Caroline Leavitt's Blog, page 75

I talk to Mike Gustafson and Hilary Lowe, the cool owners of Ann Arbor's coolest new bookstore, Literati

I love many things: bookstores among them, but I also love Ann Arbor, one of the coolest towns on the planet. I read recently about how Mike Gustafson and Hilary Lowe moved back to Ann Arbor to start a bookstore, Literati.Now, how can you not love a bookstore that says this:  "We believe that, contrary to popular belief, we are not hurdling towards some digital, machine-operated future where an Amazon algorithm can decide your reading list. We believe in the whimsy that an independent bookstore provides. We believe that people still enjoy reading real books where real people work in a real bookstore. 
Almost everything in our store is repurposed or designed locally. Our bookshelves were purchased from the original Borders Store No. 1. Our tables were purchased at local thrift stores and consignment shops. Our bookmarks were designed by SIBLING, a local graphic designer in Ann Arbor. Our logo T-shirts and totes were printed by VGKids, an Ypsi-based printing company, and they were all made in the USA. We are committed to working with and supporting the local community. "
I'm thrilled to be able to talk to both Mike and Hilary about their store and remember--you don't have to live in Ann Arbor to order from them!

I love that you boldly went ahead and opened a bookstore at a time when the economy is not exactly bookstore friendly. How can everyone help support such greatness?
Quitting jobs, moving from Brooklyn back home to Ann Arbor, and opening a bookstore in this wintery bookstore marketplace was, and continues to be, a very, very scary endeavor and yet equally exciting I think there’s an underdog status with indie bookstores that, for those opening up shop these past five years, garners reactions of equal parts excitement, support, and skepticism. Sort of like how you’d look at a kid who tells you he’s going to make the NBA one day. That was kind of the reaction we got when we told people we were opening a bookstore in 2013. And I think we’re still trying to catch up to the ramifications of all those fast-moving pieces in our journey. But finally after a very hectic and crazy year and a half, we’re just now catching our breath. We’ve been open 10 months, and we’re making plans for a one-year anniversary. Some said not to open. Others told the media that we were “doomed.” So we’re thrilled to still be here, selling books, and not just puttering along, but doing quite well, hiring more full-time staff, buying more books and bookshelves, and coming up with a plan for 2014 that doesn’t involve living out in the streets or in our parents’ basements.
Honestly, the community support has been incredible. Ann Arbor is one of those places in Michigan and one of the few places in the entire Midwest where we didn’t have to sell or pitch this idea that when you spend locally, more of your money stays local. Ann Arborites already know that, embrace that, and for the most part, live like that. Though Ann Arbor was hit hard with a number of bookstores closing, we thought the market was under-served after Borders closed. Now two new bookstores have opened, and I believe Ann Arbor has a healthy number of bookstores again. The thing is, even though bookstores sell books, people support indie bookstores because many of us offer much, much more than books – we host events, author readings, children’s story times, open mic nights, book clubs, etc. and the vast majority of these events are free to the public, community-centric, and locally focused. Ann Arbor has been incredibly, incredibly supportive so far. We have a long hill to climb, but the support has been great. We’re so lucky.
Right now we are simply trying to get the word out around Ann Arbor that we are here, we are downtown Ann Arbor, and that we sell new books. As far as support, a very easy way to support us is to support us via social networking. In that regard, we’re trying to have more of an audience online. We’ve been very focused on creating a community in every facet – both in person and online. We’ve noticed that by embracing social media, we’ve kept an online community engaged and invested both with us and with books. We like to have fun, we like to be creative, and we try to show that online as well as in our store. By utilizing social media and not shying away from it, our goal is that, should the day come when rents are too high or the market is even more “not bookstore friendly,” we can change, grow, morph, and move somewhere that will accept us… and hope that our audience will move with us, too. Bookstores 30, 20, and even 10 years ago just didn’t have the plugged-in digital audiences that exist now. We have followers not just from around Ann Arbor and Michigan, but around the country, some of whom buy books through our website, which is just like buying in the store. We can keep them posted what’s going on. We’ve been encouraged by other bookstores’ use of social media, and I think social media has allowed small and niche underdog businesses to keep their fan bases loyal and the support going. Some people have found us online, liked us on Facebook or Twitter, then began to buy books through our website just because they like what we do. It’s amazing, and many indie bookstores do this, too.
Literati has a real community feel, which I love, and which I always felt when I lived in Ann Arbor. I was intrigued that you left Brooklyn to come back to Ann Arbor (something I totally get. I never stopped loving Ann Arbor.) Can you tell us about the hows and whys or how you returned?  And why you decided to open your store in Ann Arbor rather than Brooklyn?
Hilary grew up in Ann Arbor and I have family here. So it was a literal returning home when we moved to Ann Arbor from Brooklyn. But when we were living in Brooklyn, Hilary was working for Simon and Schuster as an independent sales rep, and bookstores were just part of our everyday lifestyle. We’d visit many of them, from McNally Jackson to Word to Community to where Hilary worked for a few months, Greenlight Bookstore. It was never this huge rally war-cry of “WE MUST SUPPORT THE LOCAL BOOKSTORE!” but more just like heading to the bar on a Friday night… it was simply something we did regularly. And when we got engaged and heard Borders was closing nationally, we had this huge hole in our hearts because Ann Arbor didn’t have a bookstore downtown selling new books. There is Nicola’s over in Westgate and now BookBound on the North Side, so between us three covering the geographic regions of Ann Arbor, we feel like with the other used and niche bookstores in town, we have filled the gap that Borders left behind.
Brooklyn is a fantastic place filled with writers and readers, but there are already institutions there and in-place. We were living in Crown Heights, and we toyed with the idea of opening somewhere around there, but we just felt like Ann Arbor was home (because it is). We thought we had a good idea what kind of bookstore would work here, what kind of books we would sell, and what people were interested in. It’s always a guessing game, and we continue to learn what Ann Arborites like to read, but we are Midwesterners through and through, and we wanted to open a bookstore in the Midwest. (Though we still sometimes miss Brooklyn!)
