Sarah Cypher's Blog, page 7

A Tale of Two Jinns: A Review of Ramadan Sky by Nichola Hunter

Ramadan Sky by Nichola Hunter

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ramadan Sky tells the story of a brief and inevitably ill-fated cross-cultural love triangle set in Jakarta. Against the city’s backdrop of poverty and corruption (described as its two evil jinns), the story unfolds over most of a year as Vic, an Australian English teacher, falls for her much younger and hot-tempered ojek driver, Fajar. He has an on-again, off-again engagement to a girl in his neighborhood, Aryanti, the kind of good Muslim girl he can marry, but will never quite love.

The novel makes graceful use of three (or really four) different narrators: each character in the triangle, plus Vic’s journal. This is a feat for such a short novel, but the choice gives us useful access to what is most important in this particular story–economic strangulation that narrows young people’s futures to a few unattractive options, and the expatriate loneliness behind Vic’s financial patronage, which adds an uncomfortable element of dependence to her relationship with Fajar. We get a layered portrait of a Westerner’s experience in an economically crippled city, a deceptively simple love story shaded with a dark history of neo-colonialism.

What I love about these kinds of stories (I’m also thinking of Linda Horowitz’s While the Sands Whisper, which I edited last year), is that they depict the impossible complexities of a normal human relationship when it gets hung up on the rocks of money, history, culture, and need. We’ve all fallen for someone we hesitate to bring home to meet the fam, and it’s here, through this lens, that we’re also given a sidelong but rich glimpse into a different world. I’m a sucker for stories about Islam, and though Ramadan Sky could be told using almost any set of traditions that chafe their younger generation, this was my first literary encounter with Indonesia. The setting details are rich, and thanks to Vic’s droll sense of humor, the portraits of expats are funny.

I give the book four stars–pretty much my highest rating for everything short of Atwood and Tolkein.

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First Time Is a Charm: An Interview with Published First-Time Author Patricia Vanasse

Click to find Patricia Vanasse’s new book on Amazon

Since I worked with an early draft of Patricia Vanasse’s paranormal YA manuscript in January of 2012, a lot has happened. Resilient was accepted and recently released by Pants on Fire Press, a boutique press. It also received some interest from Hollywood, and placed in the 2012 Golden Acorn Excellence in Writing Award. Any author would count these as successes, but what sets the book apart is that it was her first-ever try at fiction–and that her first language is Portuguese, not English. Patricia’s travels, fascinating background, and pitch-perfect ability to create likable characters make her an author to watch.

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Tell us a little about Resilient.

Resilient is told by both Livia and Adam, two teenagers who are anything but ordinary. They were born with abilities that set them apart from other humans. They know they are different, but they don’t know why. Livia can feel everyone’s emotions around her, and as she struggles, her parents decide to move from New York to a small island in the Pacific Northwest in hopes that Livia will find some peace of mind. There, she meets Adam, the only person Livia can’t empathize with. Afraid of not knowing what goes on in Adam’s mind, Livia decides to keep him at a distance. While their personal quests for identity will inevitably bring them closer together, it is the confirmation of what they really are that threatens to tear them apart.

 

When I read your draft, I was struck by Livia’s special powers of empathy, as well as Adam’s ability to modulate other people’s anger. I think it’s interesting that your protagonists’ first powers are emotive ones, and I would love to hear more about how you chose their abilities.

I wanted their abilities to be a burden on them and an emotional drama. I wanted it to contribute to their growth and to the plot. What could be worse than feeling peoples’ emotions?

 

Resilient  is your first published novel. What drew you to the form? Have you done other writing, in English or otherwise?

No. Resilient was my first attempt with writing. I’ve always created stories in my mind but never thought to put it on paper.  The first time writing occured to me was the night I started Resilient, and I’m so glad I did it.

 

You grew up in Brazil, and with a husband in the U.S. Air Force, you move a lot. How does your background and travel affect your writing?

