Nancy Springer's Blog: Last Seen Wandering Vaguely, page 2

DON'T EYE WISH

Why, oh why, in fiction, do writers place so much stress on a character’s eye color?

Let’s face it: in your real world, when you meet someone, the first thing you notice is NOT the color of her/his eyes. Far from it. The very first thing you notice about a new acquaintance is gender, and if you’re not sure about that, then you might experience a sense of existential anxiety. Also, very nearly simultaneously with the above, you notice skin color/ethnicity, age, and physique, especially butts and/or boobs, depending on your preference. Hair color/style will also factor in. But rare, rare, rare is the person who notices eye color as part of a first impression unless it is advertised by loud makeup or brightly colored contact lenses. Otherwise, eye color awareness generally comes later, if at all. I dare say most of my longtime friends would be unable to state with accuracy what color my eyes are. Someday I want to write a realistic fiction character who says, with refreshing honesty, that s/he never noticed what color somebody’s eyes are.

So how has eye color become a big deal in fiction?

Because, in the long history of storytelling, eye color has become symbolic, serving as characterization shorthand.

Across the spectrum of genres and fictitious characters, blue eyes are perceived as attractive and morally good, unless they are cold blue eyes or pale blue eyes of a sharkish nature. Otherwise, so enamored are we of blue eyes that we go to ludicrous extremes in search of an exceptional blue. Violet eyes are not uncommon in fiction, although in nature they seem limited to Elizabeth Taylor. Indigo eyes, the color of classic brand new blue jeans? Don’t I wish. Eyes like Arizona skies (turquoise) cerulean blue, midnight blue (Navy?), TARDIS blue, dusty blue, cadet blue, slate blue, timber wolf blue, nearly ad infinitum. We keep pushing the boundary of blue until we have overstepped into blue’s troubled twin, gray.

Imagine Sherlock Holmes with blue eyes? No way. Without consulting the text, I can state with near certainty that Sherlock’s eyes were gray to symbolize his cold logic. (Watson’s would be brown. More on brown anon.) The symbolism of gray is that of blue compromised and/or rendered heroic by some chilly shadow. The symbolism of gray often links in with that of the sea and its restless, shifting tides – sea-fog gray, gull-shadow gray, Atlantic gray, salty as tears. Or gray is described by references to metals – pewter, or steel, or a dangerous gunmetal gray – if Shane’s eyes aren’t gray, they should be. I once described a character as having “eyes the color of tarnished silver.” Precious metal, but imperfect. Except, of course, in the case of the exceptions. Gray eyes can signify cool, calm serenity. Quiet gray eyes provide a foil for a character with eyes of, say, vixen green.

Now there’s a fictional eye color cliche, reserved almost exclusively for strong-willed foxy ladies with distinct character flaws. Didn’t Scarlett O’Hara have green eyes? In real life, the only person I ever met who had genuinely green eyes was male, and otherwise so ordinary I did not notice his grass-green irises for several months. He was absolutely not a green-eyed monster, but I suspect that the use of green eyes in fiction is tainted by that phrase, which apparently predates Shakespeare. Hence, there are hardly any good-hearted green-eyed characters in fiction, with one exemption: a blameless, naturally red-haired character is grudgingly allowed to have green eyes. But then the redhead mythos comes into play, and that’s another blog.

The real world’s most common eye color is brown, and in fiction it denotes ordinary people, foils, and followers. I don’t know whether Conan Doyle ever says Watson has brown eyes, but he should. Watson is dogged in character and displays doglike loyalty; of course he should have the eyes of a deerhound. But most authors want to make their brown-eyed characters special, so they lighten the brown to hazel, or darken it to sloe (hazel being a nut and sloe being a blackish berry, although few readers know that), or they call upon exotic coffees or chocolates for comparison, or they add flecks, invariably golden ones, that sparkle and dance. I have yet to see silver flecks in fictional irises, or copper ones, or aluminum for that matter. This disappoints me, because I am always on the lookout for new decorator trends in eye color. Why settle for hazel when, with only slight exaggeration, we can have yellow eyes like an alley cat’s? Why stop at sloe when we can go jet black (a metaphor of gemstone, not aviation)? Why balk at violet when it’s only a small step to amethyst? I plead guilty. I’ll be adding precious-metal sparkles next.

In our imaginations, eyes are vistas of symbolism, portals of the soul. Fictional characters gaze into one another’s eyes a heck of a lot more than real people do, so there has to be significance there, symbolism, and spirituality. It would be fun to flout the rules and have a very average brown-eyed character saving the world. But it’s also fun to be aware of the tacit rules and use them: an exceptional character requires an exceptional eye color. Writing I AM MORGAN LE FAY, I took this convention to an extreme by giving that witchy woman one green eye and one purple. (Amethyst. That was when I committed amethyst.) In real life, this would mean nothing more than hey, lookie that. But in fiction, does Morgan Le Fay’s ambivalent eye color mean she is dangerously weird? You bet it does.

Recently, a fan surprised me by ordering herself a new set of contact lenses: one green and one purple, in honor of Morgan Le Fay. I feel quite touched.

What is it going to take to top that? Could I possibly invent an entirely new eye color never before see in the history of story?

Don’t eye wish.

MY ONCE AND FUTURE BOOKS

Publishing, someone once said, is like throwing a leaf into the Grand Canyon, and I have to agree. Yes, most of the fifty-some novels I’ve published have felt like that. At first there was something: a spot of color, a glimpse of flight, paper winging on the breeze. But very quickly there was nothing. No echo, no indication of any impact. After the reviews were over, silence, except three (it was almost always three) fan letters mailed to me by the publisher after a six-month delay. Then, within a terribly short time, the out-of-stock notice would arrive like a messenger of doom, and sometimes (*shudder*) the remainder notice, and finally (terribly finally) the out-of-print notice. That felt like a kind of death for each book. The occasional copies being sold “used” served as ghosts.