You said in an interview that you had a preconceived idea of whom your customers would be--what was that idea and how were you surprised?  How do you make a bookstore flow and be engaging?  How does it matter where cookbooks verses fiction may be? Did you research stores you loved or work on things you had always wanted to see in a store but were never able to find? 
We had an idea what kind of inventory would work, but we were and are surprised every day. The biggest surprise was how well our poetry section has been received. It’s consistently our 2nd or 3rd best-selling section. That’s more than history, or science, or our children’s section. Many bookstores stuff poetry in a small, cold, dark shelf somewhere unseen behind the best sellers and the thrillers. Our poetry section is right up front near the door, two cases filled. Credit goes to John and Russ, our two poetry MFA graduates on staff, who curated what we feel like is the best poetry section in the state. Also credit goes to the amazingly supportive poetry community in Ann Arbor. Ann Arbor is a town of poets. Poetry is strong here. Much of that is because of the educational systems in place, from the stellar MFA program to the Neutral Zone and the job Jeff Kass does with poetry and youth in Ann Arbor. We’ve been the beneficiaries of what was already a strong poetry community long before we arrived.
Store lay-out was difficult, and continues to be something we monitor. We are a small space, and we have two floors. Having two floors can be good, and it can be bad. For events, it’s great because we can separate the events so as to not disturb the rest of the store. For theft and staffing and lugging books around, it’s not the best layout in the world. So we really, really had to consider layout carefully. The manager of the original Borders store, Joe Gable, helped us with our original layout. But, man oh man, we agonized, debated, and continue to debate. People think that when you open a bookstore, that’s it. The books never move, the shelves stay in place, and you just sit back and watch the customers come in. Not at all true. Every bookstore is an organism of many moving pieces – the books move, the shelves move, and like a river, over time, the geographic layout of the store completely changes.
The best decision we made in the opening process was that we painted our sections with chalkboard paint so we could quickly switch sections. We have changed sections around so many times, we’re running out of chalk. We wanted to get that flow just right so a customer can walk in the doors and circulate throughout the store and the transitions of topics would make sense. As in, we wouldn’t have military history flow directly into humor. Sounds like common sense until you begin to play around with unlimited options… then it gets tricky. And you can drive yourself crazy trying to guess what is the best customer experience for browsing. But for our two floors, we have fiction on the main floor and non-fiction on the lower-level. That way, we can identify ourselves with being a fiction-centric store but also be able to point non-fiction lovers in the right direction. (Plus the lower level is cozier with more seating – perfect for browsing the many non-fiction options be have down there – including history, cooking, nature, decorating, science, philosophy, sports, and much more!)
We did research other bookstores, but it’s one of those things where you can’t do too much research or you’ll drive yourself nuts. Sort of like (what I imagine to be) the difficulties in writing. If you sit down to write, say, a memoir, it might help to read other people’s memoirs to see how they structure it, formulate it, and narrate it… but if you read too many memoirs, you’ll just stare at your own blank computer screen in complete anxiety and terror. We toured a few bookstores and got some ideas, but they were general ideas. We had to cater Literati Bookstore for this specific space and our specific two floors, so many of our pre-conceived notions of what-a-bookstore-should-look-like simply flew out the window. The store would be much different if, say, we had just one level, or if we had a wider layout instead of a long layout. That’s why indie bookstores are all fantastic: Every owner caters his/her store to exactly fit the space. That’s when you can tell when you’ve stumbled upon a great bookstore. When every inch of it has been thought and planned.
I always ask booksellers, do you have a sense of what book a customer might need, as opposed to what he or she says he wants?
A book is like a relationship: While you might want the beautiful vixen and yet need the stable Girl Next Door, in the end, you’re going to choose what you’re going to choose. I can point you to both and say, “Here you go!” but the decision of who you choose is not up to me. Like my mom always says, “You can’t help who you fall in love with.” Bookstores allow people to fall in love… with books, with ideas, (sometimes) with people…. So if a customer comes in and asks for a book recommendation, I’ll give them a list of books based both on what they say they like and what I think they might like based on their previous reading habits. We always ask “What is the last book you read that you loved?” This helps us guide them to what we think they may like.  But ultimately, they’re going to fall in love with a book based on circumstances that we can’t always predict. But that’s the beauty in bookselling. You help guide and you may have a good match, but they may browse your selection and come across something they thought they’d never pick up in a million years and go in a totally different direction. It might be completely outside the realm of explanation. And that’s the point. A grand serendipity of sorts.
What’s obsessing you now and why?
Oh so many! I just read The Goldfinch over a month ago now and I still can’t get it out of my head. Hence why we’ve chosen it as our first Literati Bookstore pick and I’m excited to see what others in Ann Arbor think about it. So much of why we love reading is the experience of connecting with people and we’re excited to offer that connection here through the book club. I also just read a great memoir called My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff, which is coming out in June. It is about her experience working for Salinger’s Agent at 23 – her first real job. It’s as you might expect – bizarre and lovely and life-changing. It was so much fun – I read it in one sitting. But the book that keeps on giving for me is the cookbook One Pan Two Plates. Best cookbook for couples without kids. Michael says the jambalaya is the best he’s ever had, anywhere, including in New Orleans. The Hungarian Goulash is also pretty amazing.

