Holly Robinson's Blog, page 10

Where Fantasy and Reality Collide: One Novelist’s Happy Coincidences

I came downstairs just as my husband returned from our local liquor store, where he’d gone to buy wine for dinner. He brandished a bottle of rum at me. “They made it specially for you, I guess,” he said.

I looked, and blinked hard to make sure I wasn’t reading the label wrong. Nope: “Folly Cove Rum,” the label said. It was produced by Ryan and Wood Distilleries in Gloucester, a port city located on Cape Ann in Massachusetts. As it happens, my new novel, Folly Cove (due out October 4 by Berkley/Penguin Random House), is also set on Cape Ann, in an historic inn run by several generations of the same family.

Folly Cove wasn’t the name I originally chose for the novel when I proposed it to my editor. The first title was Birch Point, but I decided the name wasn’t lyrical enough and went fishing for a new one. I find inspiration for titles in all sorts of ways: Google, highway billboards, TV commercials, you name it. In this case, I thought of the name Folly Cove because I love the word “folly” and what it means—the primary definition is “a foolish act or behavior”–and each of the main characters in the novel had certainly been guilty of foolhardy mistakes. (Hey, you have to have a plot.)

Because the inn featured in my novel overlooks a cove in Rockport—a small historic town at the tip of Cape Ann, where the original settlers made a livelihood through timber, fishing, and hauling giant blocks of granite out of quarries—calling the novel Folly Cove seemed not only lyrical, but logical.

To my delight, Folly Cove turned out to be a real place—something I didn’t know until after the novel was nearly complete, even though I live locally and have driven by it hundreds of times. That was my first happy coincidence.

A second happy coincidence was my discovery of the Folly Cove Designers during a visit to the Cape Ann Museum in Rockport after my novel was complete. Between 1938 and 1969, the Folly Cove Designers—nearly all women—created designs in their own homes that were then transferred onto linoleum blocks, carved out, and used to print on fabrics. The Folly Cove Designers sold their designs to some fairly illustrious retailers, including Lord & Taylor and Skinner Silks. I love the idea of these women working on their designs, then getting together to give each other feedback and inspiration, just as I do with my writer friends when we swap manuscripts.

My favorite aspect of this happy coincidence, though, is that the Folly Cove Designers were created and led by Virginia Lee Burton. Burton wrote and illustrated several children’s books beloved by my family, including Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and The Little House. I must have read those books more than five thousand times: one thousand times to each of our five children, plus on my own when I was growing up.

And now this: the happy discovery of Folly Cove Rum, created by Ryan and Wood Distilleries right here in Gloucester, by people who grew up near Folly Cove. What can I do, but drink a toast to creativity and happy coincidences, as I wait for my novel to launch this fall?

The post Where Fantasy and Reality Collide: One Novelist’s Happy Coincidences appeared first on Holly Robinson.

How Do You Write a Novel? Learn the Rules. Then Break Them.

 

It’s tempting to believe that novelists who have already published books know “the secret.” But every novel, whether it’s your first or fifteenth, poses different challenges. Even the most experienced writers get stuck in dark alleys and thorny woods as they lose their way.

I’m about to publish my sixth novel, Folly Cove, this fall, and my means of feeling my way out of those slimy or prickly places is pretty simple: I read other people’s books and keep learning. This past week, I’ve read four novels that have taught me there really is only one rule in fiction: If it works, do it!

Rule #1: Never Weigh Your Novel Down with Flashbacks

Most writing teachers will advise you to ditch your flashbacks, especially early in a book, because flashbacks can rob a novel of its forward momentum. While that’s generally true, it isn’t always. I just read the mind-blowing Eleven Hours by Pamela Erens. Told from two points of view—both pregnant women—this plot focuses on how one woman, a nurse, will help the other give birth in a hospital when she arrives alone. Because the novel starts in real time, the back stories of these two women is told largely through flashbacks until we reach the present. Yet, because Erens tells those stories as “real time” anecdotes, they don’t read like flashbacks at all. We’re kept moving forward toward the crucial birth scene, which is tensely riveting. More importantly, Erens raises this novel above the ordinary with her lyrical prose, especially in the powerful final third of the book.

Rule #2: Your Novel Deserves a Happy Ending

Sure, we all like happy endings and clear conclusions—that’s why we watch romantic comedies and crime dramas on TV. However, as I learned from finishing Jennifer Brown’s amazing debut novel, Modern Girls, this past week, sometimes a novel is more powerful if you create an ending that leaves the reader drawing her own conclusions and journeying forward with the characters in her imagination. I won’t say more about Modern Girls here, other than to urge you to read it for Brown’s gripping portrayal of immigrant Jewish families in New York City as World War II heats up and women are still struggling for independence from society’s expectations.

