and my son is now getting his own MFA. The world keeps right on changing, no matter what!</span>

John Truby and Leslie Lehr talk about story structure (otherwise known as my obsession) for novelists, and so much more

<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-font-charset:78; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;} @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;} @font-face {font-family:"Lucida Grande"; panose-1:2 11 6 0 4 5 2 2 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-520090897 1342218751 0 0 447 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Lucida Grande"; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:"Lucida Grande"; mso-ascii-font-family:"Lucida Grande"; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:"Lucida Grande"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Lucida Grande";} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} </style> <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GLdDdmErB9s..." imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GLdDdmErB9s..." width="213" /></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tCOo_Mu7IUI..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tCOo_Mu7IUI..." width="240" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><br />About five years ago, I discovered John Truby's story structure. A student of mine at UCLA was going on and on about what a genius he was, so I bought the tapes of his classes, bought his book--and had my first New York Times Bestseller. Along the way, I became fast friends with his wife, the novelist and screenwriter, Leslie Lehr, and attended John's classes as well. <br /><br />John and Leslie approach story differently from all the other story people. There's no three-act structure. There's no rising and falling action. Instead, the Truby method goes much deeper, focusing on the moral choices of the characters and the impacts of those choices on everyone. His first book, The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller is a bestseller--and I have my own dog-eared copy on my desk at all times. Usually focused on films, <a href="http://johntruby.com/">John&l... and<a href="http://leslielehr.com/"> Leslie</a> are now having an upcoming class, STORY FOR NOVELISTS, starting in San Francisco, September 2015 and I cannot wait until they bring it to New York. <br /><br />Over the past 25 years, more than 30,000 people (including me!) have attended John's sold-out Writers' Studio seminars around the world.  He's been a story consultant for major studios and a script doctor on more than 1800 movies, sitcoms and television dramas from Sony Pictures, HBO, Paramount, BBC, and more.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.leslielehr.com/images/me%2..." imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.leslielehr.com/images/me%2..." height="200" style="margin-top: 10px;" width="182" /></a></div><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African..." title="African Cats"></a></i>Leslie Lehr writes about what-ifs of modern motherhood. Her debut novel, <b><i>66 Laps</i></b>, won the Pirates Alley Faulkner Society Gold Medal. Soon after, her screenplay, <i><b>Heartless</b></i>, was produced as an independent film. The romantic thriller financed five other films for Santa Monica Pictures, aired on USA TV and has been screening in Europe for eight years. Her next books were the nonfiction tomes, <i><b>The Happy Helpful Grandma Guide</b></i>, excerpted on FisherPrice.com; and <i><b>Wendy Bellissimo</b></i>: Nesting, featured on <i>Oprah</i>. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blo..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blo..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div>Her second novel, <i><b>Wife Goes On</b></i>, was a featured selection for the Pulpwood Queens Book clubs, with 250 chapters of tiara-wearing, book-sharing readers. She next wrote the screenplay, <i>Club Divorce</i>, for Lifetime.<a href="http://www.leslielehr.com/books/what-..." target="_self"><b><i> What a Mother Knows</i></b></a>, her literary thriller is a Recommended Read at Target and is currently in development for film.  In addition to private manuscript consulting, she teaches at the world-renowned Writer's Program at UCLA Extension and mentors writers to publication as the Novel Consultant for <a href="http://truby.com/novel-consultation/" target="_blank">Truby’s Writers Studio</a>.<br /><br />I'm so completely thrilled to have both John and Leslie here. Both of them have literally changed my life. Thank you, John and Leslie!  (Note: John Truby is answering these questions, but Leslie's input is in them, as well!) <br /><br /><b><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What made you decide to take your extraordinarily brilliant (trust me, it is) story structure program and rework it for novelists?  </span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Novelists are so concerned with the right word that I think they sometimes forget about story. Sure, readers love words, and love what beautiful language can do. But the main reason they read is for story. In fact, the single most important element for success in any written medium, including novels, is strong narrative drive. I see too many novelists who don’t know this or don’t know how to get it on the page. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">You'll be presenting seminars on this along with the superb novelist Leslie Lehr. What's she taught you that you didn't know already? </span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">More like what hasn’t she taught me. My expertise is story, in any medium. She’s very strong on story structure, and knows how the novel medium changes the requirements for a good story. She’s also an expert on prose techniques that are unique to narrative fiction.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">How do you go from one form to the other? (When I first started writing scripts, I was told that they read like novels!) </span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That’s a big subject we will cover in the class. How do you go from script to novel, and how do you go from novel to script? Both have to tell a good story but they do it in different ways. The biggest differences between novel and film are structure and point of view. You have to know how to translate these elements above all. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>What's the biggest difference between structure for novels and films?</b> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Plot. You need much more of it in novels, but it doesn’t have to have the same dramatic punch that plot has in movies. It’s a very special skill to be able to weave a complex plot, but also stretch it over what is typically a much longer time frame. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What's the biggest mistake you think writers make in writing novels?  </span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">They think they can just start writing and figure out the story as they go. Novels need story structure even more than films because the reader has no visuals to rely on, only imagination. Most of all, writers often have no idea how to create narrative drive.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Many novelists I know are resistant to structure, no matter how much I praise it. They think they have to "follow the muse." They also are sure that if there are no surprises for the writer, there won't be surprises for the reader. And, of course, once I get them to try structure, they love it, and they realize that's not true at all. But what do YOU say to writers? </span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I tell them, go ahead and “follow the muse.” Here’s what’s going to happen. You’ll get about 40 pages into your novel and find out you’ve written yourself into a story dead end. You stop writing the book and then repeat the same process with the next book. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Story is all about seeing the big picture, along with the major story beats, as a whole. If you get the right structure up front, you’ll have plenty of surprises writing the scenes. But you’ll also have a scaffolding that will tell you which creative surprises will work and which ones won’t (and the vast majority won’t). As Leslie puts it, how can you hit the bullseye if you can’t see the target?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I'm curious, I've been applying your seven steps--which are extraordinary on target--for my novels. Are there additional steps and issues novelists should be aware of? </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Oh yes. The seven steps are great for figuring out the anchor steps of the entire story. But for really great plot, you have to know how to use many other steps. And that’s a big deal for novelists, because you have to string a lot more plot over the 300-400 pages in a typical novel. For example, one of those additional plot steps is Revelation. Novels have 3 to 4 times as many reveals as a screenplay. We’re going to spend a lot of time talking about this all-important element in writing novels. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Are the starting points for novels and scripts pretty much the same? Writing something that will change YOUR life? Have a character with a strong arc and a moral dilemma? </span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Absolutely. The fundamentals of great story are the same for every medium. But novelists also have to know the unique ways of setting up narrative drive, beginning with a strong desire line. We’ll explain how to do that in the course.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Many novels--and films--have experimental forms or ensemble players. There is no straight through line--or is there? I'm thinking about films like Momento or Grand Canyon (which had multiple points of views, much like novels), and novels that play with form like Louisa Meets Bear--which is a series of interconnecting stories that all flow back to two initial characters.  Do the structural components still apply?  </span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Yes they do, but as you can imagine they apply differently. These are multi-hero, multi-POV stories. This is a major part of the novel world, much more so than Hollywood film. Above all, you have to know how to connect all the story strands to get that through line. We’ll talk about a number of techniques you can use to do multi-strand stories correctly. You do it quite well in your writing, Caroline, and Leslie will talk about a technique you use in IS THIS TOMORROW in the class.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What are you most excited about in teaching this upcoming class in Story for Novel?</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I’m a big believer in writers going for greatness, which is why I’m so excited about sharing 10 techniques common to all Great American Novels. Obviously, no one can teach someone how to write the Great American Novel. But I believe these 10 techniques, which are extremely detailed, can give a writer a tremendous advantage if he or she wants to take on this immense challenge. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I've been told that if you are a good screenwriter, you'll be a lousy novelist--and vice versa. I refuse to believe this is true. Why would someone think this? </span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This is nonsense. Yes, if a novelist doesn’t learn the unique elements of the screenplay medium, he or she will fail, and vice versa. But that assumes writers can’t master new techniques. If a writer learns how to tell a good story, along with the special techniques of that form, they can be great in both mediums. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Will there be a book on this, I hope? I use your Anatomy of Story for all my classes. </span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">That’s a great idea, Caroline. I was busy last year creating my Myth Class, which includes the beats for three new Female Myth stories I think will be huge the next few years. But Leslie has been talking about a Story for Novel book as well, since she uses <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anatomy of Story</i>in her work as the TWS Novel Consultant and adds a lot of focused information when she works with writers individually. Now that I know you’d be interested in that book too, it may just be a matter of time. Stay tuned.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>