And that’s the way it’s been for most of my career. Some books lasted longer than others, but eventually they all succumbed, like T.S. Eliot’s version of the way the world ends, “not with a bang but a whimper.” In order to make a living, I wrote at least one new book every year, resigned to its fate yet secretly hoping that this one might do better, might thrive and grow, might even outlive me.

Now I am of retirement age, and to my eye-blinking amazement, that secret hope is coming out of hiding.

For some of my novels, the end will not be the end after all.

A lot of those leaves I threw into the Grand Canyon are flying back out, bright, beautiful, and digitally enhanced.

It’s official. Here’s the notice:

In a major deal with the Jean Naggar Literary Agency, Open Road will publish 29 titles by Nancy Springer in digital form. Titles include the Book of Isle series (The White Hart and its four sequels) and 12 other adult titles, including Larque on the Wing, which won the James W. Tiptree Award, and Fair Peril, which was nominated for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. Open Road will also publish 12 of Springer's books for children and young adults, including Looking for Jamie Bridger and Toughing It, both of which won the Edgar Award.

My babies are being reborn!

Even my very first novels, the Books of Isle, are coming back! They and many others! This is whole-heartedly wonderful to me, but also, like many of the major events in my life, exquisitely ironic, thus: For decades now I have obstinately resisted the technology that is making this possible. It took me years and years to have a website and get on Facebook. I don’t own, and have never used, a Kindle or any whatchamacallum, e-reader. Heck, I don’t even own a functioning cell phone, far less a “smart” phone. Yet the people who, unlike me, choose to embrace the e-future are the people who are making my wonderful new hope possible.

I can’t wait to see, on my venerable computer, the new covers of my re-released books!

All of the old rules have changed, and while the process was happening, I did not like it, Sam I Am. I did not like Green Digital Eggs and Ham, not whatsoever. But now I do, I like e-publishing, Sam I am. Thank you, thank you, Sam – no, seriously. Thank you, JVNLA and Open Road Media.

TRUTH, IN A WEEK, PLEASE

Over the years I have helped lots of students with projects, but this questionnaire stands out from the crowd. Of all the “assignments” I have received, this one has to be the most challenging and, proportionately, interesting.

Here, minus the name of the sender, is the e-mail I received:

Hello, Ms. Springer. I am writing a paper for my high school English class that requires me to survey a certain demographic of people, and I have chosen authors. If you could take just a few minutes to answer my questions, I would really appreciate your insight! I need the responses back in a week if possible. Thank you!

Here’s what I sent back:

I found your questions highly intelligent and insightful but very difficult to answer concisely!

Name: Nancy Springer

Age: 65

Race: human

Gender: kinda wish that were irrelevant

Q: What qualities do you consistently put into the protagonists of your novels? Why?

A: Writing fiction is not putting qualities into characters. I mean, it’s not like baking a cake; let’s add some nutmeg and a dash of integrity. . . . It’s instinctive, intuitive, holistic, and if there’s any consistency in my protagonists, it’s only because they come out of me. I suspect, although I haven’t taken a survey, that most of them are either lonely or loners, because that’s how I am.

Q: How has being an author changed you?

A: Being an author literally saved my life and turned it around. I had clinical depression, I think since childhood, and starting in my twenties I had obsessive thoughts of suicide for years at a time. But in the process of writing fantasy novels, I gradually discovered who I was, stopped hating me, and learned to deal with life more positively. Writing is not a cure-all but it made a huge difference for me.

Q: How does love in the real world compare to fictional love?

A: It depends on whose fiction the love is in. I think many romance novels do readers a disservice by giving them unrealistic expectations of “being swept away by love.” In my early fantasy novels, the love relationships between characters are extreme, unusual, and probably unrealistic because of my psychological problems. In my later work, I hope, I depict love more realistically!

Q: If you truly had the power to change anything about the world, where would you start?

A: I’d start all over, tens of thousands of years ago, and have humankind develop in harmony with the world’s other living creatures and in profound respect for the planet we live on. I envision a world with far more forest and far less pavement. I’m a dreamer.

Q: What is the difference between reality and perception?

A: Once I was sitting in an airport watching an older woman, a younger woman, and a young man. I formed the preconception that the young man was traveling and his mother and wife had come to see him off. I saw them embrace him – or that was actually what I thought I saw until the young woman walked onto the plane. My perception was different than the reality. People tend to see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear, and remember things differently than other people having the same experience.


Q: What is truth?

A: I don’t know. I’ve spent most of my life just trying to figure out what is good or what is right. Truth is too abstract for me. I do know that Keats said, “Beauty is truth; truth beauty,” but I think he was wrong. I don’t like to favor beauty over ugly. They’re two sides of the same coin. Things seem to work by opposites. A great gift is a great burden. A strength may well become a weakness. Maybe truth is a double-edged sword that cuts both ways.

THE ENOLA/CRAYOLA CONNECTION

Ever since I was a small child, I have suffered from a psychological condition neglected by Freud, forcing me to label it myself: Crayon Envy. My older brothers, presumably, possessed fully realized crayons in their formative years, but I was left with nothing but a box of stubs, causing me feelings of frustration and inferiority. I repressed these emotions into adulthood, but they painfully resurfaced when I bought my children their first crayons. As the kids scribbled, I struggled not to snatch Colors Incarnate In Wax away from them. Those were of course Crayola crayons, the best, and my Crayon Envy sharpened into Crayola Envy that drew me into buying boxes of 24, then 48, then the extravagant 64. But any satisfaction I gained was merely vicarious; the crayons were for my offSpringers. My maternal protection of the children’s self-actualization trumped my own fulfillment until, after years of feeling conflicted, I came to a powerful realization: If I were ever to resolve my issues, I needed to provide myself with a pristine box of shiny, pointy Crayola crayons.