Michelle Richmond talks about Golden State, chance, colonizing Mars, and so much more

Let's see. The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress. Dream of the Blue Room. No One You Know. The Year of Fog. Brilliant works of art by the amazingly talented Michelle Richmond. She's got two book  about to come out, Hum and Other Stories, from the Fiction Collection and the book she's talking about today, Golden State. In Golden State,  Richmond follows fractured lives during the course of one terrifying day: a young doctor at a VA hospital, her pregnant troubled sister, and a hostage situation. About the chances we choose to take and the lives we try to fashion, the book is both harrowing and haunting.
I'm thrilled to have Michelle here. Thank you, thank you, Michelle. 







Golden State takes place across one day, and yet in that day, whole lives are really lead. I deeply admired the masterful way you played with time, breaking it apart, in order to give us pieces of different stories before we got to the whole. Did you always know this was the structure? How difficult was it to write?
The story began, really, with the idea of the main character, Julie, making her way across town on a broken ankle over the course of a single day. I wanted to use this structure to allow Julie, who is about to turn forty, to reflect on how she got to this point in her life--the mistakes she's made, the people she has loved, the path she has taken. While I've never written a novel set in a single day before, I tend to write in a similar pattern--of present action interspersed with reflection--in all of my novels. It's just the most natural-feeling way for me to write a story, perhaps because I am always so interested (not just in novels, but also in life) about where people came from, what made them who they are.
With Golden State, however, an extra wrinkle was added--a hostage situation that's taking place at the hospital where Julie works. It was quite challenging to figure out where the pieces fit. Writing a novel, as you know, is like putting together a huge puzzle. I actually laid the chapters out on my dining room floor for weeks at a time, during various phases of the process, to figure out where things went. 
There are so many brilliant parts of the novel about what it's like to work in a VA hospital, what it's like to be a vet. What kind of research did you do, and what about your research surprised you?
There is one reason the novel ended up being set at the VA: After The Year of Fog came out, when I was just beginning to think of this new idea for a novel, my son began preschool at a wonderful little one-room school on the campus of the VA hospital in San Francisco. Most of the parents worked at the hospital, and one of them, a very respected and accomplished general internist, was kind enough to allow me to trail him for a day and sit in on a diagnostic lecture. The school was integrated in interesting ways with the hospital. On Halloween, the children would go trick or treating through the hallways. And they would take walks on the beautiful grounds, perched over the Pacific Ocean. I was deeply inspired by the place.
When I was trying to flesh out the character of the sister who has returned from Afghanistan, I communicated with an old high school friend who has served several tours as a Marine in Afghanistan. And when I was in college, I lived with (and was engaged to) a guy who ended up spending his senior year of college in Iraq as part of Desert Storm. When he returned home, he was deeply changed. I saw the effects of PTSD first hand. Now, twenty years later, I can look back and feel empathy for that very young man whose personality was altered by war. I didn't realize it when I was writing the book, but looking back and reading it, I realize that the character of Dennis is probably inspired in part by that experience, and by the reality that the invisible scars our veterans carry last for decades.
Like your brilliant THE YEAR OF FOG, Golden State deals with another aspect of losing a child. As a mother, I'm both terrified and drawn to those kinds of themes. Can you talk about how it is for you?
Yes, I think writing comes from a lot of places--our dreams, our aspirations, and also, in some measure, our fears. I cannot imagine anything worse than losing a child. When I was writing The Year of Fog, I was not yet a mom, but I had nieces, and my relationship with them informed my writing about Abby's relationship with Emma, the six-year-old girl who goes missing in that book. Now, as a mother, I have such sweet memories of the time when my son was very small, and the sweetness and intensity of that mother-child bond is something I tried to capture in Golden State. But the reverse side of maternal joy, that deep and blissful connection we feel to our children, is the fear that we will lose them or not be able to protect them. In both The Year of Fog and Golden State, this fear is realized, with terrifying consequences. And I wonder if writing is also some way of staving off the worst. The things we almost can't bear to imagine are often the things we can't help but imagine, and those mental wanderings make it into our books.
There's a thread in the book about chance. One character says that you can look at a lotto ticket as a waste, since you have no chance of winning. But you can also look at it as a chance--someone has to win, and it might be you. Can you talk a bit about that please? I found that incredibly hopeful.
Yes! As I write this, a man in San Jose just won over 300 million dollars in the super lotto! He is a working class guy who was on vacation with his family, and when he came home he thought he should check the ticket he'd bought before he left, and lo and behold, he had the numbers. While I don't play the lottery (much), I am always fascinated by the stories of those who win. It's impossible, right? But actually, it isn't. Improbable, yes, but not impossible.
Tom, Julie's husband, is a beloved radio personality in San Francisco, and the host of a show called Anything Is Possible. He and Julie are different--he believes anything and everything is possible, while she's far more circumspect. I pay close attention to news about space, and I think part of the reason I do that is that it's so amazing to me, the things scientists discover on a daily basis--billions of new earth like planets in our universe, species long thought to be extinct that are actually thriving in the Ecuadorian rain forest. It's wonderful, the possibilities of our world. Strange possibilities come to fruition on a public level and a personal one all the time. In the book, California's attempted secession is emblematic of that idea--things seem crazy and impossible until they happen...and then we have to admit that they weren't crazy and impossible after all.
What's your writing life like? Was writing this book different from working on any of the others and if so, how so? 
Writing on this book went very slowly (five years), in part because my responsibilities are different than they were when I was writing The Year of Fog, and in part because there was a great deal of complexity that I had to sift through while writing Golden State. I discarded hundreds of pages, entire plot lines. I spent many months researching secession, because originally the narrator had an ancestor who fought secession in the south and had been disowned by the family for doing so. Now there is absolutely no vestige of that character or that plot line left in the book! More than a hundred pages of writing were ultimately condensed to three pages, a road trip that Julie and Tom take through Mississippi early in their marriage. 
I write while my son is in school, but not every day. I also do editing on the side, and I have this little publishing venture called Fiction Attic Press, a literary labor of love that keeps sending me down the rabbit hole! My 2014 resolution is to try to concentrate more on my own books.
What's obsessing you now and why?
Oh, my, what a wonderful question! Space--for the reasons mentioned above. There is currently a contest going on whereby one can apply to go on a private spacecraft to colonize Mars. When I saw that a writer had made the first cut, I was so jealous. I mean, I want to go to Mars, because who wouldn't want to be the first writer on Mars? I mean, talk about leaving behind a legacy of your work! Talk about being remembered! But the problem is, I don't want to live on Mars. I am quite happy in California, where everything is green. And I don't think my husband and son would tag along, which makes it out of the question. But in my next book, there is a character who is searching for intelligent life in the universe. Last year I went to the SETI conference. Bizarre stuff. And yes, I'm obsessed.
What question didn't I ask?

You asked everything, Caroline! 

Brigid Pasulka talks about The Sun and Other Stars, soccer, community, cat videos and more.

A widowed butcher. Soccer. A young man in love. What could be more magical? I'm thrilled to have Brigid Pasulka here to talk about her extraordinary novel, The Sun and Other Stars. She's also the author or A Long Time Ago and Essentially True, which won the 2010 Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award and was also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection.