Tawnysha Greene talks about A House Made of Stars, writing without a map, endangered children and so much more

<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} </style> --> <div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><br /><i><span style="color: #212121;">I'm always happy to discover  presses that are new to me, like Burlesque Press--and even more delighted to find new writers. I devoured Tawnysha Greene's book, A House Made of Stars, and I'm deliriously happy to host her here. Thank you so much, Tawnysha!</span></i><br /><br /><b><span style="color: #212121;">What sparked this story?</span></b><br /><br /><span style="color: #212121;">When I first started writing this book in graduate school, I was in a writing rut. I was writing all sorts of stories, trying my best to impress my teachers, but nothing I wrote seemed interesting enough to be a dissertation project. Then one of my professors, Margaret Lazarus Dean, assigned a "secret story" in which I had to write a story where I attempted something completely different than anything I had tried before whether it be in content or style. So I decided to become vulnerable. I wrote about a girl like me.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><span style="color: #212121;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>I was homeschooled and raised in a very religious household. My family often roomed with relatives, and we lived on food stamps. I am hard-of-hearing. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A House Made of Stars</i> is a narrative different than my own, but the girl carried pieces of me that I had always been hesitant to talk about before. So while I wasn't necessarily haunted by anything in writing this book, I did have an urge to write about someone who could have these same details in her life. However, I wanted to incorporate the resilience needed to overcome some of these odds, and the girl in my novel became someone stronger, tougher, and braver than I could ever be. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #212121;">How difficult was it to write this novel through the viewpoint of an endangered child? How did you get into the young girl's head? How did you find the voice?</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #212121;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span></span></b><span style="color: #212121;">Writing a novel from a young child's point of view is actually easier for me than if I were narrating the story through an older character. Children use simpler language, they are more honest, and they often have a sense of innocence that I find endearing. To familiarize myself with how a child can carry a story, I read books with child protagonists. Novels like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The House on Mango Street</i> by Sandra Cisneros, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Housekeeping</i> by Marilynne Robinson, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Salvage the Bones</i> by Jesmyn Ward were my lifelines.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><span style="color: #212121;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>Additionally, I read the diaries I used to keep while growing up. While the book is fiction, I looked to my own writings to refresh myself on what a ten-year-old girl would find noteworthy every day. I also studied the syntax of these sentences, so I could mimic them in the novel and make my narrator more convincing. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #212121;">There's so much terror here—was there ever a moment when you had to stop and say—I can't do this?</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #212121;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span></span></b><span style="color: #212121;">Honestly, I did have a lot of nightmares while writing this book. Even when I'm not at the computer, I still think about the novel in my head when I'm working on a book. I'll go through scenes when I'm washing the dishes, running at the gym, or driving to work. When I'm trying to sleep, the scenes I put off thinking about usually surface, and the weeks in which I wrote some of the most violent chapters in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A House Made of Stars </i>were full of nightmares. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><span style="color: #212121;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>Yet these were the times I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">had</i> to write through. I had to free my narrator, and in freeing her, I could free myself from these same terrors. As I'm sure you know, stories and their protagonists can take such strong holds on their writers, and as I grew closer to her and her family, I felt the need to bring her to rest, peace, and comfort. It was a relief to get past these scenes, and when I reached the end of the book, I knew it was a safe place to leave her, because my nightmares stopped then, too. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><span style="color: #212121;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>The last dream I remember while writing the book was of the protagonist in a room with her father. She was hiding from him, because he was angry and breaking everything in sight. Then, he picked up a globe and threw it down and became enraged when it wouldn't break. He tried again, then again, and still it didn't break. As much as he tried, he couldn't break her world. He couldn't break <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">her</i>. When I woke up, I felt a peace that I never felt about any of my other dreams. She was safe now. I could leave her in that forest at the end of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A House Made of Stars</i> and know that she was going to make it.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #212121;">This is your debut, and I know from my own experience, that sometimes in the middle of writing a novel, you discover the next novel you want to write. Did that happen for you?</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #212121;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span></span></b><span style="color: #212121;">It did. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A House Made of Stars</i> a bit a of an anomaly in that it doesn't wrap up as neatly as many novels typically do. Some readers pushed for an epilogue at the end of the book to tie up the ending a bit more, but I hesitated to include one, because the rest of my protagonist's story was so much bigger than a short note at the end of a book. So much more had to happen before she truly found closure about her childhood, so I decided to start writing a sequel to better detail this journey.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><span style="color: #212121;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>This book is untitled, but takes place twenty years after <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A House Made of Stars</i> has ended. Writing this novel has been very different from my first book—the novel is still in present tense, still has short chapters, but I am still figuring out how to finish my protagonist's story. I have been writing from a young child's point of view for so long that the older voice still feels strange to me, but I am looking forward to learning more about this character as an adult and what she can teach me. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #212121;">What kind of writer are you? Do you outline? Do you have rituals?</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #212121;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span></span></b><span style="color: #212121;">I wish I outlined and had rituals. I am the sort of person who likes to know the future and have things planned out, but I find that when I do this in my writing, the narrative always turns out stilted and forced. So I just let it happen. I free write a lot and my first drafts are horrible and full of mistakes, but they are the ones that end up surprising me and where I find out things about my characters that I didn't know before. I also write whenever and wherever I can. Ideally, my writing sessions are early in the morning when the house is quiet, but sometimes, especially during the semester when I'm teaching, I'm scratching out notes during office hours, while I'm making dinner, or working on other projects. My phone is full of little phrases and ideas that I've texted into it, so I am grateful for this sort of technology! </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #212121;">What's obsessing you now and why?</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #212121;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span></span></b><span style="color: #212121;">Right now, I am obsessed with writing the sequel of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A House Made of Stars</i>, because it is still in the first draft point, and that is always my least favorite writing stage. During this period, I often feel like I am writing blind, because I don't know what will happen next, and that can be very frustrating. But I am still figuring out some of the same things my narrator is—about forgiveness, love, and hope—so maybe it is a good thing that I don't have all the answers yet. Maybe we can learn these things together. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #212121;">What question should I have asked that I didn't?</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>"What is something few people know about you?" (All of your questions were so good, so I was stumped by this one a bit. Luckily, Jeni Wallace, the lovely lady behind Burlesque Press, came to the rescue and suggested this question). My answer: Originally, I didn't plan on being a writer. I had my heart set on becoming a veterinarian, and I volunteered for several years at a veterinary facility, but when I went to college, I favored my English classes and the new world that was opened in me in literature and writing. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>One of my professors, Stephen Gresham, wrote me a note on a graded paper he returned to me and asked if I ever considered taking a course in creative writing. I later took three more courses with him, and he was integral in me choosing to write as part of my career. He is in the acknowledgements page of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A House Made of Stars</i>, and I owe so much of my early growth as a writer to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">   </span></div>