And coloring books. I forgot to mention, my mother wouldn’t let me have coloring books. She didn’t believe in them. So my first coloring book of my very own, featuring mandalas, I bought for myself on the Internet.

After that my fixation rapidly escalated. I bought myself lots of coloring books, plus crayons to the max, specifically Crayola’s box of 120 with a Mr. Crayon orange plastic sharpener thrown in. Oh, sure, I fooled around with Twistables and markers, but nothing else did it for me like the Big Box of Crayola.

I might have been on my second Big Box when I started to write about Enola Holmes. Or rather, when I started preparing to write about Enola Holmes. What daunted me, overwhelmed me, and, to tell the truth, nearly made me drop the whole thing, was the enormous amount of research I faced. I had to write from the point of view of a girl in 1880, * gasp, choke.* I had never previously written historical novels, for the exact and precise reason that research scares me.

Fortuitously, at this crux I happened across The Victorian House Coloring Book, illustrated by Daniel Lewis, written and researched by Kristin Helberg.

Researched? Yes. Every picture was accompanied by detailed notes. That wonderful book took me, room by room, through what eventually became Ferndell Hall, Enola’s ancestral home. Her bedroom is in the coloring book. Mrs. Lane’s kitchen is in there, too. And the parlor, and the porch, and the library; all of these are where Crayola helped me connect with Enola. Coloring, say, fire screens and silk lampshades enabled me to internalize Victorian decor and the pastimes of Victorian ladies much better than reading could. Also, by coloring furniture and other structures, I better understood how things worked. Why the bathroom and the water closet were two separate places. How pictures were hung. What washstands were for. All sorts of things.

So far, so good, supplemented by other research, but what was I to do when Enola went to London?

Enter Tom Tierney’s coloring books of Victorian fashions for men, women, and children. I hadn’t realized how truly ridiculous Sherlock’s “deerstalker” hat was until I colored one. Also thoroughly researched, Tierney’s books included scholarly introductions and helpful notes. “The most popular colors for corsets were white, black, yellow, blue, and lavender.” Now, where else would I have learned that? “Preferred colors for ladies’ riding habits were brown, dark green, bronze-green, or black.” Bronze-green! I would never have thought of such a wondrous hue by myself. And who knew that real kidskin gloves were yellow?

Altogether, in the course of writing the Enola Holmes mystery novels, I colored three different books of Victorian architecture and another three of Victorian costume. Oh, yes, and one, most helpful, about the Victorian language of flowers.

It’s too bad I couldn’t find coloring books on Victorian Rookeries (slums), Victorian Street Entertainers (dancing bears) and Victorian Social Evils (hookers), but I made do. What I really needed, and never found, was a coloring book or a book with illustrations or even something on the Internet about barouches, broughams, chaises, gigs, landaus, phaetons, traps, dog carts, carriages, and cabs, none of which were drawn by dogs; all were horse-drawn vehicles. I would have enjoyed coloring the horses, too.

“Enjoy” is what the Enola/Crayola connection was all about. Who knew I could enjoy research? The first rule of fiction writing is “Show, don’t tell,” meaning that the novelist should create a visual experience for the reader. Therefore, the writer requires a thorough visual understanding of the subject matter. How better to acquire it, intimately and in concrete detail, than with a college-level coloring book and a quality set of crayons – or colored pencils, if preferred?

Besides which: Hey Mom, lookie what I did!

"JUST A STORY"

When I was four years old, my parents bought a TV. I remember standing as far away from it as I could and eyeing it askance, unwilling to confront face to face this blockheaded new family member – and it wasn’t even turned on. Yet I think I sensed, even then, that my life had been irrevocably changed.

Unlike most people I know, I remember life before TV. I remember lying in my crib and watching with fascination the darkness, inexplicably glittering with tiny flecks of gold, slowly rolling to flow underneath the bed and up and over me again. Standing under the grape arbor – I must have been about two --I remember looking up at a goat with alien amber eyes and curling horns with which it promptly knocked me flat. Starting about age three, I remember reaching above my head to collect warm eggs from the chicken nests, occupants of which would sometimes peck my hands. I took a mental note: I was four years old the first time my mother let me go trotting all by myself down the rutted dirt lane to the woods and fields where the wild things were.

And they roared their terrible roars. . .no, not really. They were mostly rabbits. But my point is, I was unafraid. Not brave, exactly, but innocent, open.

The TV remained blank-faced and mute in the living room during the days. But when my father came home from work, and after supper, we would all gather in front of it and he, paterfamilias, would turn it on.

I don’t remember what we watched or how I reacted the first time this happened, but I remember the accumulated pain of many such evenings, and it amounted to a feeling of being mentally and emotionally violated, forced, almost raped, as sounds and images were jammed willy-nilly into me. I had no control and no free will and I couldn’t go to where the wild things were. Instead, wild things, the wrong kind of wild things, came to me, men punching and hitting each other and blood on their faces and shooting each other and wincing me with the noises of gunfire and shouting and images ramming into my eyes like shards of glass. Don’t blame my parents; I doubt that I gave any sign I was suffering. Somehow, perhaps due to my British father, very early in life I adopted a Spartan ethic. Wolves gnawing my vitals could not make me cry. Nor could TV. But inwardly it agonized and sickened me.