Rule #3: Historical Fiction Must Be Well-Researched and Accurate

This is one of those “sort of” rules, in the sense that, yes, historical fiction, by definition, sets a story in the past, with characters who are based on real people, so if you’re writing in this genre, you’d better love research. Frankly, I’ve always avoided reading historical fiction because I never knew what I could believe. Why not read actual history? Or at least biographies? Lately, however, I’ve been reading more historical fiction because I’m actually trying to write it—yeah, yeah, shoot me now—and I’ve discovered an important rule to break: yes, writers should research their material so the facts are accurate, but sometimes, for the novel’s sake, it’s better to forget what you know. Recently, for instance, I read the brilliantly compelling House of Hawthorne by Erika Robuck. The novel is told from the point of view of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia Peabody, and is a stellar example of this: there are just enough facts here to trust that Robuck knows her stuff, but we are always securely in Sophia’s point of view, that of an artistic woman from a progressive, feminist family who chooses to support her great love and raise his children rather than devote her life to creating her own art. Because Robuck doesn’t overwhelm the novel with research, it becomes a profoundly universal tale of a woman who struggles to maintain her own identity despite nearly subsuming her own desires in family life.

Rule #4: Your Characters Must Be Likable

Well, yes and no. One reason I have trouble watching Game of Thrones is because, as brilliant as it is, all of the characters I want to follow keep dying. Many readers have told me they won’t read novels unless they like the characters, because life is too short to spend time with people you don’t like, even on the pages of a book. However, writers who create the most memorable characters in fiction are usually those who do NOT make their characters completely likable, but instead give them flaws they must overcome by the end of the novel. Last week, for example, I read a gripping mystery called Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner. Manon, the lead detective on the case of a missing young woman, is a real screw-up: estranged from her own family, unlucky in love, and prone to saying mean things when drinking. She even botches a key facet of the investigation and inadvertently causes another death. Yet, despite her being such a train wreck, Steiner gives Manon’s character so much heart that we root for her even as she slides deeper into her mistakes.

All right, so what’s that Golden Rule for writing novels? Here it is again: “If it works, do it.”

The post How Do You Write a Novel? Learn the Rules. Then Break Them. appeared first on Holly Robinson.

Should You Track Word Count While Writing a Novel? Yes, No, and Maybe So

 

If you eavesdrop on a conversation between writers, it’s easy to mistake talk about craft for something else. Marathons, maybe.

“I had such a slow day. Only 500 in two hours!”

“Mine went well. I topped 2000 before lunch!”

What are these writers despairing or gloating over? Word count. Some authors—particularly those high-stepping their way through a fantasy, romance, or mystery series—count words every day as a way of meeting their deadlines.

Other novelists linger, polishing each sentence to a high gleam rather than steamrolling through plot. What does it matter how many words you produce, they ask, unless they’re the best words?

I have mixed feelings. When I first began writing novels, it didn’t matter to me how many words I produced, as long as the story in my head continued to spin out on the page. It took me a long time to write each of those early novels. Years.

After I sold my first novel to Penguin, however, things sped up. The publisher gave me a year to write each book. I happily wrote the next four novels at a breakneck pace to meet my deadlines. That’s when I discovered the usefulness of word count: if I calculated how many words I needed and divided that by the number of days I had, I could reassure myself that I’d finish in time. If I missed a day of writing for some reason, I made up for it, even if it meant binge-writing through a weekend. It was kind of like dieting, only in reverse: 100 extra calories here can be burned off by depriving yourself of a piece of toast the next morning.

Once I was in the zone, writing at that speed was pretty easy. There were even advantages: I was always in the heads of my characters. However, occasionally I felt breathless and unmoored, even unhappy. I wanted to fix certain things but didn’t have time. To meet my deadlines, I had to keep moving forward and piling up stacks of words.

Then something happened that was totally out of control: my beloved editor at Penguin had to take a leave because of personal reasons. Another wonderful editor stepped in to usher my new novel, Folly Cove, to print in October 2016.

But I don’t have a contract for another book.

My first impulse was to hurriedly put together a synopsis to show the new editor. I might have done that, too, except there was this other book I’d been thinking about—a novel different from the ones I’ve done before. Even though I believe the same sorts of readers who typically buy my books would love this new novel, I have no idea whether I can pull this book off. I knew I needed to figure things out—more slowly.