J. Ryan Stradal talks about his exhuberantly wonderful novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, wanting to write a book his mom would have loved, being a foodie, writing, and so much more.

The title of Kitchens of the Great Midwest is as glorious as that cover. You can't help but become engrossed. 

J. Ryan Stradal is an editor Unnamed Press, fiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown, advisory board member at 826LA, and co-producer and host of the literary/culinary series Hot Dish.
His work also appears appears in Hobart, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Joyland, The California Prose Directory, and Midnight Breakfast, among other places. He likes books, wine, sports, root beer, and peas.

Publishing a debut is always exciting--and a little nerve-wracking, yet people are already buzzing about your book. Does this make it harder or easier to write your next book, and if so, why?

No—at least not yet, anyway. The new book feels like a completely different entity. It’s like everyone is talking about what I made for lunch, and meanwhile I’m busy cooking dinner.

To some extent it already feels like someone else wrote Kitchens. I’ve heard that this could happen. I love all of the characters in that book, but I love my new characters too, and they’re the ones I’m thinking about every day and obsessing over.

What was the idea that sparked this book, the thought that haunted you so you had to write it out?

Great question. I wanted to write a book that my mom would’ve loved had she lived to see it exist. Beyond that, I was driven to write a book set in my home region, with characters that resembled the kinds of people I knew growing up. I hadn’t read anything yet that really nailed that for me, so I figured I’d better write it myself. This one really was heavy with my mom’s influence, though. I thought of her every day while I was writing this. It was like she was sitting behind me.

What kind of writer are you? Do you outline or do you wait for the muse?

Somewhere in the middle of those two, but skewed towards the latter. I don’t outline before I start working, but I do have some idea of what ending I’m working towards. I write into a story, and depending on the work, once I discover it, I may make some kind of structural schematic when it’s far enough along that helps me keep track of what’s happening and what still needs to happen.

I deeply admired the structure of this book, with all the different points of views, all of them forming a kind of tapestry allowing us to see a more complex Eva. Did you know this was going to be the structure when you began writing or did it seem to evolve organically? And how different was your first draft from your last?

I devised this structure in my head pretty early on. I started with the notion that I’d tell the stories of the guests at a dinner party, explaining how each knew the chef, and work backwards, with each chapter telling the story of a different guest. I veered from that pretty quickly once the personality of the chef became so strong, and she, not the dinner, became the focus.

The first draft was about 80% the same. Initially there were more chapters like Venison and Bars that barely involved Eva. I quickly decided that I didn’t need so many of those. One character was wiped from the book completely when the two chapters that prominently featured her were both cut. There was more time spent with Ros Wali and his company in one of them. Every chapter, in my mind, had to tell the reader something new and important about Eva, so the ones that failed that test had to go, regardless of their other merits.

Of course, the book is about food, so I wanted to know if you, yourself, are a foodie?  And are the recipes in the novel yours?

I’m an enthusiastic eater of food, but not much of a chef. I follow recipes, I don’t come up with them. The ones in the novel are largely inspired by recipes in a book compiled by a group of women at my great-grandmother’s Lutheran church in 1984.

What’s obsessing you now and why?

My next novel. It’s what I’m working on even when I’m not working on it.



What question didn’t I ask that I should have?

Who else has helped since I wrote the acknowledgements section last fall! So many people mattered to me so deeply while I was writing the book, and so many people have continued to astonish me with the amount of hard work and generosity they’ve brought to my life in the intervening year between completion and publication. These folks require my eternal gratitude in print: Thank you, so much, to Joel Arquillos, Stefan Bucher, Ellen Byron, Ann Friedman, David Gonzalez, Chris Heiser, Carolyn Hutton, Rosemary James, Pamela Klinger-Horn, Cathy Langer, Steven Salardino, Kate Stark, and, significantly: Tom Benton, Jude Swenson, and Brian Tart.