What were we watching? Disney, mostly, and I don’t mean cartoons. Hasn’t anybody besides me ever noticed how violent Disney TV was, although God forbid they should show any kissing? Also we watched Maverick – I had to love James Garner – and Bonanza. Michael Landon as Little Joe on his pinto horse; yes, I had a crush on him. But at the same time and always and forever somebody would get beaten up in a fight, or the bogeymen of the time, Indians, would charge in with chilling war cries, and bang bang that awful sound somebody would shoot somebody down, and I could just barely stand it.

I was scared sick of TV “Indians” and scalping, but the very worst thing was whips. Another awful sound. Somebody was always going to horsewhip somebody. The words alone made me queasy. But it wasn’t just violence that traumatized me. It was heartbreak, tears, drama that overwhelmed me. Even the bloodless cartoons were bad. Bambi and the forest fire, or what happened to Dumbo and his mother. . . I wouldn’t cry, would not cry, but I would sweat, and cringe, and sometimes make an excuse to flee the room.

One would think I’d grow out of my sensitivity in time, but I didn’t. Perhaps because I had not watched people being tortured and/or murdered on TV since infancy, I continued to be upset by TV into adulthood, and indeed until the present day. My life became very hard when TV spread like influenza into department stores, restaurants, waiting rooms in doctors’ offices, even the auto repair shop, and I could seldom raise my eyes in a public place without encountering a TV set confronting me with the news, a basketball game, Wheel of Fortune or whatever. Even though I was not usually forced to witness slaughter on these occasions, I still found TV unsettling because its flickering and random action would not allow me to reclaim my selfhood and turn my attention to enjoying my life. Real life.

In real life, I’m a lot less squeamish than some of my friends. I’m not afraid of darkness or thunderstorms or loud noises, or of guns as long as they’re pointed away from me. I’ll even shoot at a target occasionally. Moreover, spiders, mice, worms, bloody accidents, medical procedures and the like don’t faze me. I’ve tried to breathe life into a dying man with strings of saliva cobwebbing his mouth. I’ve let a boa constrictor slither up my sleeve and around my shoulders. I’ve watched giant slugs hang from their own slime to mate. I’ve dated a man with half a head. I’ve picked up a rattlesnake on a shovel to escort it off my porch. I’ve attended dozens of science fiction conferences. What more can I say? I can be weird, but I’m not a wuss.

I’m even brave enough to watch TV or a movie with friends or family when they insist. If they see me trembling, they sympathize but don’t understand. “Nancy, it’s just a story! It’s not real! Those people are just actors!” they tell me, helping not at all. Or, if the show turns out to be one that wins my heart rather than curdling my intestines, they say, “There, that was nice, wasn’t it?” And I want to scream: no, no, it wasn’t nice. It was sublime, and I will remember it until the end of time! Or at least the rest of my life (realistically this is true), whereas they will have turned away and forgotten about it within a few minutes, because they consider it was just a story. Just a story? Nothing means more to me than story! Why the heck do these people think I’m a novelist?

Yes, I’m sure there’s a connection between my fiction-writing career and my TV viewing or lack thereof. I love story. I love apple pie, too, but don’t go force-feeding it to me or shoving it into my face.

I guess I need control. Finesse. Story unsullied by commercials for hemorrhoid cream or white teeth or yogurt or pickup trucks. Story that bespeaks truth, doesn’t cheat and doesn’t have to be compressed into a time slot. I guess I need to read story, so I can pause and reflect, or else story has to come out of me.

Do I ever watch TV nowadays? Yes, I’ve gotten a little bit more Zen about it. I fell hard for “Perception” and “The Mentalist,” although the scripts are not without their story logic faults. And I seldom miss an emergency room show or a true-crime documentary. My husband is appalled by my interest in trauma, assault, missing persons and murder. “How can you watch that stuff, but not a John Wayne movie?”

I have to smile. “Because nobody’s trying to tell me it’s just a story. It's real, and everybody knows it’s real, so I can deal with it.”

LETTING THE DOGS OUT

First I must leash, sharply, with a choke collar, the impulse to tell about my own real-life candidates for Woman’s Best Friend; I am supposed to be blogging about fiction.

So what about dogs and fiction writing?

Okay, for starters, dogs provide the quickest, slickest characterization shortcut I know. A character who comes complete with a beloved dog is instantly shown to be good at heart. A character who rescues and adopts a dog, even more so. A complex, flawed character who is in danger of repelling the reader MUST be provided with a dog forthwith. When writing I AM MORDRED, my novel about the arch-villain of the Arthurian mythos, I gave young Mordred a whimpering white puppy that he cherishes and names Gull after the white birds of the happy seaside home he remembers. Gull, his constant, loyal companion, is also a confidante he can talk to.

That’s another way a writer can make good use of a fictitious dog. Provide a troublesome, taciturn, solitary character with a dog, and very shortly they’ll be telling the animal all their shocking secrets, while the dog listens with unwavering interest and adoration. I suppose some people talk to cats, also, but it’s not the same; cats don’t generally sympathize. Nor do they trot by your side if you are traveling on a quest, as Mordred is.

In my most recent novel, DRAWN INTO DARKNESS, I give a stray dog to one of the characters, Ned Bradley, who is a recovering alcoholic. At a time when his family does not yet trust him, his treatment of the dog shows the reader that he is trustworthy, and what he says to the dog helps to establish his role in the novel. Exposition in monologue to a dog works a heck of a lot better than exposition in dialogue, in which characters tell each other things they already know. That sounds goofy, causing the reader to lose respect for the characters and the author. But no one sacrifices respect by telling a dog what they are thinking about. In this case, lack of sophistication is to be expected.