Let's talk about craft. Do you plan out your novels or just "follow your pen?" Did anything take you by surprise in the writing of this novel?I think generally, I start with a nice, simple idea, which, after 40 pages of a first draft becomes impossibly tangled and complicated. Ten or twenty drafts later, I’ve managed to unknot it, and that’s the finished novel. The Sun and Other Stars started as a nice, simple story about the son of a butcher in a small town in Italy who had lost his brother. Then one day, I looked up the spelling of Roberto Benigni and found that he had made it his mission to recite Dante’s Divine Comedy to as many people as would listen. It made me think of how the Divine Comedy is such an integral part of every Italian’s education, and I felt compelled to read it. I was very quickly sucked in, and the parallels between Dante and the story I’d already written were uncanny. I ended up reading it several times, and eventually gave myself over to Dante, borrowing characters and scenes, and forcing myself to think deeply about judgment, sin, redemption and hope.I loved all the soccer details in the novel. Is this something you already know or did you do research, and what was the research like?I was a tomboy growing up, and played just about every sport except  soccer. So when I came to the realization that I couldn’t set a story in Italy without some element of soccer, I had a steep learning curve. My first introduction was when I was in Italy for the 1998 World Cup. I was babysitting for a family where the father later became a team manager for several Serie A and B soccer teams, so he really initiated me into the cult of soccer. He took me to practices, and, on my last trip to Italy, to a Serie A game. Here in the U.S., I went to a season’s worth of Chicago Fire games, and was given access to practice fields and locker rooms. But most of my education happened on YouTube. The entire history of soccer has been lovingly and meticulously recorded by its fans, whether a spectacular goal that took place in 1964 or Ultra fans taking over a train station or episodes of “Have You Heard the Latest about Totti?” where Roma captain Francesco Totti tries to tell jokes about himself while keeping a straight face. And then, of course, I had real soccer nuts check the final manuscript. But it was a lot of fun to research, and one regret I had while writing the book was not playing soccer when I was younger. It simply wasn’t popular yet where I grew up.You have a real gift with characters who are so alive, your pages are breathing. How do you go about crafting your characters? When in the writing process do you know that they are alive?How my characters come to life is still a mystery to me. I usually start with a visual of what they look like--sometimes taken from real-life people or even photos. Etto’s brother, Luca, is based on a photo of a young Italian novelist, and the two random people he’s standing next to in the photo became implanted in my head as Zhuki and Etto. Somehow the face helps me get to the facial expressions, which helps me get to the inner workings of the character. Other than that, I don’t spend any conscious time crafting them. I simply put them in the story and watch what they do. And at first, I don’t really know them, so there’s some vagueness, then some awkward resistance between the dialogue and actions that I want to write for them and what they themselves want to do. But when the dialogue and actions start to write themselves (“Of course he would say that!”) that’s when I know the characters are truly alive.The novel is also really about community--something that isn't as strong anymore today. Can you talk a bit about that?It’s one of the things I miss now that I live in the city. I grew up in a farming township of 100 people, and my dad and his wife still live in a similar place. People stop by each other’s houses unannounced. Someone will always be around to plow your driveway. Stores keep tabs. My dad even used to leave the keys in his truck so if anyone needed to borrow it, they wouldn’t have to bother him. Of course, the downside is that everyone knows everyone else’s business. If anything goes wrong in your family, it automatically goes on the prayer list at church whether you want it there or not, and people read the newspaper not for the news--they already know it--but to see if the reporter got it right.So the sense of San Benedetto community exists in the U.S.--you just need to look for it. Or create it yourself. But a lot of people--including Etto--fear that kind of closeness because then they feel it obligates them, and we are a society who sees obligations as constricting rather than giving us boundaries within which we can be more ourselves.What's obsessing you now and why?Cat videos--what else?What question didn't I ask that I should have?None. The questions were great.

A dream house becomes a nightmare in Sonja Condit's amazing debut, Starter House

Who doesn't love things that go bump in the night--especially when they are the showpiece of a literate new novel by the enormously talented Sonja Condit? Thank you, Sonja, for being here.

 I always ask, what sparked this book? Did it become something different than what you thought it would be?  And if so, what surprised you about that?
I wanted to write a ghost story because I love them. A few things bother me about ghost stories, though, mainly that the haunted house is so obviously haunted. No reasonable person would choose to live there, so how do you write a ghost story about a reasonable person? I wanted to create a haunted house that was a perfectly ordinary modern house with no immediate danger signs. When my husband and I were house hunting, we visited a house we didn’t like, and it was only a couple of blocks away from the house we bought. Over the next few years, I noticed it was almost always for sale. Nobody ever lived there more than a few months. Why was that? I never knew. I think it’s standing empty now. 
The second element of the story was pregnancy. There are a lot of books about pregnancy and none of them helped me with the first baby, because I had a terrible time, bled for four months straight, and almost lost him. My obstetrician told me “there’s nothing we can do, go home and pray.” You won’t find that in What To Expect When You’re Expecting. So, when I wanted to put more pressure on the reasonable person in the ordinary house, I gave her that pregnancy. (The baby is fine, by the way; he’s almost fifteen. These ideas have been in my head for a long time.) And the third element was that the ghost isn’t dead. This is built into our language. People say things like, I left my childhood behind, or part of me died that day. I just made the figurative language into an actual event.
As for surprises, I wrote the whole book knowing somebody would have to die, but I didn’t find out who until I wrote that scene. I went into the scene prepared to kill anyone, and I hope some of that uncertainty is still there for the reader.
There is something about pregnant women and things that go bump in the night that really make a story roll. There’s Rosemary’s Baby, of course, and there’s your book. Why do you think this is such a perfect blend?
Even an ordinary pregnancy is terrifying. Think about it—until quite recently, getting pregnant was the most dangerous thing a woman could do. Then, this person you know nothing about starts to take over your life. They have personality and opinions long before birth. I played in orchestras in my third trimester with the second baby, and she reacted very differently to different kinds of music. (She didn’t like trombones.) And, especially with the first one, you know your life will never be the same. From now on, forever, you will be someone’s mother. This is a huge change in identity; it reorganizes every part of your life. Loss of autonomy and loss of identity are important elements of horror.
 I really admired the way you tunneled into your characters and made them breathe on the page, which is a considerable feat. How did you do such alchemy?
My agent, Jenny Bent, made me do it. She’s a wonderful reader and editor. She went through the manuscript marking all the places where she couldn’t tell what Lacey was feeling with the question how is she feeling, and I worked it out. Most of the time I answered the question not with a description of Lacey’s feelings, but with a paraphrase of her thoughts. That seemed to work. In the book I’m writing now, I hope to do that without being told.

Modern Love's Daniel Jones talks about Love Illuminated, what he's learned about love, how living online changes our relationships, and so much more

Oh, yes. Every writer knows the name Daniel Jones, because we all are desperate to be published in his extraordinary Sunday column in the New York Times, Modern Love. (It took me six tries to get in.) But he's so much more. The author of After Lucy, a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, and he has  published in the New York Times, Elle, Parade, Real Simple, Harper's Bazaar and more. He currently lives with his wife, the brilliant writer Cathi Hanauer, and their two children in Northampton, Massachusetts.
In Love Illuminated, Daniel uses his unique perspective to explore how love saves us, destroys us, gives us hope and makes us hopeless. It's such a great book (and could the timing be any better now that Valentine's Day is upon us soon?)  I'm delighted to host Daniel, here!