Joshua Mohr talks about ALL THIS LIFE (alert: it is the most haunting, moving, fierce novel), technology's enriching or destorying us, and why he needs help for his Taylor Swift addiction

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This is a bold, fierce, genius book, and I can't tell you how dazzled I am to have Joshua Mohr here. I'm going to read every word he has ever written, and I think all of you should, too. Thank you, Josh, for being so amazing and for coming on the blog.<br /><b><br />Holy Moly mother of God, I’ve said this to you before, but this book was like lightning sparking in my whole body. It’s genius. So I always want to know, what sparked this story (sorry for the lightening metaphor). What was it that was haunting you that made you need to write this?</b><br /><br />That word, HAUNT, is perfect because this book came from ghosts: The apparitions of San Francisco, a city I love so much.  I wanted to write about the tech boom and gentrification and displacement and the way in which our digital lives can so often dominate our analog ones.  So various ghosts are all over this book, informing each other, crying, screaming, pleading, kissing.  "All This Life" is a book about the various interpretations of connection.  And I'm interested in legacies (another ghost-approved word): The things that live on in our brains like YouTube clips, looping endlessly. <br /><br /><b>All This Life is the perfect title because so much is about life being “lived” online and off, about having followers, and fame virtually, about recording life, and about TV screens that actually look better than life itself.  As one of your characters remarks, why comment on someone’s update when you’ve walked past twenty real, living people, and never said a word to them?  Do you think there is a solution to this? And where do you see this all going?</b><br /><br />I have a 2 year old daughter so I think about this all the time, how to teach her to use technology to enrich her real life, rather than to dominate it, anesthetize her from this beautiful sloppy world.  I wonder if since these screens and gadgets are so new to us that we don't know how to sip them, instead guzzling their nectar like frat boys.  Maybe my daughter's generation will have an easier time moderating, as all the tech will be ubiquitous their whole lives.  That's what I hope happens, but it's easy to envision some grim future, all of us sitting in dark rooms, pallid and hungry, having the time of our online lives.  <br /><br /><b>What I also loved so much were all the characters and how you slowly and expertly begin to make the connections between them, building to one of the most startling and satisfying endings  I’ve ever read. There’s Paul and his troubled son Jake. Rodney, suffering from an accident and yearning for the mother who abandoned him, Sara who might actually love him, Wes the mysterious--and so many more. Which brings me to the question of craft. So how do you write? Did you plan all this out first? do you outline a little or not at all? Do you believe in the Muse or not?</b><br /><br />I love the muse!  I'm not a planner; you could say I'm an anti-planner.  I only want to know the opening image of a narrative and nothing more.  Then I spend three or four years diving down every single rabbit hole I can find.  Some lead to nothing useful. Others lead to magic.  But it's never boring making art that way.  You just have to be a willing explorer.  I'm leery of things I think I know about a story.  I want the story to whisper in my ear, rather than any authorial superimpositions.  The best material, at least in my process/experience, comes from organic discovery.  It’s not efficient or elegant, but that’s how I do my best work.<br /><br />All This Life isn’t just about the damage living virtually can do. It also explores San Francisco and gentrification, something that is horrifyingly happening everywhere. In The West Village, stores are being shuttered because rents are being increased by the 20 thousands. Brooklyn, which was once a joke, is now inaccessible to anyone who isn’t wealthy. Hoboken, where I live, is a one 10 minute stop to the Village, and homes are going for 3 million.  One character says, we always change neighborhoods when we move in--and that’s true. You pioneer a place that is filled with gunshots and violence, and the next thing you know there is an artisan cheese shop.  It actually seems to me the same thing as virtual living--i.e. there is a price with both, and we had better figure out how to change it, or at least lower it. Can you talk about this please?<br /><br />Well, the tricky thing is that the book can't read like a polemic, some didactic rant in which the author skyscrapes on a soapbox.  No one wants to listen to me sermonize, so my task in this novel was to make these issues character-specific.  That way, it isn’t me going through these debates, it’s the main characters, and ultimately, the reader.  I want my reader to be drawing her own conclusions as the romp unfolds.  Reading is a lovely collaboration between author and audience.  In fact, I’d go as far as to say that books are in a state of suspended animation until a reader generously brings it to life in her mind’s eye.  Has the tech money harmed San Francisco?  Well, it’s pricing out ethnic families, artists, anyone who isn’t making six figures is barely scraping by.  SF is on the cusp of becoming homogeneous, a bunch of rich people, mostly Caucasian, patting themselves on the back, and that’s dangerous.  This town has been THE destination for those rejected in other spots.  We have an invisible Statue of Liberty and it’s clad in the diversity flag.  We love everyone.  Or we used to.  That’s one of this book’s chief driving questions: What happens to a city that only values commerce?<br /><br /><b>What’s obsessing you now and why? </b><br /><br />It’s my daughter, Ava, always Ava.  She is the best obsession.  She just started waking me up in the morning by saying, “Let’s play, daddy,” and it’s the most touching and profound and perfect way to begin a new day.<br /><br /><b>What question didn’t I ask that I should have? </b><br /><br />I always like to know secrets about other writers, so in that spirit I’ll tell your readers something that I keep on the sly: Ava already loves Taylor Swift, which means I listen to a lot of Taylor Swift, which means I’m spending every hour of every day singing/humming/whistling Taylor Swift, which means I hate myself, but I can’t stop.  It’s a situation.  Please send help.</div>

Kristin Tsetsi talks about Inside The Writers studio, The Year of Dan Palace., her Five On! interview series--and hey, I am an honorary PaperRat!

Tell us about 5 On! It's a different sort of interview series and I want everyone to know about it. Why do you think here's such a need for something like that now?
I started the 5 On series (which posts every two weeks at JaneFriedman.com) with the intention of doing a few different things: -                Entertain, by providing some insight into the person being interviewed, whether that person is a well-known author, a struggling writer, a selective editor, a bookstore owner, a literary agent, or a publisher. -                Create a platform where people with experience finding agents, navigating the self-publishing world, or developing marketing plans can speak directly (in a sense) to people who can learn from that experience.-                Encourage those (and depending on the day, I’m one of “those”) who are getting impatient, disheartened, or anxious. Writers who have kept going in spite of devastating rejections ultimately have great success stories, too. Victories. -                Provide a reality check. Part of your question was about the need for something like this right now, and there’s a *great video circulating on Facebook that documents how much time it took successful people – Leonardo da Vinci, Marie Curie, Michael Faraday, Stephen King, John Coltrane – to become the figures we know now. Typically, several years of hard work and plenty of rejection. But the video also explains why the prevailing belief is that a certain level of achievement must happen immediately. However, as readers of **your 5 On interview will learn when they read your story, it’s a long, difficult (and just as rewarding) process. Or, as the video’s narrator calls it, “The difficult years,” and “The story that never gets told.” 5 Onseeks, in part, to tell that story as a way to combat the Immediate Success Fantasy, a fantasy which is not only unrealistic and tinged with entitlement but also destructive to creativity. How can a person consumed with anxiety over not having “made it” within a very short time expect to keep imagining, practicing, even enjoying their passion?
You can find a complete list of all interviews here.
There is a growing awareness now of the fact that female writers just aren't reviewed as often as males. They don't get the attention. There are people doing something about it--including you and Bill Wolfe, whose wonderful blog, Read Her Like An Open Book, focuses just on women writers. What else do you think we can do to encourage men to read women?
Pretend to be men.
I wish I meant that tongue-in-cheek. I adopted the pen name Chris Jane in small part because my real name is a hassle for others to spell and pronounce, but in large part because I wanted to be gender ambiguous to the average cover-scanning reader. I explain why at Bill Wolfe’s website in my essay Robin Black, in her fantastic essay
Is it credible that fiction occupies a unique place? Credible that men who dismiss what female storytellers have to say as irrelevant to them, aren’t also inclined to dismiss – albeit unconsciously – what females of every variety have to say? 