What else about dogs and writing? Well, even without being players in the plot, dogs can factor into characterization. For instance, if one of the people in your novel is involved in dogfighting, what does that reveal about them? Or if they rescue greyhounds off the racetrack, or carry a Chihuahua in their purse, or prefer to own a vicious dog? Regarding scary dogs, I remember when everyone was afraid of German Shepherds, then Doberman Pinschers, then Rottweilers, and now it’s Pit Bulls. When characterizing dogs, please avoid such stereotypes; the dogs can’t defend themselves. But when characterizing humans, it’s good to be aware of fashion trends in dogs. At one year’s horse show, all the big stables will show up with Welsh Corgis in tow, the next year the very same people will have Jack Russell Terriers, and so it goes; what sort of people trade in their dogs for a more recent model? If a person uses a dog to terrify the neighbors, that reveals character; the same is true if a pet is actually a status symbol. If a woman displays a Teacup Yorkie with hair bows in a plush-lined basket on her coffee table, what does that tell you? How different are the implications if she raises Irish Wolfhounds?

Another usage of dogs in fiction is as viewpoint characters. The canine point of view, refreshingly down-to-earth, food-driven and featuring a smorgasbord of smells, can provide a valuable contrast to the complex concerns of the human characters, and can serve as a foil for them. The first-person canine narrator can be especially appealing, and no, this approach is not limited to children’s literature or fantasy. But I admit it requires some getting away with and is not for every writer or every writing project. Still, my short story “The Scent of an Angel” pulls it off successfully, with the help of my mystic streak.

But as far as that’s concerned, the symbolism of dogs varies profoundly from culture to culture. Wild dogs and hunting dogs carry different meanings than house pets. Here are some snippets I’ve picked up: Merlin the Magician was followed by a black dog with white eyes. Winston Churchill called his depression “the black dog.” Every spring in the small town where I live, a terrifying rumor goes around about a big black stray dog with rabies. It’s never a Pekingese with rabies; it’s always a big black dog. The canine equivalent of an alley cat, however, is a “yellow dog.” People who believe in ghosts say dogs can see them, especially “four-eyed dogs,” which are dogs with contrasting spots of color above their eyes. A dog howling in the night is an omen of death. Finally, two widespread beliefs that are maybe even true: dogs can detect cancer, and dogs can sense the truth about people; if a normally friendly dog growls at a smiling stranger, never mind the smile; that person is bad news.

There are stories galore just in that paragraph.

Hmm, I feel one coming on. I feel a story beginning to constellate around the dog star, Sirius, and a dyslexic agnostic insomniac who gets out of bed to look up at the sky. . . . Gotta go for now. Sometime soon, cats, okay?

HI MS. SPRINGER

Over the years I’ve helped lots of students with school assignments, which sometimes provide pleasant egoboost, are often thought-provoking, and occasionally cause me to bobble between laughter and frustration. There’s nothing wrong with this kid’s letter; it’s my career that’s weird. See for yourself:


Hi Ms. Springer,
Thank you so much. I really appreciate that you would help me with my project. These are the questions I would like you to answer.

1. What is the typical starting salary?

There isn’t any. What I mean is, people just starting out generally do not make any money. I am not salaried; I am self-employed. What I do is sell my intellectual property, which is words I put together into a book manuscript. Most people who want to be writers take about ten years learning to write well enough so that they can interest publishers in their books.


2. What is the salary range?

Again, there isn’t any salary. The vast majority of writers make only a little money, not enough to live on, but a few very talented bestselling writers make millions. I am in between; I make about as much as a schoolteacher in one of the better-paying districts.


3. What is the typical work schedule? (Sun-Sat.)

I can speak only for myself. I usually work every morning, seven days a week, for two or three hours. Other writers might work only on weekends, or they might get up extra early to work before going to a paying job, or they might stay up late at night. There does seem to be a tendency for fiction writers to work either first thing in the morning or last thing at night, times when they are sleepy and dreamy.


4. What is the typical range of hours worked per week?

I don’t think there’s anything typical about any aspect of this job. Some writers work only a few hours per week. I work about thirty. Others, who have book deadlines to meet, might work around the clock, putting in eighty or more hours a week. But no writer should do that except for a really fat paycheck.

5. Who are some employers that would hire someone in this career?

They’re not exactly employers. They’re book publishers, some very large like the Penguin Group, some very small like Pulpwood Press. Usually I don’t deal directly with the publisher, but with an editor who works for the publisher, who is empowered to “buy my book” if s/he likes it. A publishing contract is complex, and arranges for the publisher to kind of rent my words, while I keep the copyright, the ownership, and it reverts to me once the book goes out of print.

6. Where in the country am I most likely to find employment in this field?

What country? I have no idea where you are e-mailing me from. But it doesn’t matter. There are only three languages providing a large enough readership to support a writer financially. They are English, Spanish, and Chinese. So employment as a free-lance (self-employed) writer is best sought in England, the USA, Canada, Australia, Spain, Taiwan, or China.

7. What makes this job enjoyable?

Not having to get dressed. (I work in my nightgown.) Not having to commute or punch a time clock or have a boss. Having cats in my office, as long as they are not interfering. Having a lizard in my office window right now for the cats to look at. Being creative. Playing with words. Being praised by people who admire writers. Doing research which may involve activities such as horseback riding or kayaking or country line dancing, or might involve travel.

8. What makes this job stressful?

No co-workers; it can get lonely. No steady paycheck. No retirement plan or health insurance. Tremendous competition. The necessity to accept rejection and/or deal with editors who want you to make changes in your book. The fact that when I tell people what I do for a living, they either ask whether I’m on the New York Times Bestseller List, or else they say, “Sure, and I’m the reincarnation of Princess Di.”