I was twenty two when I moved to the U.S. I was very sheltered growing up, and I had little contact with people outside of my circle. To be in a different country around people so much different than me, gave me a whole knew perspective in life. It felt as if I was experiencing two different worlds, and in a way, I was. However, it was easy to adapt, and I loved traveling and moving with the Air Force. In two years, I lived in five different states and met all types of people from all over the country. Growing up in Rio and later moving to the U.S. allowed me to experience different cultures, and I got to know two countries for what they truly are. I believe every writer benefits from traveling and seeing different places. But to experience a place by living and breathing that culture, you learn what it is truly all about. Their real face is unveiled, which we can’t see by just visiting.

 

Finding time and space for concentration is a challenge for any creative task. How do you balance writing with being a mom?

When I wrote Resilient, the only free time I had was late at night after the kids went to bed. When I started writing the second book, I decided I needed to have a better schedule. So, I started a routine of waking up at five in the morning. That gave me two and a half hours of writing before the kids woke up. Now, they are both in school all morning, and I have plenty of writing time.

 

Writers at all stages of their careers read this blog, and I’m sure some are either querying agents and hoping to approach big publishers, or considering self-publishing. They would be interested to hear about the “middle route” of finding a supportive, small press as you’ve done with Pants on Fire.

When Resilient was ready for submission, I started querying agents right away. I didn’t have that many agents in mind and honestly didn’t like how the process took so long. I attended a writers conference, and heard great things about small publishers. So, I decided to query them instead. I received very fast responses and more than one publisher wanted to read the full manuscript. Luckily, I didn’t have to wait too long for an offer. I’m very happy with my publisher and how approachable they are.  My only concern about working with a small publisher is the limited exposure. But over all I’m happy with the route I took, and I do recommend it.

 

What’s next in the series?

Resilient focuses on the characters, the development of Livia and Adam’s powers, who they are, and the backstory about their powers.  Resilient is the beginning of everything and sets up the next installment, titled Awakened. The sequel will be pack with action, suspense, and a handful of new characters.

 

Thanks again for your time, Patricia, and I wish you the very best of launches and very most of success!

It was a pleasure! Thank you for having me.

 

Be sure to check out the great reviews the book is getting on Goodreads. You can learn more about the book on Patricia’s author site, or follow her on Facebook. The book is available now in paperback and as an e-book on Amazon and other retailers. 

 

Antagonists

As my monthly writing week winds down, and I find myself still struggling with scenes between my protagonist and antagonist, I wanted to share a few insights on what’s working, what’s not, and what I’ve learned in hopes that it will be helpful to at least one of you.

I admire Lajos Egri’s book on playwriting, The Art of Dramatic Writing, for its advice on the sacred narrative relationship between protagonist and antagonist. In short, you sit down to write when you have an inkling what you’re trying to say. From that intention, you create a character who is most likely to struggle to see that truth expressed in his or her own life. That’s your protagonist. Then you pick the character who is most likely to oppose the realization of that truth in your protagonist; this is your antagonist. Their agendas clash, and assuming they are both well-motivated enough to keep pushing for their own success, they will keep clashing: from whence comes conflict. A story with meaningful conflict becomes interesting.

This comes about as close to a creed for manifesting conflict as a creedless heathen like me will accept. And yet I’ve gotten continually stuck when writing scenes between my protagonist and antagonist. These scenes are important, yet for years, they have struck me as arbitrary and “talky” no matter what I try. These scenes are like magnets, attracting every stray thought about the story’s meaning, and forcing them into my characters’ mouths. Yuck. And my antagonist comes across as flat—a mere villain, not the hero of her own story.

Something Egri wrote returned to me with new weight yesterday. He said that antagonists don’t have to hate the protagonist; that in fact, some of the most wrought conflicts grow out of affection.

That’s it, isn’t it? Why would two people bother with each other if they didn’t care about the other, at least on some level? To relegate their motivations entirely to an external agenda is to be writing a film, not a novel. Robert McKee says almost exactly the same thing in the first five minutes of a long interview (posted below), and hearing Egri’s observation confirmed, I will be working on my protagonist/antagonist scenes in the coming week.

Watch Robert McKee’s thorough interview about storytelling in our time here. His book Story is one of the texts I use with my editing clients.

Ninety-nine Percent Brilliant: A Review of Kevin Brockmeier’s “The Illumination”

The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Oh, if it weren’t for the last chapter! I fell in love Kevin Brockmeier’s writing for its sensitive existentialism (incidentally the same reason I admire Jane McCafferty’s First You Try Everything: A Novel). I enjoyed his deft handling of what could be a plodding trope in the hands of a more sensationalist writer: wounds that are rendered into light. He explores his concept with the thoroughness of a genre writer, but follows a literary sensibility through a series of interconnected short stories to show the fine resonance between love and pain.