Given my recent history of writing novels only under contract, it’s scary to just write whatever I want, like performing trapeze tricks without a net. But it’s also liberating.

At the moment, the words belong only to me. Writing this way is as liberating as it is terrifying. Later, I’ll show it to my friends, and then to my agent, but right now I’m feeling my way through a secret underground tunnel each time I enter the world of this new book. It’s a place where only I can play with the colors and shapes, and magical things are happening.

Or maybe the book is crap. I really don’t know. However, one way or another, I’ve decided to impose a personal deadline of late autumn. Thanksgiving, maybe. Otherwise it’s too easy to keep going down rabbit holes in this tunnel for the fun of it.

So now I’m back to counting words, only there’s a difference: I know that, if I write 2000 words on any given day, I’ll probably throw 500 of them out. Or even 1800. I want these sentences to shine. However, tracking the words keeps me a little bit more honest, and a lot more on schedule. What’s even better is that one of my best friends, Maddie Dawson, is also writing a new novel. She and I have agreed to swap our word counts, sort of like Weight Watchers weigh-ins, only we can eat as much as we want.

If you’re curious, here’s my word count over the past month. You can see that some days are better than others. There are entire days, and even a one-week gap, where I did no writing at all. The important thing is that the word count gives me proof that the book is moving forward, one sentence at a time:

5.13.2016 20949

5.20.2016 22707

5.23.2016 26423

5.25.2016 28120

5.27.2016 28873

5.29.2016 29789

5.31.2016 31702

6.1.2016 32843

6.2.2016 33619

6.5.2016 33913

Here’s where Maddie and I decided to swap word counts:

6.6.2016 35267

6.13.2016 37272

6.14.2016 39384

What about you? Do you or don’t you? I’d love to know!

The post Should You Track Word Count While Writing a Novel? Yes, No, and Maybe So appeared first on Holly Robinson.

On Horses, My New Book Cover, and Coming Full Circle

My dad was a Navy officer, yet he was sent to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas when I was eleven years old. Yes, Kansas: not exactly a seafaring state.

Dad’s assignment was a teaching job at the Army’s Command and General Staff College. It was an important job, but did I care?

I did not. I was on a desperate mission of my own: to convince my parents to buy me a horse.

I began taking riding lessons at The Fort Leavenworth Hunt Club, where the tack room to me was like the opium den to Sherlock Holmes. There were saddles and bridles exuding those intoxicating odors of horse sweat and saddle soap. The wooden boxes were filled with curry combs and hoof picks. Men and women strode about in jodhpurs and black leather boots. And, of course, there were the horses, their magnificent heads bobbing over stall doors, ears pricking as I whispered secrets to them or fed them carrots.

I’d been reading horse books all my life: Black Beauty, The Black Stallion, Misty of Chincoteague, My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead. Any book with a horse on the cover belonged on my shelves. I’d been collecting horse statues for years and, whenever I rode my bike around the Army base, I popped wheelies and pretended my bike was a horse rearing on its hind legs.

I became a barn rat, helping other riders groom their horses after a ride. I especially liked currying the horses’ coats in slow circles, making the animals arch their necks in pleasure.

If I didn’t have a horse to work with, I’d follow the older girls around, watching them closely as they stood with one hand on a jodhpured hip or tucked their hair beneath velvet hunt caps. I saw the power in these girls, power that came from the confident way they tamed these huge beasts with a cluck of the tongue and a bit of leather.

Finally, my parents gave in. As Mom reasoned with my father, sitting on a horse under the watchful eye of an Army instructor had to be safer than me spending my free hours in some teenage boy’s smoky basement. She convinced him to buy a small gray mare that I named “Ladybug” because my fictional heroine, Trixie Belden, had a horse called “Lady.”

Ladybug looked docile, with her long-lashed eyes and sweet brown freckles. However, my new mare had a nasty habit of holding her breath whenever she was saddled, so that it was impossible to get the girth tight. The first day Mom mounted Ladybug, the horse expelled her breath and the saddle slid upside down. Mom ended up being dragged through the dust by one stirrup.

“That horse is cute but tricky,” Mom pronounced, when she managed to get herself untangled.

Dad eyed my new horse with suspicion. “That animal doesn’t seem safe to me,” he said. “What if Holly gets hurt?”