9. How difficult is it to get a job in this field right now?

Writing for commercial publication is and always has been a tremendously competitive field. Getting well published is very, very difficult. However, right now many writers are publishing electronically, on the Internet, which is less difficult but at this time less profitable.

10. If there is anything else about this job that you think I should know, please tell me.

This is not exactly a job. It’s more like compulsive gambling. You need to be somewhat crazy to do this.

HOW TO WIN AN EDGAR BY MISTAKE

Back in the 1990s, although I had changed genres several times, I swore I didn’t write mystery and never could, not me. Mystery as I knew it was plotty and artificial, lavished with red herrings like ornaments on a Christmas tree. (Brief, dreadful visual of tree decorated w/ red herrings, suppressed.) Also it trivialized the loss of human life. So I wasn’t going there, thank you. As a writer I like to challenge myself, BUT. (Voice of Meatloaf: “I will do anything to get published, but I WON’T DO THAT.”)

However, one boring summer, feeling the urge to try something new, I decided to write a book for people who don’t care to read. Let’s make guns for pacifists, grow cattle for vegetarians, roll spitballs for teachers? Ah, but the marketing did make sense after all, because those teachers would thrust my product upon the reluctant readers, who were predominantly teenage boys. In order to seduce them (in a nonsexual way), my protagonist would have to be a male teen who was BAD. Ideally, he should be inner-city, but having never lived in a city, I didn’t think I could pull that off. However, I’d been in contact with a rather scary family living in an isolated, ramshackle trailer on the flood plain of the Susquehanna river. Tuff could live there. (Already my tough boy’s nickname was Tuff.)

And what would Tuff do? I knew he had to grab the reader from the first sentence and never let go. No problem: my kids had told me about one of their high-school classmates who had been riding his dirt bike when he ran into a trap somebody had set. A cable strung across a wooded trail at neck height had crushed his windpipe and killed him. I found this so disturbing and just plain mean that I needed to write about it. I couldn’t kill off Tuff, of course, but I could kill off his brother and Tuff could be right there on the bike behind him. Tuff would have a very, very hard time dealing with his brother’s death. Because he was “tough,” rather than grieving he would seek revenge. He would nearly kill an innocent man.

I wrote TOUGHING IT in first person viewpoint using Tuff’s voice. His mother was drunk as usual and unsupportive when he told her about his brother’s death. He had no father. His approximate stepfather was abusive. He ran away from home. By the time I got to Chapter Five of the novel, writing from my gut, I began to wonder whether the story was so sad and depressing that no reader, reluctant or otherwise, would be able to stand it. So I pulled back, trying to lighten up. I managed to finish the manuscript on a positive note.

Then, as is my rule, I put it aside for a while. But one day my daughter, fourteen years old at the time, wandered into my office complaining of nothing to do. I handed her the print backup of the manuscript. “Here, read this.”

Rather to my surprise she did so. Two hours later she returned. “Mom, the beginning is okay, but the ending is, like, lame. You never said who did the murder.”

To which I retorted, “It’s not a murder mystery. It’s about Tuff’s grieving process.”

“Whatever.” She meandered off.

The truth was, if the four stages of grief are denial, anger, depression and acceptance, I had pretty much skipped denial and depression. But in due time I finished (I thought) TOUGHING IT and sent it in. The first editor who saw it rejected it, but one of the nice things about being agented is they always tell you why they declined. The editor said that the manuscript was very strong through Chapter Five, but at that point the author had evidently chickened out. Also, the author needed to solve the murder mystery. If the author did these things, the editor would be interested in seeing the book again.

Well. Guess who should have listened to her gut. And her daughter.

I had utterly no idea who had killed Tuff’s brother. In the real-life case I was trying to exorcise, no one was ever prosecuted. In the book, I had turned the cable into a shotgun rigged by a trip wire, because Tuff wanted to have his revenge in kind, and it’s easier/more believable to tote a gun around than a cable. By the way, I am still ticked off at whoever in the pub house changed “triggers” to “trigger’s.” A double barreled shotgun has two triggers, for gosh sake.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I still needed a murderer. So I called my brother Ben, ex-cop, and he told me the guys growing marijuana in the state forest land on top of the mountain did it. I didn’t even know they were there before he told me. He also explained how to rig up the shotgun trap. This is why TOUGHING IT is dedicated to Ben.

Duly revised, it was eventually accepted by the same wise editor, and upon publication it became an ALA/YALSA Best Book for Young Adults, an ALA/YALSA Recommended Book for the Reluctant Young Adult Reader, and a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age. Better yet, I heard this from an English teacher: one of her students, a boy who had never read a novel in his life, finished TOUGHING IT in a day, then demanded, “Youse got any more books by this here lady?”

These honors, and good reviews, and the good news from the teacher, pleased me enormously, but I hope you will not think I suffer from an enlarged head if I say they did not surprise me. I mean, TOUGHING IT was my twentieth published novel, and I’d heard nice things about my books before. But I WAS surprised – indeed, astonished – when I received word that this book for reluctant readers was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. I was nonplussed, dumbfounded, and astounded, because I knew I didn’t write mystery.

My agent encouraged me to attend the award ceremony, a very dressy affair in New York City, if only for the sake of mingling, and she convinced me by promising to go with me. But I felt sure I could not possibly win. For something to wear, I borrowed from my daughter the long black standby she wore when playing violin solos. I enjoyed the trip to New York, and hobnobbing with my agent, and the parties, and how nice everybody at the Edgars was to me, and the dinner, European style, salad served at the end.