The novel breaks down in its final chapter, however. His POV character has what seems (to me) to be an unfounded ability to read minds, and the narrator jumps without warning into the heads of passersby. I found the transition irritating, but could have dismissed it as an editorial oversight had the *entire blasted novel* not ended on one of these jumps: There, all the deliciously textured mystery of love and pain is reduced to a scientific observation in the mind of a random academic who is walking down the street. In the final lines, Brockmeier forces an explanation of his concept onto us–perhaps not realizing that when we embraced his magical realist concept in the first pages, we dismissed the need to understand, to compartmentalize, to qualify.

The flaw is so blatant, however, and the rest of the novel so brilliant, that we might still embrace it because of its shortcomings. The disappointment of a bad ending is minimal, too, because the novel is a series of stories; really, it is only one story that fails. Too bad it’s the last one, but the others make for a fine journey.

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Fiction on the Digital Frontier: An Interview with Genese Davis

Author Genese Davis

When I began editing Genese Davis’s The Holder’s Dominion in 2011, it fascinated me because it highlights the often-underestimated degree of connection between the online world and real life; it treats the Internet—and online gaming—as an extension of human society, not an alternative to it. I’m not a gamer, but I am someone who has moved around the country so often that I am absolutely dependent on the Internet as a way to conduct business and maintain friendships.

Since our collaboration, I have observed Genese’s masterful ability to work with digital media not only to tell a story, but to turn it into a book supported by a high-quality publicity campaign. Her book trailer, cover art, and website are top-tier, and she has a wide network of gamer/readers to help spread the word. As authors go, she is an exemplar of the kind of energy it takes to self-publish a book well.

The book launches tomorrow, March 1, and I encourage you to check it out at www.genesedavis.com. Without further adieu, let’s talk about how she made it all happen.

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1. Tell us about The Holder’s Dominion.

Like Kaylie, (the protagonist in The Holder’s Dominion) I came to gaming pretty late in life. I wanted to write for gamers and non-gamers alike about the unpredictable and influential ways that video games change us. I wanted to share with others the amazing experience of collaborative video games and the communities that grow up in and around them. This fast-paced story aims to bridge the gap between families and friends of gamers who wonder about the allure behind their loved ones’ fascination with video games.

What’s different about Holder’s is that the story takes place on a college campus and therefore falls into a new genre called “new adult.” The foundation of this story revolves around that “shove” we all go through into adulthood. When we leave the nest, we’re forced to grow up quickly. Beyond our high school days are powerful new adult stories that begin and blossom in our late teens and early 20s. The whole publishing industry is recognizing the huge amount of heartfelt stories set beyond high school, thus the “new adult” classification.

The Holder’s Dominion reveals the secret side to online games, and offers an avenue for different generations to understand one another. This book is a message of hope and support for anyone going through grief or who have been separated from their family. It’s a story about a girl who discovers the world of gaming, and how to get through the tough times between friends and loved ones.

2. You mentioned elsewhere that you write for fourteen hours at a stretch. Quick poll: What’s more immersive to the human psyche, writing, reading, or gaming?

Hmmm, great question! I would have to say writing. In nothing else have I found myself so completely immersed in an activity like I am when I write. Writing demands every ounce of the my attention, where as games and even reading, allows my imagination to wander, allows breaks, and allows me to meander through at my own pace. But writing… Writing is extremely demanding on the human psyche, and requires me to give all that I have, and then more onto every page.

All authors “bleed” for their artwork. We are creating by carving and cutting the very essence of ourselves. And by doing so, each page is authentic and from the heart. It’s a personal and extremely lonely journey. Surviving all those times when I felt helplessly isolated, chained in solitary confinement, working day after day with the determination to finish . . . phew that was tough! If I wouldn’t have had the chance to meet with my creative producer and editors to figure out the speed bumps, it would have been much more difficult to finish Holder’s.