The problem is so deeply rooted in a history of women being perceived as superfluous but for baby-rearing that getting more men to read women would first require a drastic shift in the overall value women are assigned by men. In the meantime, deception by pseudonym seems legitimate enough.
Tell us about your own life as a writer. You write both novels and journalistic pieces. Do you feel you have to get into a different frame of mind to do so? And I certainly want you to talk about the smart, witty, and oh-so-wise The Writer's Studio and the Paper Rats videos!
I didn’t know how right-brained the journalistic pieces were – and these were features, even, which I’d thought were pretty creative – until after my editor assigned a paint bar story. A new paint bar, called The Muse, had just opened and he wanted me to do a first-person experience piece.
It turned out to be a great date night (not with my editor), but it was also a revelation. The only word that will do justice to how painting made me feel is “giddy,” and looking back now I can compare it to having a passionate (if short-lived) affair.
I literally (literally-literally, not figuratively-literally) dreamed about things I wanted to paint. During conversations with my husband, I would accidentally zone out because I’d have an idea for a painting I wanted to try. Every weekend, after five days of writing about other people doing the things they loved, I’d fly to my basement painting station so I could do something I loved. (Writing creatively after a 40-hour week of writing for work wasn’t appealing.)
I didn’t understand where the sudden passion for painting had come from, but once I quit the newspaper and got back into creative writing, the painting frenzy stopped. I’d still paint on weekends for a while, but the urgency was gone. It took my husband saying it for me to see it, but it turned out I’d just needed a creative outlet. Desperately. Feature writing was educational and interesting, but it was still reporting rather than creating.  
And about the PaperRats’ Inside the Writers’ Studio! We – author R.J. Keller and I – haven’t made an episode in a while (I think it means we’re both busy writing, which is a good thing), but for those who haven’t seen the series, it’s just good, mostly-clean comic relief that laughs not only with, but at, writers (and as writers, ourselves, we’re allowed to make fun of us for taking ourselves too seriously, sometimes). We acknowledge and poke fun at writer stereotypes, make light of the darker side of writing life (which includes receiving terrible reviews), and in one of the two episodes featuring the Fabulous Caroline Leavitt as a guest star and honorary PaperRat, we question the logic of writers approaching other writers in an effort to sell their books. (This happens all the time, and I think we make a pretty strong case against it in Self-Promotion: FAIL.) Our most popular video is “$#!+,” Writers Say. (It’s not viral, or anything. But it should be!)
What's obsessing you now and why?
In addition to 5 On, I’m working on a story I can’t talk too much about but that I’m in a hurry to finish. I have this irrational (or is it rational??) fear, because the topic is timely, that someone else has had a similar idea and is working on their own version of my story right now. I don’t want them to finish first. I’m a little freaked out daily.
What question didn't I ask that I should have?
“What’s your latest publication?”
Thank you for allowing me to ask myself this. I’d resolved to let it be in the world without my help so I can focus on the “now” project, but I owe it one last little push.
The Year of Dan Palace , available in most places one buys books, answers the multi-part question, “Why don’t more people break routine, escape a moderately satisfying but in no way gratifying position of security, to live the life they really want to live? And if they did, how would that affect the people closest to them?” Dan Palace finds the motivating force he needs to leave his comfortable life and fine-enough wife in pursuit of something more, including the forgiveness of his ex-wife, who’s hated him since their wedding night almost a decade before.
It was a fun challenge to write. Modern stories, and I’m probably thinking primarily of movies (my first love, and almost the subject of my MFA thesis before fiction won out), seem to miss a quality of the movies made in the ‘80s and prior, which was a perfect balance of humor and gravitas. The World According to Garp, St. Elmo’s Fire, Working Girl, and even Dream a Little Dream. Just beautifully choreographed moments of darkness and light, meaning and entertainment. The Year of Dan Palace strives for, and I hope succeeds in managing, that kind of balance.
* Disregard the inaccurate and inflammatory title assigned to the video at the website.

The fabulous Susan Shapiro talks about her new book WHAT'S NEVER SAID, lost love, memory, and so much more