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At the beginning of the book you have a quiz about love, which touches on some of the thorniest issues of the heart.  Why is something so important so difficult? By the way, I love your saying it’s the question that counts, because as we all know, the answers are always very different.
I couldn't figure out how to write or organize this book until I wrote that line: "Let's start with a quiz." So many books about relationships start with quizzes, but those tend to have actual answers that give you a score - a kind ridiculous idea, at least to me. All I hear about day after day are people struggling with unanswerable questions, or with questions that don't have easy answers. How do I find someone? How can I trust them? How can we stay in love? These were the kind of complicated questions I wanted to tackle. 
Do you think it’s sad that people are more calculated  about finding a mate (i.e. online dating and making finding a mate a job) rather than giving in to the mystery and magic of tumbling into love?
On one level online dating is just a way to find someone - or to find a lot of people! - and there's nothing sad about having new ways to search for love, especially for those who have trouble getting out and meeting someone otherwise. On another level, though, online dating can change the way we approach the search by pushing us to figure out, in advance, whom we might be most compatible with and then drawing a circle around that group of people and excluding everyone else. But time and again I see stories of the unlikeliest couples making the best match. I think we overestimate our ability to decide about love in advance. 
What really interests me, and what I explore in the book, is how technology promises to empower us, promises to make things easier. And in many ways it does. But in love and partnership and compatibility, we should be skeptical of our ability to "streamline" love or to somehow make the process easier and more efficient.  
What struck me so much about the book is how different love is now than it was in our parents’ age, and how probably even more different it might be in the future. Care to make a guess what love will be like in 2040? And even though it will be different, don’t you think the fundamentals still will apply--the need for companionship, for sexual sparks, for emotional contact?
As I ask at one point in the book: What do we know about love now that Shakespeare didn't know 500 years ago? Anything? What have we gotten better at? I think we've gotten more open-minded and accepting about relationships than we used to be, but the basic difficulties and mysteries of love and partnership remain refreshingly the same. We doubt ourselves, we cheat, we suffer, we are generous in ways we'd never believe and can be bafflingly mean to those we love most. I doubt we'll make a whole lot more progress over the next 25 years. I hope not, anyway. Love is more interesting when it's hard to figure out, not when it's scientifically explained. 
There’s been a recent spate of books about how men might be outmoded, but unless all those women love other women, do you think this is just wrong reasoning?
Those books are using provocative titles to get attention, but what they're really exploring are subtle shifts in power. I don't think men are going anywhere, but women are getting more powerful in relationships and in politics and at work, and this comes at the expense of men's power. 
Have you ever been offended by any pieces sent in to Modern Love? 
I don't get offended very easily - at least not by the style or subject matter of an essay. Reading the stories of people's lives fills me with a sense of compassion more than anything. 

I loved your novel After Lucy. Are you writing another one, and do you ever feel that editing Modern Love is giving you material or education that you could not have gotten elsewhere?
Thank you! Writing After Lucy was my proudest accomplishment. I often think about writing another novel, but to be honest I'm more drawn - both in reading and writing - to nonfiction these days. I've always been a news junkie, and working for the Times has even made me more of one, so I don't think in fictional terms all that often. 
What’s obsessing you now and why?
I'm obsessed, like a lot of people, with what all this time on screens - large and small - is doing to us, how it's changing us. I see people having their most satisfying relationships online. But these aren't physical relationships, and the person we are in them is just a slice of who we really are. It's easy to moan about this and act nostalgic about the way things used to be, but none of this is going away. Does this mean our relationships in the future will be more emotional and less physical, simply because the way we spend so much of our time together will be through the ether? Who knows. I know there's no stopping it.
What question didn’t I ask you that I should have?
Why did I write the book? My answer, two years ago, would have been to put down what I knew, what I'd learned about love and relationships from having spent so many year in this editor's chair. But after finishing the book I realized that I wrote it to find out what I knew, to solve the puzzle of what all this immersion has meant to me and taught me. I couldn't make sense of all those stories until I really focus.

Rachel Louise Snyder talks about What We Lost is Nothing, memoir, how a Greek Chorus helps her write, and so much more

Trust me, you want to read Rachel Louise Snyder's astonishing novel, What We've Lost is Nothing. About a mass burglary in a suburban Chicago Neighborhood, the book delves into the secrets and paranoia that begin to encroach on everyone's lives. She's an NPR contributor, an investigative journalist and Library Journal called her one of their "Outstanding New Voices."   I'm honored to host her here. Thank you, Rachel!


I’m always interested in what sparks a particular book. What was it for you for this one? Did anything surprise you in the writing? 
Many years ago, a friend of mined told me about a neighborhood outside of Atlanta where a number of the homes on one particular street were burgled. Within a couple of years, all those families had left. It just seemed like a great impetus for a novel. What happens when you’re thrust together into a sort of collective event like this? What do people do? What do they say to one another? Are they afraid? Angry? Then I realized it was a perfect event to set in Oak Park, which is the first suburb west of Chicago and is known for its integration efforts over the past four or five decades; Chicago, of course, was one of the country’s worst cities for redlining and other discriminatory housing practices.

Everything surprised me in the writing! I’d never written an ensemble piece of work —some folks have likened my book to the movie “Crash”—and so coming up with very different voices and points of view was a real challenge. But with each character, it seemed like some small part of their creation turned out to hold great metaphoric value. Arthur Gardenia, for example, is partially blind, yet turns out to be the person who keeps the main family from falling apart; it’s as if he’s the only one who can truly “see”them all. I had this moment, too, toward the end when I had to write a final scene that contains, essentially, almost every character in the book. There are something like thirteen characters in this one scene. I put off writing it for weeks. I had no idea how to write a scene with so many people. The trick of such a scene is to maintain the sort of chaotic moment and not lose your reader. I was deeply insecure about writing it, and then finally I just forged ahead and it’s maybe my favorite scene in the book now. I’m proud of it in a craft sense, but I also think it successfully carries the emotional weight of a half dozen different characters. It surprised me that I could pull off such a thing! 
This is your debut,  and it’s such a gorgeous one. You did a lot of research and you became a resident manager of a housing center yourself. Can you talk about how the real life material became incorporated into the fictional world?

Thank you! I did some research, though not a ton…I did research on hemeralopia —I was actually mock-blinded by a professor who works in this area —and I researched french food, and bridges. But I lived in Cambodia for six years, and so didn’t need to do much research there, and I also lived in Oak Park and worked as a resident manager in the village’s diversity assurance program for five or six years back in the mid-90s. It was such an amazing program, and I always wanted to write about it. I was friends with Ira Glass at the time and I used to say to him, “You have to let me do a story on diversity assurance.”And he’d say, “But what’s the story?”I never had a story; I had a setting and an issue, but no narrative. So it was an idea that germinated for years, until finally it occurred to me that Oak Park would be the perfect setting for the novel. There are issues of race and integration and historical justice, but it’s not polemic. The characters and the story always come first, I hope. But I learned so much in that job, about race and economics and fairness and opportunity. I’d never thought of myself as having been given any kind of advantage simply by the color of my skin. I think that job taught me empathy and tolerance more than anything else in my life. It taught me that everyone has a story. 
I happen to love any novel that delves into the myths about suburbia--that it’s safe, that all the people are community, that it’s the American Dream in a lot of ways. Can you talk about this, please?