3. You have an unusual approach to writing, in that you have a creative producer. And in fact, so much of your writing and work seems to contain a message about how helpful communities can be in personal endeavors. Can you tell us about your writing process, and the role the creative producer played? How did you choose the right person for the job?

Absolutely! Thank you for asking. Communities impact our personal lives each and every day. And when we realize how much we can learn from one another, opportunities open up everywhere. And I am excited to share the new approach to writing that my producer, Eric, and I invented!

Having a creative producer is the number one advice I would offer any writer looking for a breakthrough approach to writing. Whenever I get stuck or lost in the minutia of writing, I schedule meetings with my producer and we have production one on ones, or creative one on ones. These are meetings where the author and producer can brainstorm, also known as “blue sky sessions,” and where we plan out small tangible goals using project management tools like Scrum. Project management doesn’t have to be solely for corporate environments anymore. Use these methods to develop your artistic projects, too! In fact, I’ll be talking more in depth about how to use project management tools for writing novels at a number of upcoming conventions this year. Come join in on the fun! To find a city near you, visit the “News & Appearances” section at www.GeneseDavis.com.

4. Speaking personally, Internet communities seem to level the playing field for introverts. If I can wax philosophical for a moment, do you think online connections are changing human relationships—and if so, how?

Online connections are definitely changing human relationships, and in a fascinating way. Ten years ago, when I first sat down to try Final Fantasy XI (an online game, also known as a MMO or MMORPG) I instantly became intrigued by the fact that I was playing with thousands of different people from all over the world. Final Fantasy XI allowed me to develop friendships with people in Japan, Great Britain, Canada… literally, I met people from all over the world! Immediately, this new experience with online gaming revealed a unique and healthy form of social networking and interactive entertainment.

5. You write with such a positive message about gaming, and hope to change some stereotypes about gamers. Do you think gaming plays a different role for kids than it does for adults?

Not really, and here’s why. While some games are developed for mature audiences only, most all other video games encourage ingenuity, confidence, empathy, and team building that benefit children and adults. Thousands of games incorporate multi-player mode that enhances the mentality to care about your team’s well being. Additionally, these games offer rich storylines with a legacy of lore and culture that the player (child or adult) can study and discuss. Not only do video games train your brain to make quick and accurate decisions, they also improve cognitive ability and eyesight. Children and adults play games as a way to spend time with their friends, and as a way to relax after school or work. Most of us will never know what it’s like to be a secret agent, soldier, or superhero, but video games can place anyone in the role of the hero.

While more people today play video games than ever before, there are still significant misconceptions about gaming. For example, the average gamer is in their 30s, and up to 70 percent of all Americans play video games in one form or another. Though many see gaming as an “alien concept”, games literally have something to offer everyone. The key is how we define games and the word “gamer.” Gaming is not just children’s entertainment or a consoling escape for social outcasts: Lawyers, doctors, athletes, office workers, nerds, jocks, children and adults, even politicians, men and women alike, are known to play games. Just as it is in film, gaming has something to offer everyone, and everyone is a potential player.

The pilot episode for Pixel Legends’ newest web series called “Pixel Vision” just released on Youtube and I’m the host! In this first episode titled, The Gamer In You, we discuss the importance of understanding what “Gamer” really means and why we need to redefine this term. Check out the link below and see what’s true about gaming and what are the stereotypes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdzwDZZNCFY

6. So far, you’re doing a heck of a job promoting The Holder’s Dominion—from producing a book trailer, to placing articles, to getting great blurbs, to arranging talks. Do you have advice to offer other indie-publishing writers? What work do you do yourself, and how do you pick a great team for the other pieces?

Oh thank you! It has been many late nights staying up till 3:00, 4:00, sometimes 5:00am, so it is very encouraging hearing your feedback. (Hugs!)

The best advice I could offer authors is to find an excellent creative producer and excellent editors. The benefits from having a highly skilled and motivated team can help the author’s inspiration significantly. Without a team, we are utterly alone. Producers and editors remind us of our goals, reveal new outlooks, and reinforce our personal convictions. Meet at least bi-weekly with your creative producer, and edit, edit, edit your work with your editor. Getting to work with such a fantastic editor like Sarah Cypher was integral in getting Holder’s where it is today.