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As soon as I finished (I fell in love with that book), I quickly bought up everything else of hers that I could find. And I quickly found that I couldn't go to any sort of literary party or event without her name coming up--and people smiling. Her new novel, What's Never Said is about all my favorite things, loss, love, and the quirkiness of memory and you can pre-order it RIGHT NOW. (What are you waiting for/)</i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><i>So here is the scoop: She's an award-winning journalism professor, has written for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, L.A. Times and Newsweek. She's the New York Times bestselling author of 9 books including Unhooked, Speed Shrinking, Overexposed, and the acclaimed memoirs Lighting Up, Only as Good as Your Word and Five Men Who Broke My Heart. Her recent coauthored memoir The Bosnia List was published in 2014 by Penguin Books and Heliotrope publishes her new novel What's Never Said in August 2015. She and her husband, a TV/film writer, live in Greenwich Village, where she teaches her popular "instant gratification takes too long" classes at the New School, NYU, and in private workshops and seminars. You can follow her on Twitter at @susanshapironet or reach her at ProfSue123@gmail.com.<small><b> </b></small></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><i><small><b>AND NOTE: I will be appearing with Susan at the WRITER'S DIGEST CONFERENCE PANELS</b><br />Saturday August 1, 2015 from 2:00-5:30pm <br />Roosevelt Hotel in midtown NYC <br />Switching Genres</small></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6tRBTrsZnnw..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6tRBTrsZnnw..." width="216" /></a></span></div><br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">I always have to ask, what sparked this book? What was the thing haunting you so you felt you had to write this?</span></span></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">The first scene in <i>What’s</i><i>Never</i> <i>Said</i>, where a 50-year-old woman sees her old flame –her former professor - and he doesn’t remember her – really happened.  It freaked me out.  I thought: I exaggerated our connection in my mind all these years.  I  overestimated my place in his romantic lexicon. I’ve lost my looks completely if the  older suitor who’d exalted my beauty didn’t even recognize me.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"> In real life, my husband Charlie was with me.  On the way home in the cab, I told him what happened, in tears.  Charlie laughed and  said my ex knew exactly who I was because he was staring at him weirdly the whole night, pacing around us.  Charlie was wondering what the guy’s problem was  and now he knew.  It fascinated me that  thirty years after our breakup,  my ex might still be upset.   I was actually thrilled because it meant #1) he remembered me #2) Maybe I hadn’t totally gone to seed  #3) if he was still holding a grudge that long, he’d obviously had deep feelings too and had been hurt as much as I’d been.</span></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">I love the whole idea of lost love, and actually I think it’s never lost. We always love the people we once loved, even if we don’t want to be with them or can’t be with them anymore, don’t you think?</span></span></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"> Yes! I had several intimate intense  relationships early on, from age 13,  and didn’t know what I was doing pre-therapy.  I  didn’t marry until age 35.  Now that I’ve been monogamous with the same (awesome) man for 25 years, I’ve often wondered about the past.  An early poem I published in my twenties  started, “If all your old lovers lives in a row of dark houses on the same street…”</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"> Though I was a failed poet, I stayed obsessed with the topic.  In  my first comic memoir, as a 40-year-old journalist, I  went back to re-meet  my top five heartbreaks of all time, to do ex-it interviews and find out what really happened. And I wrote about how I never really got over anything.   The way I describe the two books is:  “In <i>Five Men Who Broke My Heart, </i>Susan Shapiro  spilled all the secrets of her  lost loves. But there was one secret  she could never tell, until now. And in fiction.”</span></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">I  admire the way you write about memory--what we choose to remember, and what we force ourselves to forget, or...even more interestingly, what we think we remember. Can you talk about this please?</span></span></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">I address this in a scene in <i>Five</i> <i>Men</i> <i>Who</i> <i>Broke</i> <i>My</i>  <i>Heart</i>, where I’m given a Holocaust book to review.  “I finished reading the Holocaust book, a posthumous memoir by an Auschwitz survivor who had blocked out the evil he witnessed in the camps. Fifty years later he dredged it up. After completing the memoir, he’d had a heart attack and died. His memory killed him. I was enrapt, not about the atrocities of the Third Reich, but with the lines debating whether he should have relived what he experienced. The author was issuing a warning: Don’t look back, the past can kill you. Getting assigned this book right now was an omen, I decided.  My review focused on the dilemma, the treacherous deep-sea dive of memory, the twisted search for vanished footsteps, the perils of digging too deep.”</span></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">In <i>Five</i> <i>Men</i>,  I would have told anyone: go back and re-visit your exes – for creative energy, for closure. It was a great experience. But I  think <i>What’s</i> <i>Never</i><i>Said</i> is the darker sequel. Maybe what’s cute and funny at  40 isn’t so adorable in  your fifties.</span></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">On the other hand,  a reader named  Michelle Mead, contacted me to say that  <i>Five</i> <i>Men</i>had inspired her to reach out to an ex she’d had at 21.  She sent him a letter and at age 57 she finally would up married to him. I’m a romantic. I was fixed up with my husband and I’ve fixed up thirty marriages, with about 25 kids. But that’s another book…</span></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> </span></b></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">How difficult was it to traverse thirty years and three different settings?</span></span></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">Everything about <i>What’s</i><i>Never</i> <i>Said</i> was difficult.  It took six years to finish.  It was my first book that was third person, half in a male’s head, which I’d never done before.  I had a brilliant Philip Rothian or Woody Allen character in mind but some critics from my writing group didn’t like Daniel.  I finally decided you didn’t have to like Daniel for the book to work, you just had to understand him.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">  My great agent Ryan Harbage found me  a young editor I loved at a big publisher  who was going to publish the book in 2009.  But she gave me a choice and I picked another novel I’d spent thirteen years on, <i>Overexposed</i>, sure she’d take <i>What’s</i> <i>Never</i> <i>Said</i> as my  next book. But then <i>Overexposed</i>  tanked, selling about five copies, and she left the job and her state. And <i>What’s</i> <i>Never</i> <i>Said</i>  was orphaned. Since then a  lot of editors said “This is great. Can you just not make it about  New York poets, writing and shrinks because that doesn’t play in Peoria.” That was 90 percent of the book. It seems I  don’t play in Peoria either.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">Anyway, it was a miracle this spring to  find  Naomi Rosenbaltt  at Heliotrope Books. She’d published my student Royal Young’s great memoir <i>Fame</i> <i>Shark</i>and had just started taking fiction. She’s this awesome Village hipchick, my age, and she’d had a flirtation with her own teacher, so she just totally got the whole book. I had a shrink appointment, depressed that I didn’t get a big advance from a big publisher. And for some reason I was jealous of my cousin Molly Jong Fast’s beautiful purple cover for her last book.  My shrink asked,  “What will make you happy about this?” I had a boring summer planned, just working, with no classes, work, or  shrinks around in August.   So  I said, “If this novel came out in August, in hardcover, with a purple cover.” And Naomi gave me everything I wanted. I dedicated the book to her and to my first editor Danielle Perez, who bought three books of mine from Random House. They both live in Greenwich Village, where my book is set, so it felt poetic.</span></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">What kind of writer are you? Do you outline and map things out, or do you just sort of follow your pen? Have you noticed a difference in writing in each of your books? Does it always seem hard to you, the way it does for me? (And if not, what’s your secret?)</span></span></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><br />A colleague joked  that I’m a memoirist writing a novel about poetry.  But  I never understand writers who say “I am a short story writer,” or “I am a book reviewer” because most others  I know have to switch genres to make a living.  I certainly have to.  I seem to pick a genre, fail, and then have to reinvent myself every five years. </span></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">While I couldn’t sell the novel for six years, I actually coauthored two memoirs by men I was close to – The Bosnia List I wrote with my physical therapist, who was a Bosnian war survivor.  And <i>Unhooked</i>, an addiction book   I wrote with my addiction specialist, became a surprise <i>New</i> <i>York</i> <i>Times</i>bestseller last year. Plus  teaching at night has been a miracle: I show up, they pay me. The same time every month.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><br />Every book  has been  different. <i>Five</i> <i>Men</i> and <i>Lighting</i> <i>Up</i> came out fast and furiously. I’d just quit smoking, drinking and toking so books  became my new addiction.  Novels are much harder for me.  My colleagues say my nonfiction is better than my fiction and my family says my nonfiction <i>is</i>fiction.  First person nonfiction comes easiest. But there are certain books – like <i>What’s</i> <i>Never</i> <i>Said</i>,  I couldn’t write as a memoir.  The story –a year long romantic relationship doesn’t work out, I’m sad - wasn’t dramatic or unusual  enough.  I’m working on another memoir now.</span></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><br />What’s obsessing you now and why?</span></span></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">Whether anyone is going to read,  review or write about <i>What’s</i> <i>Never</i> <i>Said</i>.</span></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">What question didn’t I ask that I should have?</span></span></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><br />What book  events should we come to? Oh so  glad you asked. I’m doing a Speed Shrinking for Love charity benefit at Housing Works on August 4, a “Secrets of Publishing Panel” at the Strand bookstore on August 5 and a “Shrinks Are Away reading” at the great St. Marks Bookshop on Tuesday August 4 with Royal Young, Kate Walter and my <i>Bosnia</i> <i>List</i> coauthor Kenan Trebincevic. They’re all open to the public. I’m listing them on my website </span><a href="http://susanshapiro.net/"><... style="color: #103cc0;">susanshapiro.net</span></a><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"> and on Twitter at @</span><a href="http://susanshapiro.net/"><... style="color: #103cc0;">susanshapiro.net</span></a></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-pagination: none;"><br /></div>