Me, too. Definitely. Oak Park is a very urban suburb. It’s not entirely unlike Brooklyn —more of an extension of the city. So it’s not the kind of place John Cheever would write about; it has a liberal sensibility, with a very educated, middle or middle-upper class populace, but every place holds its own blind spots. When I was researching the novel, a police chief in Oak Park spent the better part of a day with me driving me around the village, looking at the kinds of signs you might look for as an officer investigating house break-ins. So he’d say things like: “You see all those ADT signs? Those are like invitations for thieves. You see those fences around the yards? People think they’re invisible with their fences, but in fact they often just hide thieves.”And then he said something really interesting, which was that after 9/11, he began to hear the kind of racial prejudice that you NEVER hear in Oak Park emerge, this fear that was taking root in the community. Several high profile crimes had people really questioning the continued funding of the integration programs, and he got so frustrated, because crime was really low —lower than it had been in two decades! So he wrote a series of op-eds in the local paper trying to tell people that the statistics didn’t back their fear. This is why the book is set when it’s set —just a few years after 9/11. It offers an allegorical parallel. 
Let’s talk about craft. What kind of writer are you? Do you map things out, follow your muse (if so, can you send him or her to me?) or do a little of both? Do you have rituals you need to follow? What’s your writing day like?

I had rituals before I became a mom! I used to spend like an hour or two “prepping.”Listening to music, dancing around my apartment in Chicago, drinking an entire carafe of coffee. I had the luxury of time. Now, I am manic. I get into my office and just fucking write like a mad woman. And I write by hand. Everything, by hand, in a different color pen every day. I use these beautiful German pens in a set of 25 colors by Staedtler. I discovered them when I lived in Cambodia, and now I use them all the time. When I’m writing journalism, I can compose on a computer, but with more creative stuff —like fiction, or like what I’m working on now, which is a memoir —I hand write still. It slows my brain down, forces me to concentrate. And some days I can really get a lot of writing down in just 45 minutes or an hour. I don’t believe in inspiration, or muses or any of that kind of stuff. I believe in hard work. Yoga and writing. Those are my pillars. 
And in fiction I haven’t mapped anything out…I get one really crappy draft down that has a kind of wobbly arc, and then I go and tweak and rewrite and reorder. I’m a structure queen; my graduate students will tell you that about me. I talk about it more than anything in writing. How is the story unfolding? What are the beats? Some writers need each sentence to be perfect before they’ll move on. That’s not me. I need each sentence to be in place, and then later I rip the shit out of them. This book, for example, had at least two other major characters who ended up on the cutting room floor. I’d say two areas have really enhanced my writing generally: the first is John McPhee. If I could build him a shrine without it being creepy or alarming my husband, I would. The second is radio scripting (I’ve done a lot of work for public radio). You have to be exact when you’re filling, say, three seconds of time. So with McPhee I get the structure, the big picture stuff, and with radio scripting I get the exactitude, the one perfect word, and it all informs my writing — fiction, journalism, everything. 
What’s obsessing you now and why?

I’m working on my memoir now —I’m about halfway through —so that’ll likely be my next book. But I also have another nonfiction book that I’m mulling…I did a piece for the New Yorker on domestic violence homicide recently, and I have SO MUCH more research than what went into the article, so I think about turning that into a book as well at some point. I’m also writing a piece for the New York Times magazine that I can’t really talk about, but it’s really dark in terms of subject matter. The kind of dark that is actually terrifying to think about too deeply, and I don’t know why I’m attracted to this kind of darkness, except to say that these kinds of topics aren’t unrelated to what many fiction writers also ponder: why people do the things they do? How they survive the things they survive?

What question didn’t I ask that I should have?
I can’t think of anything, but I will give you a little secret into the book’s structure. Every eight or so chapters, there are what I’m calling “interstitials” (a term I borrowed from public radio). These are things like blogs, list serves, newspaper articles, etc. and they’re meant to act like a kind of Greek chorus, like how the Gods in the Iliad are always commenting on the fate of the humans below them. It’s maddening because it’s like, “Come on, Gods! Can’t you save Hector? I mean, you’re Gods, after all!” But they can’t save Hector. All they can do is know that Achilles is fated to kill Hector, and so in some sense, these interstitials are comments on the characters in the book, or on the burglaries, or on the integration programs’ efficacy. The street name in the novel — Ilios — is actually another word for Troy. Thought you’d find it interesting. 

------------------------Rachel Louise Snyder

Alice Hoffman talks about the Museum of Extraordinary Things, misfits and outsiders, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, service dogs, and so much more

I first met Alice Hoffman at an Algonquin book party, though we had been planning to have coffee for months. She's warm, funny, accessible, and a little bit magic. We were having some discussion and I happened to mention my beloved tortoise Minnie and Alice said, "That's a Modern Love piece!" I hedged and she said, "Write it! You have to write it!" So I did, and it was published to acclaim, and Alice later said, "See? What did I tell you? I'm always right."

You know what? I think she is. 

She's also the author of 24 novels, 3 books of short fiction, and numerous books for kids and young adults. Here on Earth was an Oprah Book Club Choice; Practical Magic, Aquamarine and The River King were both made into films, and she' sheen published in more than 100 foreign editions and 20 languages. She's both critically acclaimed and eloped by her readers, and I am thrilled to host Alice here again. Thank you, Alice! 


What sparked this novel?

The novel began when a friend at the school of Education at Adelphi University suggested I write about the Triangle Factory Fire of 1911 on the 100th anniversary of what was the worst workplace disaster before 9/11. I realized that my personal pull was that my grandfather was a member of the ILGWU --

I wanted to write about the history of New York, intertwined with my own history in Chelsea and Brooklyn. I'm always drawn to survivors, and all of my characters are survivors in one way or another.

Your storyworld was incredibly alive--the drifters, the gritty streets of New York, the magic of Dreamland and the museum,  and especially the misfits, who are always my favorites. Can you talk about what the research was like? What surprised you? And how would you say that writing this novel changed you?

Interesting that you bring up misfits -- my first novel, Property Of, was about a street gang named the misfits.

In terms of research, I read everything I could about the time, and was lucky enough to have several experts read the finished product and weigh in. And then I let my characters and the dream world of that time take over. For me, NYC is a place of wonder and magic, and it is in the novel as well.
The characters are all misfits -- outsiders -- Jews, criminals, lost souls, one of a kind odd people that I fell in love with.