Also, for anyone interested in tips and tricks on writing books, publishing, promoting, marketing, conventions, video game insights, or filmmaking, check out my blog titled “Between Books” at www.GeneseDavis.com. Most recently, I posted the article, “How to Shoot a Live-Action Book Trailer” and talk about the unique approach directors, Brian Horn and Eric Kieron Davis took to make The Holder’s Dominion live-action movie preview. See what they did at www.Youtube.com/AuthorGeneseDavis!

I feel the secret to success is in extra preparation. Before you ever think about publishing, hire highly recommended editors to go through your novel with you. After I completed the first draft of Holder’s, I did this twice. I hired two different editors before approaching any agents or publishers. This way, you have a crisp, clean, tight, and thrilling manuscript ready to take the next step. (Which, remember, should be more editing and proofreading with your publisher, hehe.) Editing is key!

7. Can readers hope for a sequel to The Holder’s Dominion?

My next book is a completely new genre—not the sequel to Holder’s. But, I would love to continue the Holder’s saga… After all, the Holder certainly does have a lot more to reveal… So, perhaps you can expect a sequel for The Holder’s Dominion, but we’ll see!

Here’s my info:

Facebook: www.Facebook.com/AuthorGeneseDavis,

Twitter: www.Twitter.com/GeneseDavis,

Youtube: www.Youtube.com/AuthorGeneseDavis.

Life and writing: where it all stands

Several folks have asked me lately, in the various and sundry ways of communication these days, what I’m working on. If you are one of the few, the proud, or the curious who swing by this blog from time to time to see how it goes with me and where the heck I’m living right now, I hope you will find this FAQ helpful.

I thought you were living in Oregon/Maine/Texas/California? The latter would be correct, but only until October. Then we might stay in California. Or go to Massachusetts. Or Virginia. I sure hope not Alaska. It depends on the Coast Guard clinic where E. will get stationed.


Wait, you’re married? You and I really haven’t talked in a while, have we? E and I are formalizing the whole shebang in Manhattan next month, where it’s legal ‘n stuff.
Wait, to a woman? Last time I checked, yep.
I thought you wrote fiction. What are all these Salon essays? My weekend fun. I do still, as ever, bleed fiction every morning from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m.
What’s happening with that weird set-in-the-future Mideast novel? The great Marjorie Braman edited it last winter. I brooded on it for a year. Now I’m halfway done with a revision, and I’m posting chapters on Authonomy to see if the genre really is all that weird. The editors chose it as One to Watch last week. I hope the new draft is ready to submit later this spring—only, oh, a  year after I wanted it to be done and told people it would be done. (Clutches hair in hands.)
How’s business? The Threepenny Editor turned ten this month. It’s great. I’m booked until May, but taking a week off every month to write, though, for my sanity.
Did I see something about your going to school? I’m also getting a second bachelor’s in Arabic.
Do you still race? No, I just run. If you do, too, I’ll see you at the San Francisco Marathon this summer.

 

 

New Salon.com story on post-DADT couples

My essay about my experiences as a same-sex military spouse appeared today as an editor’s pick on Salon.com. Check it out!

Successes from 2012

Last year set all kinds of records: in my number of clients, in increasing my efficiency in the administrative side of my business, in attracting new visitors to this site, and most of all, in client successes. Here are the highlights:

Harriet Parke’s novel Agenda 21 hit the bestseller lists on its launch day.
Jen Westby’s beautiful memoir of grief Six Days of Kindness came out, following plenty of great local media attention.
David Seaburn’s fifth novel, Chimney Bluffs, was released by Savant Books.
Patricia Vanasse’s YA novel, Resilient, was accepted by Pants on Fire Press.
Nazli Ghassemi’s hilarious multicultural novel, Desert Mojito, earned almost $12,000 on Kickstarter.
Steven Maitland-Lewis’s novel, Emeralds Never Fade, won the 2012 Benjamin Franklin Award for a self-published novel.
Ross Goldstein sold the film rights to his self-published novel about cycling, Chain Reaction.
David Rothstein’s gorgeous self-published novel about the Civil War, Casualties, got a big sales boost when university classes started teaching it.
Tony Russo made it to the semifinals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award with his YA novel, Zak Corbin: Master of Machines.
Shelley and Jason McClanahan’s Sea of Jasmine rose through the ranks of Authonomy to become nominated as “One to Watch,” and got a personal submission invitation from an editor at HarperCollins.