As for receiving the award, I was stunned. I went up to the podium and dithered. I had no speech prepared, because I did not write mystery. My agent informed me, “Now you do,” but I still didn’t believe her.

Not until I won another one the next year, for LOOKING FOR JAMIE BRIDGER.

Then I got serious, wrote some short stories for the mystery magazines, and eventually wrote the ENOLA HOLMES series, thanks to the two Edgars I won by mistake. But I haven’t received any since I began writing mystery.

HOW ENOLA HOLMES HAPPENED

You want to know the truth? When I get a brilliant book idea, write it as if my head were on fire, and send in what I think is a masterpiece, usually it won’t sell. In this way I’ve written books about a pregnant man, about the gillygaloo bird laying cubical eggs and weeping itself into a puddle of self pity, about feral cats in search of Tyger tyger burning bright, and angels with angle-wings (type of butterfly), and a swamp Sasquatch, and twins separated by faerie, and – and many more; can you understand why I don’t want to remember them all?

I mention this lest anyone be disappointed with the rather uninspired way the Enola Holmes books came about.

They started out being business as usual. For a decade I’d worked closely with a savvy editor at Penguin, starting with I AM MORDRED and I AM MORGAN LE FAY, after which I suggested the Rowan Hood series – five books, five years. But it was barely finished when my editor phoned me and said, approximately, “Nancy, what I want you to do for me next is a series set in darkest London at the time of Jack the Ripper. Children’s lit is getting darker and darker. I’d have you do Jack the Ripper only somebody else already is.”

Whaaaat? I’d never been to England, let alone London, I’d never written straight historical fiction, I felt no fondness for Jack the Ripper, and I had to remind myself seriously that this editor had guided me well so far.

Because of that, I knew I ought to give the idea some thought.

So I thought: as a child, I’d read my family’s King Arthur book to shreds; hence I AM MORDRED and I AM MORGAN LE FAY. I’d read the Robin Hood book to tatters; hence Rowan Hood. Now, had I compulsively read anything set in Victorian London?

Well, I had all but memorized my mother’s complete set of Sherlock Holmes.

Huh.

Still doubtful, I checked dates; was Jack the Ripper contemporary with Sherlock Holmes? Yes, I had a handle on the right era. So, regarding possible book premises, feminist that I am I thought: how about “daughter of Sherlock Holmes?”

But I didn’t think it more than a nanosecond before shaking my head. Sherlock Holmes, veritable Victorian monk of a bachelor, with a daughter, or any child? Inconceivable.

Okay, maybe "little sister of Sherlock Holmes?

A fiction premise began to form. I counted backwards and decided on the year of Enola’s birth. By now she was Enola, a name with which I’d been familiar for all the years I’d lived in Pennsylvania. There was a railroad town called Enola along the Susquehanna River, named after the founder’s mother. Curious about the moniker, I’d discovered that backwards it spelled “alone.” The Victorians sometimes gave their girls strangely melancholy names such as Perdita (“lost”) and Dolores (“sad”). Oscar Wilde’s sister was names Isola, “the isolated one.” Go figure.

I’ve always been a loner, so Enola began to take shape in my heart and mind as an extension of myself. Her provenance pointed toward a mystery series, and I’d won a couple of Edgar awards seemingly by mistake, so I decided to give mystery a try. But not murder mystery. This was supposed to be a children’s series, and anyway I had always preferred stories about missing persons.

I dove into research. Blast my mother for giving away her Annotated Sherlock Holmes books to someone else; those suckers are expensive. But I managed to find a first volume, which was all I needed, el cheapo. It affirmed what I had always thought: Conan Doyle's chronology is so messed up I couldn't do it any further harm. THE ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES blessedly included a map of London in the 1880s. I internalized the map by drawing and labeling it. After that, I researched every which way, but I especially needed visual reference. John Thomson’s VICTORIAN LONDON STREET LIFE IN HISTORIC PHOTOGRAPHS proved invaluable. So did coloring books from Dover Publications, whether dissecting Victorian houses (I had to be careful; these were different in England than in America), Victorian costume, Victorian hotels or Victorian flowers. Also, I sent away for videos of Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes, and I learned how to use the VCR player so I could watch them over and over, pausing to take notes on details of setting.

Before I could possibly finish all the research I needed, I had to write the first volume of the Enola Holmes series. I was very, very nervous about sending it in, even though I’d found out so much of London was destroyed during World War II that nobody would know I was fudging it. I was relieved that my editor liked the book, but I was joking when I suggested calling it The Case of the Missing Marquess, shades of Perry Mason. Duh. Never lock yourself into alliterative titles. Also, after the first book, the editor expected a code or cipher in each one. Ouch! Like Enola, I didn’t like ciphers, but I learned to.

So I was hobbled in ways, making the books parlous difficult to write. Each had three plots: Enola finding her mother, Enola finding a missing person, and Enola fooling her brothers. And I’m not a plotter; I’m a character-driven writer! I soooo did not write the Enola Holmes books as if my head were on fire. Usually, writing them felt more as if my head were being used to break rocks.

Writing volume two before the first one was published, I strove for that Darkest London setting, as I was originally directed. That’s why THE CASE OF THE LEFT-HANDED LADY is grimmer than the others. But by the time I got to volume three, THE CASE OF THE BIZARRE BOUQUETS, sales had boosted my confidence and Enola had taken over. Completely. She wanted to dress up. She no longer cared about Darkest London and she no longer cared that she was supposed to be for children. Vocabulary restrictions be hanged! Onward and upward, Excelsior!