Megan Feldman Bettencourt talks about her incredibly important book, TRIUMPH OF THE HEART: FORGIVENESS IN AN UNFORGIVING WORLD, how the world sees forgiveness--and how it should see it, and so much more

What's more important in the world than kindness? Maybe it's forgiveness. But how do we come by forgiveness and what does it really mean? That's the cornerstone of Megan Feldman Bettencourt's astonishing and provocative new book, coming August 11, which explores forgiveness through memoir, stories and science. She is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in publications including The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, Glamour, Details, and Southwest: The Magazine.  Learn more and pre-order the book here.

You can also hear her wonderful Ted Talk here.

Thank you so, so much, Megan!

I love the whole topic of forgiveness, especially in a world as hard as ours. What can the average person do to jump start forgiveness in his or her own life?

The place to start is to consider whether you’re harboring resentment or bitterness against yourself or someone else.  At whom are you flinging nasty insults, even if only in your mind? You can write that person a letter (without necessarily sending it). I’m endlessly surprised at what happens when I sit down to write in my journal about something that’s bothering me. It’s like going through a box you’ve kept in the garage – you’ve had that niggling annoyance and anxiety about the gathering dust and lack of space, but you don’t even remember what the hell is in there anymore. Taking ten to twenty minutes to write out – unpack, essentially- what’s bothering me about myself or someone else and letting myself feel however I happen to feel about it is the beginning of letting it go. That’s something I learned from the experts in my book, as well as the extraordinary people I profiled. With trauma or a big loss, you have to let yourself notice and feel the hurt or anger first, before you can get to a place where forgiveness is possible. There’s no skipping ahead to forgiveness or “zenny peace,” as a friend of mine jokingly calls it. That’s why therapy and meditation, while roads to peace, can be hell. It’s also why one man I write about in the book, who lost his son and forgave the killer, loves the Rumi quote, “There’s no cure for the pain but the pain.” Now, when it comes to ourselves, we can be utterly merciless, thinking awful thoughts about ourselves that we would never unload on another person. The first step is simply noticing our grudges and criticism, and the second is to begin practicing more kindness and compassion with everyone, including ourselves. One of the many techniques I discovered to make that easier is to explore the possible reasons someone did something that pissed your off or hurt your feelings, or why you yourself did. The organization I profiled that unites Israeli and Palestinian girls at summer camp, Creativity for Peace, their slogan is, “An enemy is a person whose story you haven’t heard.”

It seems to be that honesty is so much a part of forgiveness. I’m thinking of the letter you mentioned where a son wrote to his father, I could be a better son if you’d come to one of my ballgames. It takes incredible courage to write something like that, to be that honest--and you can imagine that only the worst sort of father wouldn’t apologize and respond--and be forgiven.  Can there ever be forgiveness without honesty?

That’s very astute, and very true. I saw this in so many of the stories I write about in the book. There can be no forgiveness – and no redemption – without honesty. Because at its core, forgiveness is about connection. It’s about recognizing that we’re all flawed human beings in need of compassion and understanding (some would argue that’s not true of sociopaths, but they comprise a small percentage of the population). Dishonesty and pretense kill the opportunity for vulnerability and connection. They throw up walls. Also, so much suffering comes from the explanations we give to things. Take that boy you mention. He assumed that his father didn’t go to his games because he didn’t love his son and/or wanted to hurt him. That interpretation is brutal, and it may not even be true. Without honesty, there’s no way to sort those things out – truth versus perception, intentional actions versus unintentional ones. Another man with an absentee father told me that when – as an adult - he asked his father why he wasn’t around much when he was a kid, his father replied, “I didn’t want you to be like me.” That kind of honesty is heartbreaking, but it also deflates the storyline of the uncaring or malicious father who just never really gave a shit or wanted to ruin his life.

How is self-forgiveness different than forgiving others? Which is more difficult to do and why? Can you forgive someone else if you haven’t forgiven yourself first?

For most of us, self-forgiveness is harder (minus the small percentage of true sociopaths and narcissists). In part that’s because if we’ve made a hurtful mistake, we usually avoid providing an authentic apology for our part in the situation and then doing what we can to repair the damage. That’s uncomfortable, and we don’t like to be uncomfortable. But we know from research that redeeming ourselves makes it much easier to forgive ourselves. When it comes to forgiving self and others, I don’t like to get too caught up in some sort of “step by step” chronology. Often these things aren’t linear. When we’ve been hurt, blaming ourselves and the person who hurt us is a common response, and often we blame ourselves most. We tend to expect that if we do things right and behave well and are generally good, the world – and other people - will be kind to us.  If they’re not, we assume that we fucked up or happen to be terrible worthless people. And of course it doesn’t work that way. As Hemingway put it, “the world breaks everybody,” so it’s about applying the lens of kindness and compassion to other people and ourselves, at the same time.

You mention how meditation alters the structure of the brain, but would you say that cognitive behavioral therapy would also be helpful in terms of becoming more empathetic and forgiving? What also fascinates me is the science, the whole idea that emotions can heal or harm us physically. What was it like researching this, and what surprised you the most and why?

Yes, cognitive behavioral therapy can have similar effects if instead of going round and round attached to and identified with your negative perceptions and storylines, you’re noticing them as a neutral observer.  Researchers at UCLA found that when subjects were shown a picture of an angry face, electronic activity rose in their brain’s amygdala, preparing the body to respond to what seemed like a threat. Yet when people labeled the emotion they felt upon seeing the picture—“I feel angry,” for instance—activity lessened in the amygdala and increased in another area, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. This area is associated with thinking in words about emotional experiences, processing emotions, and inhibiting behavior. So just noticing and labeling our emotions turns down the amygdala alarm response and the adrenaline-fueled reactions it triggers. That makes it a lot easier to be calm, rational and forgiving. I’m not sure how linked CBT is to empathy, but certainly taking the time to question our judgmental tendencies and kneejerk rush to blame leads to more empathy – for others and ourselves.