I also had a few personal successes as a writer. This doesn’t usually matter much in the scheme of my business, but the foundation of my editing is a deep, personal connection to the struggles and aspirations common to every working writer. I also try to practice what I preach. Here’s what I’m proud of:

Attended the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference in Mexico
Connected personally with several agents who invited me to submit my novel
Completed four short stories in a month, and two were accepted for publication
Had my first-ever article published on Salon.com
Got included in two anthologies: Laura Stanfill’s Brave on the Page (interview) and the Association of Independent Editors guide, Self-Publishing! (article)
The Threepenny Editor entered its tenth year of business
Completed three semesters of Arabic, part of a research effort for my current novel
Ran a marathon

May 2013 bring health, wealth, and creative successes to each and every writer out there, on a tide that raises all boats. Happy New Year!

Adventures in Orientalism: A Review of Craig Thompson’s Graphic Novel, “Habibi”

Habibi by Craig Thompson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I give Habibi five stars for the art, and one or two for the story. As a beautiful mess of a narrative to think about, it earns a solid three. Most of the other mixed reviews on Goodreads make similar points, dinging Thompson’s story for its cliched depiction of the sultan’s harem and its sexualization of rape.

I’ll assume that both are innocent, or at least ignorant, errors. As an artist and writer myself, I can think of many other ways to portray a intelligent female character whose life is shaped by sexualization, ways that don’t include repeated depictions of her body that bring hillbilly mudflaps to mind. Because this transgression of taste seems obvious, however, I’d rather give the most space to a more detailed discussion of Thompson’s use of Orientalist elements in the story.

First, let’s start with what he does right in his depiction of the Middle East. He doesn’t blame Islam. The relationship between women and religious authority is long and complex enough in both Christian and Muslim history that equating Islam to misogyny is problematic, yet this conflation is one of the most common modern stereotypes in Western depictions of Muslim life. Thompson avoids it. The extent of his treatment of Islamic elements is a kind of artistic gnosticism, and he seems more interested in the roots it shares with Christianity. He gets a lot of artistic currency from this choice, and it ends up being one of the novel’s strongest elements.

On the other hand, he draws a bit too heavily on Ottoman history in his depiction of the sultan’s harem. It’s all right to criticize an extinct institution for exploiting women. The historical sultanate did so, after all, collecting attractive girls from the farthest reaches of its territory to remind everyone who was boss; the feudal European practices of prima nocta and droit de seigneur are similar. Yet Thompson’s sultan isn’t a political creature at all–he’s a lustful little troll, and his harem is a caricature. Given the novel’s otherwise contemporary setting (dams, tires, bottles, pollution), a more serious and interesting choice would be to replace the whole sultan-harem-Orientalist element with something closer to the Saudi monarchy, and see what happens. Along these lines, late in the novel, Thompson has a character who appears to be a Western(ized?) businessman point out that the kingdom is being exploited for its resources. Saudi oil, anyone? A more contemporary choice of a problematic society would have avoided an Orientalist cliche, an artifact which seems to have puzzled other reviewers besides me.

There is another important omission in Thompson’s treatment of Arab women. He doesn’t make the mistake of blaming Islam for objectifying women, and in fact, steers away from a discussion of women in Islamic society. Yet it’s kind of an elephant in the room. The reader is neither encouraged nor discouraged from believing that Muslim women are chattel (as I said earlier, kudos to Thompson for not explicitly perpetuating a stereotype). But here we are, in a Middle Eastern-looking place, and women are bought, sold, and abused. It’s an uncomfortable simplification, and I would have liked to have seen more of the traditional Arab ambivalence toward femininity: on one hand, holding Woman to a saintly standard of purity, while on the other, tolerating or outright denying violence toward women. It’s a problem of both power and Arab tradition more than one of religion, and for a novel that is so deeply interested in the Arabic language, and which uses violence against women as a major plot element, it avoids acknowledging this key cultural dichotomy.