Considering all the research I had done, I wanted to write maybe twenty Enola Holmes books, but she disagreed. She wanted character arc and resolution, not the usual slow death of most series. Necessarily I listened to her, and each of the books got better than the last. My only regret is that I didn’t find out until too late that Florence Nightingale owned seventy-six white Persian cats. (THE CASE OF THE CRYPTIC CRINOLINE.) What feline fun Enola and I could have had with them!

I love Enola; how can I not love Enola? In many ways she is a fictional incarnation of me. Yet I can’t help feeling irony: here am I, capital-F feminist, standing on the shoulders of a misogynist, namely Conan Doyle? Annoying. Even more annoying: One of my critics has been unkind enough to suggest that authors shouldn’t ride on the coattails of existing works, but should write their own stories, dammit.

Well, I did, dammit. And I still do. And some of them actually get published and do well. Nevertheless, I remain most gratified and truly honoured to have made the acquaintance of Enola Holmes.

THE DANGER, THE MYSTERY

When I remember the place where I lived until I was thirteen, I feel a deep, somewhat twisted connection with the writer I later became. I’ve never written about it, yet somehow I’m always writing about it. The danger. The mystery.

Back when Mom was still taking me for walks, before I became four years old and she turned me loose, I remember her pointing to a sizable thicket of thorny bushes and telling me, “Don’t ever go in there. That’s where old Mrs. Botone was picking blackberries and fell into the cesspool and almost drowned.”

“What’s a cesspool, Mom?”

“It’s not nice, sweetie.”

And that was that. Danger. Mystery.

The blackberry patch in question was just on the far side of the woods street by our house. It was a woods street because someone had planned a street and laid sidewalks that were still there, but trees had since grown up in between. It was a scene evocative of what my Chaucer professor later called “transience.”

Dad kept beehives on the near sidewalk. We kids were told to let the bees alone and they would let us alone. On the other side of the house was a pasture through which ran a brook. If we went over there, we were to watch out for cows. We were to stay away from the men with machine guns who guarded the Mafia guy’s mansion just down the street. We were also to stay away from other men with machine guns who guarded the Nike base diagonally across the street. Also, we were warned from time to time, never get between a groundhog and its hole.

I met a cow once and survived by ducking through the barbed wire, then running. But I was very nearly done in by an enraged groundhog. No kidding. It was charging for its hole with its chisel teeth leveled at me and I stepped out of its way just in time. That was before I realized how truly psycho groundhogs are: when I found one climbing a tree (!!) and it growled, threatening to jump me.

Despite such perils, Mom and Dad always dismissed us from the house with utmost placidity. It was almost as if they wanted us to get killed. Along with my two older brothers, Ben and Jim, I had perfect freedom, barring a few stay-aways such as the Nike base (military installation), the strong-arm men (Mafia), the bees, cows, woodchucks and, of course, the cesspool.

“What’s a cesspool, Ben?”

He just laughed.

Ben and Jim constructed wondrously lofty and rickety tree houses to which we would climb without benefit of stairs. They used my Dad’s tools. So did I. If I felt like it, I took a hatchet and hacked away at anything that grew in the woods street. Similarly, Ben once shoveled a huge hole just because. Maybe he wanted to have a cesspool. He dug down about ten feet and found some soft discolored soil plus bone fragments that Dad said were maybe a dead Indian. In our Mafia neighbor’s back yard, it was rumored, were more recent graves.

But a murderous gangster seemed like nothing compared to world annihilation via the atom bomb, the ultimate transience, which was serenely discussed over dinner as a daily possibility. Never mind duck-and-cover drill in school; heck, we had missile launchers within hollering distance of our house, although we never got to see them because they were up the hill behind the guards and a chain-link fence. But Ben and I were building a dam in the brook once and the Army came and told us to stop. Apparently we were messing up their cesspool.

They were nice about it, though, and didn’t frighten us. The strong-arm men were another matter. I would see them when I went to visit the Lurkers. Never have I met a family more aptly named. The Lurkers lurked in their shack beside the Mafia gates. Their children had prominent ears, walked with their feet at a chevron angle, and for some reason, perhaps proximity to the Mafia guardhouses, they seemed half a bubble off plumb. From their yard we could watch the men with machine guns waiting to open the big iron gates for their boss, and once I saw his limousine pull in, and I saw the Mafia man’s face. Something stony about his jowls and eyes impressed on me that he was Not Nice, as my mother would say. Very, very Not Nice.

The Mafia guy was scary, but his mailbox was just plain weird. Truly. Like the Lurkers, it was a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, about twelve feet tall and six feet wide, made of filigree wrought iron, with the mailbox in the middle and above it a kind of shield topped with the head of a dead goat with glass eyes. You know, stuffed. Taxidermy.

There were other weird things in the neighborhood, such as a cacophanous pasture full of donkeys and peacocks. But in retrospect, the weirdest aspect of my childhood place was not things I saw; it was things invisible to see. I never saw the Mafia mansion, just the gates; I never saw the missile base, just the entrance; and I never saw the cesspool. Danger and mystery were okay, apparently, so long as we didn’t look.

I became a writer in large part because I wanted to look.

My childhood’s setting was Beaufort Avenue, Livingston, New Jersey, and in the 1950s it must have been the last pocket of farmed land in the megalopolis. Now it’s industrial park/housing-development/freeway. My house is gone. The monstrously ornate mailbox topped with a goat’s head is gone, and so are the Lurkers, but the massive gates beside which they lurked are still there. The Mafioso who lived in the mansion was “Richie the Boot” Boiardo. I find, Googling him, that his place was indeed the east coast burial site; in fact, he had a crematorium in back. His mansion, with its seventeen acres of grounds, is still there. The Nike base is now Riker’s Hill Park, but the threat of nuclear annihilation is still with me. As for the cesspool, I have no idea.