What surprised me most were the stories I encountered where people forgave unrepentant offenders, and their forgiveness lead to a remorseful apology. We expect it, we want it, to be the other way around. It’s harder to forgive someone who hasn’t apologized or seems oblivious to the impact of his actions. But meeting people like Jean-Baptiste, who found it within his power to show compassion to the man who murdered his mother during the Rwandan genocide, that was amazing to me. And what really struck me was when those acts of mercy and forgiveness were the one thing that made an unrepentant offender actually acknowledge what he did and then apologize.  That phenomenon could radically change our world if we let it.

What’s obsessing you now and why?

What question didn’t I ask that I should have?

What obsesses me is that so many people write off forgiveness, or condemn it, without even knowing what it is (to their own detriment and that of others). An Op-Ed in the New York Times after the Charleston families forgave shooter Dylann Roof railed against the concept of forgiveness, but based its points on an antiquated, unhelpful perception of the word that conflates forgiveness with patronizing religious jargon, condoning an act, and foregoing justice. So many people are stuck in bitterness, resentment and blame merely because they think that forgiving would mean excusing an offense or having to be besties with someone who has unjustly hurt them. It does not mean that. And as long as we as a society operate under that faulty perception, peace – inner and outer – will be hard to come by.

 

Erika Swyler talks about her astonishing debut, THE BOOK OF SPECULATION, having her fortune told, 18th Century circuses, and so much more

 I love, love, love debuts. What is more wonderful than watching a star take off? I felt that way from the first pages of Erika Swyler's wonderful The Book of Speculation, and I'm thrilled to host her here. Thank you, Erika! (And how can you not adore an author who gets her fortune told?)


 I always want to know what sparked an author’s book, what was obsessing you so you absolutely had to write The Book of Speculation?

I'm a person who obsesses. I'm obsessed with books, circus, water, erosion, family, and folklore--all of it. At the heart of those things is an obsession with inheritance. I was fixated on what gets passed down through generations of families--land, values, history, love and trauma. It manifested in this story, which is ultimately a story about what we do with our inheritance.

So, the novel has gotten all kinds of praise. It made the June Indie Next List, it was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick, a Library Journal Editors Pick and an Amazon featured debut and Top Pick of the Month.  How does it feel, seeing as this is your new debut, and how does it make writing the next novel easier--or harder?

I'm insanely lucky, and this is very much a once-in-a-lifetime moment. Still, the great thing about books and reviewers is that for every person who tells you you've done something amazing, there's another who says your writing is awful for the exact same reasons the initial person loved it. (I wonder if they've picked up on that yet.) It keeps my head from getting too big. The next book is quite different, so I feel like I'm learning to write a novel all over again. It's more difficult in the sense that I'm no longer writing in a vacuum--people know what I'm up to. Inevitably, that means there's someone who's disappointed that I can't churn out a book in two months. At the same time, there's someone who's disappointed that I'm not writing more quickly because they want to read it. That's wonderful.

There’s this wondrous traveling circus in your book at the turn of the 18th Century and it spans 250 years. How did you research that? What surprised you in your research?

I spent so much time in libraries that I really should have brought a tent. I dug through journals and books to find whatever I could about the period before Barnum came on scene. Incidentally, librarians were fantastic at accessing journals that I, as independent researcher, would have had to pay for. "I'm writing a novel," isn't always enough to hop a paywall. "I'm with the library," works well. I also dug through archives of historical societies from the towns my circus moves through. Burlington, NJ, and Charlotte, NC, have an incredible number of documents available to the general public.
It was surprising to discover how far back some circus families' histories go. The Wallendas have essentially been touring since 1780s. That's practically half of circus's recorded history. That's difficult to really wrap your brain around.

Your book has been compared to The Night Circus. But tell us what’s different about yours?

The Night Circus deals more heavily with fantasy than I do. The Book of Speculation is a tango between reality and folklore that infuses the ordinary with elements of wonder. I don't see why we can't mythologize the everyday. Then there’s scope. The Night Circus is essentially constrained to one lifetime. The Book of Speculation jumps through 250 years of a family’s history. For me that was great fun because I got to ask the reader to look for overlaps and play with allegory in a way that smaller scope doesn't often allow. I'm also shamelessly bending genre. The Book of Speculation borrows elements from historical fiction, fantasy, magical realism, mystery, family saga, fairytale, and literary fiction.

What kind of writer are you? Did you map this all out and do you wait for the muse?

I'm a messy writer, a terrible slob, really. I rely heavily on inspiration for that initial push on a project. I can't settle in for a long haul unless my brain is itching for it. The other part of me is quite business-minded and knows that inspiration is more likely to strike if I always have a notebook on hand and regularly stare at the pages. I'd love to say that I'm an outliner, but I'm not. I write endless drafts, keep ten percent, toss the rest, and then do it again and again until a book takes shape. It's inefficient, but it leaves the door open for unexpected moments. When I have a working draft, I outline. Yes, that's backwards, but sometimes you need a map to get through your pages. With The Book of Speculation I had a notebook where I kept a family tree. That tree helped me organize plot points. It was far too unwieldy for the book, but it was essential framework for shaping the story.

I absolutely fell in love with the feel of your book. The pages have a ragged edge and they look mysteriously weathered, and you’ve included your own drawings in the story as well. Was this something you wanted to do right from the start?

The illustrations happened late in the process. Bizarrely enough, I submitted my manuscript to editors as the old book in The Book of Speculation. I bound and aged copies, and included tarot cards and the illustrations mentioned in story. I thought that seeing the book and drawings would make for an interesting interactive reading experience. It never crossed my mind that I was illustrating a novel. I was floored when St. Martin’s bought the art as well as the manuscript. As edits went on, it was clear that it always was an illustrated novel. As ever, I was just slow on the uptake.

What’s obsessing you now and why?


At the moment I'm obsessed with time, more specifically different experiences of it. It's a common thing to fixate on as you age. It's also quite a bit like water, so I guess it's a natural progression. I've been thinking a lot about protracted time and what a stretched second might feel like, particularly if someone is aware of it, or what it might feel like for time to suddenly pull backwards. I guess that means I'm thinking about getting older and the chaos of it all. Oh, and tall ships. I've got a thing for tall ships so I'm always up for obsessing about tall ships.

What question didn’t I ask that I should have?

Oddly enough, considering the book, no one has asked me if I've had my fortune told. I did recently have my palm read. The palmist looked at my hand told me that my life was ruled by water, and that all my creativity came from it. I blinked at him for a while, and then left to find a stiff drink.