Even though these problems make easy targets, it’s worth understanding and talking about them so that we can evaluate our own ideas about the Middle East. I have no problem with Thompson, as a Westerner, taking on a story like this–as Margaret Atwood said in an essay, the logical conclusion of the statement, “Only people of a culture should write about that culture,” is, “The only story I can tell is my own.” The difficulty in Habibi, however, may simply be a sticky moral one that is separate from the actual story. In an era of thorny conflict between the United States and violent, self-proclaimed “Islamic” organizations, is it a good idea to use outdated depictions of the Muslim world just to add a sense of danger and adventure to a tale? How should authors pick and choose what nuances of another culture to portray? What responsibilities does the author have in these choices? And taking this idea even further, what responsibilities, if any, does art have to life?

If this book is an entryway into your continued interest in books about the Arab world, I encourage you to visit Goodreads’ group for Middle Eastern/North African (MENA) literature for a long list of nuanced novels by and about that part of the world. Happy reading!

View all my reviews

Brave on the Page: A conversation about creative courage with Gigi Little

Gigi Little, fiction and memoir writer in Portland, Oregon.

Portland, Oregon’s authors have many friends in common, and it’s a good day when two more of us meet, making its community even tighter. I had the honor of meeting Gigi Little this fall when our friend-in-common, author Laura Stanfill, included us in Brave on the Page: Oregon Writers on Craft and the Creative Life, an anthology of variously funny, wise, and beautiful literary interviews and shorts by forty-two Pacific Northwest writers.

Gigi is a member of Tom Spanbauer’s renowned Dangerous Writers group, and her extensive experience with the performing arts—from theater to clowning to her love for old movies—gives her an exemplary ear for voice and dialogue. (Read her excerpt, “The Book Club,” here.) About her love for dialogue she says, “We don’t have time to refine our dialogue before it comes out of our mouths. [It's] the particular wackiness that pleases me.” But most of all, we compared our processes for story creation. Gigi exemplifies the concept of bravery in front of what Ernest Hemingway famously said was the most frightening thing he’d ever faced: a blank sheet of paper.

She says, “Surprisingly each time I think I’ve hit the cliff and there’s going to be nothing on the other side, I move forward and the story moves forward. The story is there.” This got me thinking.

As an editor, I love this quote by Paul Sahre: “Design is a process of trying to address the unknown, through a process, and end at some place. … Any creative endeavor is about embracing risk, and that risk of failure, whatever form it’s going to take.” So much of my editing is about story design: Do the subplots mirror the central plot? What leitmotifs reflect the story’s main conflict? Does the protagonist’s feelings about the antagonist evolve smoothly, and are they proportional to the actions s/he takes to get what s/he wants? To say that editing is a cool-headed profession is a wee bit of an understatement.

But as a writer, you have to be brave. You have to trust that you have something to say, which is best said in fiction. Gigi says of her current manuscript, “I think I’m drawing on a lot of subconscious stuff that I’ve been wanting to talk about for a long time. The scariest thing is that I don’t know where this ends. That definitely eats away at my courage. How do I know that any of this is worthwhile if I don’t know where it’s going?” And yet, it all comes back to self-trust: “The interesting thing to me about my own process in this is that when it works best—really, not only dialogue but in creating situations, too—what works best is when I put down what pops off the top of my head.”

I’ve found something similar, too, in trusting what my subconscious mind hands to me; and Anne Lamott, too, evidently, since she writes something in Bird by Bird about a little kid in the basement of her imagination, who plays in the dark and hands up ideas when they’re ready for the light. Is this how all writers work? Gigi and I talked a lot about breadcrumbs—about scattering a few ideas lie on the ground and then enjoying a night’s sleep, or a walk with the dog, and then coming back later to find that the breadcrumbs lead somewhere new in the story.

Brave on the Page was selected as a staff pick in Powell’s Books.

It is interesting to see this commonality; and also its diversity. The pieces in Brave on the Page celebrate the perspectives of so many successful, hardworking writers who have followed their breadcrumbs to a voice of their own. Not only do we each have something to say, but also to tap into our courage, our sense of faith in finding a way to say it.

I’m a planner at heart. Faced with the blank page, I am afraid of wasting time, wasting hope, wasting the spark that made me sit down in front of one of my high school notebooks some sixteen years ago and begin to write a novel. But Gigi is right; just as on that first day, the story appears.

All you have to do is sit down.

(Read Gigi Little’s side of the conversation with me on her blog, here.)