Like thousands of people, I’ve been following your career since Property Of, your first novel,  and I’ve watched your work grow richer, and deeper, but it always retains that hint of magic, that sense that the world is stranger and more miraculous than we can imagine. Is this your personal world view, or just that of your characters’?

I always think the writer isn't the person you meet, he or she is the person you read. As a writer I am a great believer in magic, fate, history, mystery, beauty. This is the reason I still write, and why it's my life raft.

Most of my miraculous experiences have occurred in New York City -- this summer I discovered fireflies on 23rd Street -- If that's not a miracle, what is?

I have sort of an odd question. I always read the endnotes, and in them you credit your editor and publisher for changing your writing. How did they do that?

I've been fortunate enough to work with Nan Graham and Susan Moldow on The Dovekeepers and now on The Museum of Extraordinary Things. They are amazing in terms of their support for their writers, and their dedication to publishing and literature. They were behind me when I told them that I planned to write about very challenging subject matter -- The siege of Masada and now the Triangle Factory Fire. I think they trusted that I would tell the inside story and do my best to get to the heart o the matter through my characters and their journeys. I had been somewhat bottled up, and their support freed me to write the books I most wanted to write.

What’s obsessing you now and why?

I'm working on a novel for middle readers -- tween, teen, adult -- it all overlaps now. It's a book about magic and monsters and love and faith. Great fun to write, and in many ways, an ode to Edward Eager, one of my favorite childhood writers.

What's obsessing you now and why?

My current obsession is non-literary -- after losing three dogs, I'm planning for a puppy and obsessed with working with it to become a service dog. Dogs have figured in a major way in my writing and my life. In my new novel, there is one of my favorite dogs, Mitts, a pit bull left to drown in the Hudson River, who is as loyal as they come once he's rescued.

You ask such great questions about writing -- if I could add anything it would only be that I was always a reader, and I never expected to be a writer. Because of this, I feel lucky every day.

Jan-Philipp Sendker talks about his extraordinary new novel, A Welll-Tempered Heart

A year or so ago, a book came through the mail for a blurb: The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker. I started to read and was soon carrying the novel around. I was so astonished by this novel, so stunned, that it was really all I could think about. Fast-forward to Booktopia in Washington State. I was at a reception meeting and talking to all sorts of sublime writers, when someone said, "Oh, have you met Jan-Philipp Sendker?" Stunned, again. Jan-Philipp turned out to be as mesmerizing in person as he is on the page, and I immediately told him I had to have him on the blog.

He was the American correspondent for Stern from 1990 to 1995, and its Asian correspondent from 1995 to 1999. He's also the author of Cracks in the Great Wall. A Well-Tempered Heart is the sequel to The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, but you don't have to have read one to worship the other.  The book follows Julia Win, who begins hearing a voice prodding her to examine her life and to discover the story of a Burmese woman. About love, life, loss, faith and art, the book is as profound as it is moving.

Thank you, Jan-Philippe for being here.










A Well-Tempered Heart is the sequel to your sublime The Art of Hearing Heartbeats. What made you decide to do a sequel and were there any difficulties and surprises  in revisiting the characters? 


 I never planned to write a Sequel. They story came to me and wanted, needed to be written. Three years ago I was sitting in a tea house in Kalaw, where "The Art of Hearing Heartbeats" is mostly set and was day dreaming. I thought about the book and was wondering what Julia might be doing now, 10 years later. How she has been doing all these years, if the first trip to Burma and the story of her father had changed her. I thought about it and I got really curious and very slowly her story started to evolve. I went back to Germany, I just had started another novel and wanted to forget about Julia but could not. For weeks I pushed her aside, eventually I gave in, called my German publisher and told him that I have to interrupt the novel we had agreed on to write another one. It felt like I did not have a choice.Revisiting Julia, U Ba, Burma was very easy, it was like seeing very old, very good friends again. I do enjoy their company so much that there will be a third book about Julia, U Ba and Thar Thar, you might have guessed it...


Your novel  is both shockingly and tragically realistic and also deeply magical, which is a wonderful blend. So much centers on the  power of the individual to try to make things happen, yet your characters are also changed by fates they are powerless against. Do you think we can control our fates?

Very, very good question, for me one of the fundamental question for every human being, therefore very difficult to answer. I don't have a conclusive point of view yet. On one hand I am a very strong believer in Buddhas words ( and not only his, of course) that we are responsible for our actions and their consequences, that we create our own "Karma", "fate", however you want to call it. That we, before we blame others, should look at ourself. On the other hand I have met many people who have suffered so much, they had been treated so badly by other people and I could not find their part in it, could not see how it was their fault. Having said that I must admit that I have seen how human beings  reacted in very different ways to illness, bad luck etc. proving that you can be the master of your fate - to a certain extent.So I guess my characters are a good reflection on my own ambivalent thoughts and doubts when it comes to controlling our fates.


"What do you want in life" is the question posed to Julie. Why do you think it's so difficult for many people to know the answer to that?

That is a little easier to answer: Because we have so many choices. There are so many distractions, temptations, possibilities. Finding out who we are and what we really want is a life long journey, would you agree? And only if we know who we really are do we know what we want in life.


There's a rhythm in your novels. The books slowly and hypnotically begin to grab you until you realize you can't stop reading, even if you want or need to. How do you do such alchemy when crafting your stories? Do you outline? Do you know the story before you begin?

Again thanks for your very kind comments. I wish I knew the answer to your question. I never visited a creative writing workshop, I am this learning by doing type of person. I have always been a passionate reader and I have always loved good story telling. I see myself as a story teller and I tell it the way I would like to hear it I guess. Even in elementary school I told my class mates stories I had made up. They loved to listen to me and I liked their attention of course...I deeply believe in the power of good story telling because that is one way we learn about the world and ourselves.I do not outline my books. I have the most important characters, their emotional conflicts and start from there. I need a very emotional hook. Writing is like a journey and I do not know where it ends. The drama of Nu Nu and her two kids evolved while I wrote it, chapter by chapter, I do not know where it came from...
What's obsessing you now and why?

That is a very personal question I would rather answer in person while sharing a good glass of red wine with you... Only so much for now: Writing is, as you know so well, an obsession and I think one of the most difficult things is to balance that obsession with the rest of your life especially when you have three kids...
What inspires you?

My answer: Many things and people, among them my unshakable belief in the the abilities of human beings to do good, in the magical and mysterious power of love... (as described in my books :)  (OFF the record: Having read that again I am afraid I am a hopelessly romantic soul but at least: It is authentic)
When can we expect another novel?

Hopefully soon. I have written two novels set in China, they have come out in Germany and some other countries. The first one is being translated into English now, the complete translation should be ready by the end of March next spring and I hope to find a good house for it in the USA soon after...

Introducing Shebooks, a smart new e-publishing venture

Laura Fraser is the  Editorial Director and confound of SheBooks, an exciting new e-publisher of short stories and memoir written by women for women, at length "that respects their time." I was thrilled to be able to interview Laura for Shebooks, which launches December 20 (that's NOW.) Take a look at these great titles.
Why Shebooks? What is your vision for this kind of publishing and why do you feel the time is right for it? At a time when the term "women's fiction" often has a derogatory tone to it,  how do you feel that "books by women for women" might change these misconceptions? 
Peggy Northrop (former editor in chief of More, Reader's Digest, now Sunset) and I came up with the idea for Shebooks at a conference on journalism and new media, where panelists were unrolling ideas for publishing e-singles as a way of saving long-form journalism, which is a great idea. But I turned to Peggy and said, "It's all the same guys," and she said, "Someone should do this for women." That's when the light bulbs turned on. The problem is that here in 2013, bylines at the top-shelf magazines that publish long-form journalism and short fiction are still overwhelmingly male--about 70%, according to the group VIDA. It's still a boy's club, and there's still a perception that women's writing--be it in magazines or in fiction--is fluffy and inconsequential, i.e. "chick lit." No one ever talks about "dick lit," and men with comparable narrative chops are routinely considered better and more serious than women, whose work is trivialized. We decided that it was time to stop knocking on the glass ceiling in the publishing world and become our own publishers. Peggy and I have vast experience in women's magazines, memoir, and journalism, and we decided we should put that to use. We definitely hope to change that derogatory perception of women's writing. So far, we have been overwhelmed by the high quality of the stories we've received from terrific women writers.

Why are you publishing shorter works? 
Shorter works are ideal for mobile devices, and they fit into the busy lifestyles of many readers. No one is trying to take away the pleasure of curling up for an afternoon with a long book--I just finished Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and am now plowing through Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers, both of which are fabulous. But space in magazines for long-form journalism has shrunk to the point where most pieces are what I call "charticles," and they aren't satisfying reads. Both women writers and readers crave the shorter e-book--a one to two hour read. There are very few venues now for publishing the novella or the short memoir. They're perfect for reading before bed, on an airplane, waiting to pick up kids, wherever. And honestly, a lot of books that are published at 220 pages or more to fulfill the requirements of publishing are just padded. Why not cut the excess and just have a good, quick story? I am all in favor cutting excess.

I understand Shebooks will have its own reading app. How will that work and why did you design it that way?
We created our own reading app because we want to create a lovely place for readers to come in, look around, and have a lot of great books to choose from, like a virtual bookstore that is highly curated. Plus, there are financial reasons to get people to read from our app instead of downloading from big websites--which they can still do, if they choose. Our financial partner and guru, Rachel Greenfield, former EVP of Martha Stewart Omnimedia, managed to navigate the very complicated terrain of creating our own e-reader, and we're really excited about it.

How do you see the future of Shebooks? 
Right now it's hard to see beyond the launch--our soft launch is December 20, and then we'll have our e-reader up by March. But we basically want "Shebook" to become a noun, so women everywhere will be asking each other what great Shebook they've read lately, and will be talking about them in their book groups.

How can writers can involved? What kinds of stories are you looking for and why? 
My main criterion is quality. I want a story that draws me in to a different world, that is seamlessly well-crafted. We are looking for short memoir, long journalism, and short fiction--a diversity of subjects and writers. We're not looking for self-help books or anything with a lot of bullet points. Writers can submit a completed manuscript to write@shebooks.net. It's fair to say that most of our writers have been published before, but there are some exceptions.

What's obsessing you now?
Figuring out my own next Shebook to write.

What question did I forget to ask?
I have a question: Will you write for us? Do you have any stories that you have the rights to that we could package into a Shebook? Or something new? We would be so happy!

Catherine Tidd, author of Confessions of a Mediocre Widow, writes about natural highs, creative Gods, and connecting the dots

Catherine Tidd's smart essay about what it means to be a writer. I'm honored to have her here. Thank you, Catherine!
Natural Highs, Creative Gods, and Connecting the DotsI once read a quote by Stephen Markley (and I’m paraphrasing here) that said that the most euphoric feeling in the world is when you get lost in your own writing and lose all sense of time.I think that is absolutely true.There is no better high (natural or otherwise) than submerging yourself into your own story and only breaking the surface of reality when you need to catch a breath. Characters come to life and your fingers can’t keep up with the scene that’s unfolding in your mind. That perfect phrase that you didn’t know you had in you to create shows up on the screen and you think, “Wow. Did I come up with that?” You stop writing for the day and realize that you’ve skipped lunch and didn’t even need that afternoon cup of coffee because your body has been so energized by the world in your head.Not every day is like that, of course. Some are definitely better than others. There are mornings when I wake up, just knowing that I am going to make major progress on a project. And then there are others when I struggle to show up to the page.To be honest, when I get bogged down, it’s usually because I’ve spent too much time in my own head with only my computer keeping me company. And that’s my signal to pause the writing for a few days – maybe even a week or more if I have to – and actually get dressed, go outside, and live life. And inevitably something will happen that will spark an idea and another scene will click into place.And if, for some reason, I’ve gotten out there and done some living and still nothing is percolating…then I have to go to Plan B.Get out of my own way. Which is harder than it sounds.There have been times when pages and even whole sections of a book have happened so fast, I can’t sleep well at night, knowing what I want to write the next day. And then, inevitably, I will get to the end of the scene that played itself out so vividly in my head and end up staring at the blinking curser on my computer screen, wondering why it isn’t moving.Usually I know something that’s going to happen to some character later in the book. Usually I know something that’s going to happen to some character later in the story…but I can’t figure out an interesting way to get from point A to point D. And so I’ll stop, stuck and frustrated, scared that the creative juices have permanently stopped flowing.In order to keep myself from breathing into a paper bag, I’ll write the scene that I know is coming later, praying to the creative god (who I’ve named Joey) that it will all work out in the end. And as I’m writing, a magical thing will suddenly happen.I’ll figure out how to connect the dots in order to get where I was to what I’m writing in the moment.
As I’m filling in the middle, that feeling of euphoria will visit me once more. And then the only thing I have left to do is pray to the publishing god (George) that someone will feel as euphoric reading it as I did writing it.