“Oh, she’ll be fine,” Mom said breezily. “You have to get thrown at least thirty times before you’re a real rider.”

My father was right. I did get hurt. Ladybug threw me off many times. The worst was when she refused to jump a fence and bucked me off onto a paved road. I lost seven teeth and broke my nose.

But my mother was right, too. I was fine. In fact, I rode Ladybug until I went to college and passed her on to another young girl. My mother and I ran a riding stable for many years after Dad left the Navy. The life lessons I learned while horseback riding—about independence, resilience, patience, responsibility, and forging my own path through the woods—gave me knowledge I still use every day.

And so I have come full circle. I was a child who loved books and horses, a girl whose shelves were crammed with books that had horses on the covers. Now I write books for a living, and my newest novel, Folly Cove (Berkley, October 2016) has a main character who owns a stable and loves horses for the same reasons I do. And this book has a lovely cover—one with a woman riding a horse by the sea.

Who can ask more of life than this, to have your childhood dreams come true in ways you never expected?

The post On Horses, My New Book Cover, and Coming Full Circle appeared first on Holly Robinson.

Stranger than Fiction: Men in Kilts and Firemen on My Lawn

I live in a small town, in the sort of neighborhood with sidewalks and dog walkers and kids on bikes.  In other words: not much happens. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I looked out the window and saw men in kilts AND firemen on my lawn.

Could any woman ask for more?

Here’s what happened: I was working on my new novel in one of the upstairs bedrooms, at a desk in front of a window that overlooks our driveway. On the other side of that driveway is our neighbor’s driveway, with perhaps just enough room between them to park a car. On this particular day, a van pulled into the driveway with “Men in Kilts” emblazoned on the side of it. And, yes, men in kilts began climbing out of the van. At first I thought this was some new musical gig of my neighbor’s, since he’s got a band that practices on Tuesday nights in his carriage house.

It turns out that “Men in Kilts” is a national window washing service. (Their slogan is “No Peeking.”) I watched in amazement as the men began unloading ladders and then, kilts and all, started ascending them to wash the upstairs windows.

After a while, I settled back into my work and mostly forgot about the kilted men, until suddenly a siren blared beneath the window. I peered outside and realized a firetruck had pulled into my driveway. A second fire engine pulled into my neighbors.

“What the heck?” I muttered to my cat, who was eagerly watching everything from the same window. (Though I suppose to him, the firemen just look like big cardinals.) I leaned over the desk to get a better look, and realized my lawn was now populated not only by men in kilts, but by firemen, and that smoke was billowing up behind the carriage house.

I ran downstairs and found my neighbor, in a suit jacket and with a coffee mug in one hand, assuring the firemen that he had just been burning leaves and everything was under control. The firemen apparently didn’t believe him, because they began uncoiling their hoses and running them into his backyard, with the men in kilts now assisting them.

And there I stood, a writer standing in the middle of a scene I couldn’t possibly have written, realizing once again that life really is stranger than fiction. It’s the novelist’s job to keep up with the wonders of an ordinary day.

The post Stranger than Fiction: Men in Kilts and Firemen on My Lawn appeared first on Holly Robinson.

In Praise of Great Coaches: How One Out-of-Shape Older Mom Ran Her First 5K

 

On Mother’s Day, I ran my first 5K. After two decades of cheering on my kids at sports events, I wasn’t on the sidelines. I was an athlete.

I couldn’t have done it without my coach.

I’ve never had a real coach before. In high school, I didn’t participate in sports. My mother had a horse stable, so my free time was filled with mucking out stalls or riding horses out on the trails. As a young adult, I was outdoorsy. I hiked and biked with friends, but I was never physically competitive.

Then I had children. My free time drained away. I had little time to exercise. Somehow, three of my children became athletes anyway. They were champion distance runners. My oldest two were lucky enough to have a coach who also taught English at the high school and was a great communicator. More importantly, he was inclusive and positive. Even if the team lost, he’d say, “That’s okay. You did great. You beat your personal best!” Or, if that didn’t happen: “You’ll break that record next time!”

My youngest son attended a different school. But he, too, had a wonderful coach, a guy who also taught biology and astronomy. The kids adored him. Not surprisingly, many of his runners went on to study science and engineering in college.

All three of my children became team captains under the mentorship of these coaches. Their years of hard practice, of fitting in homework around sports, and of mentoring younger athletes turned them into confident college students.

While my children were running, I was sitting. I played tennis for a while, but work and money got in the way. Without scheduled physical activity in my life, I was reduced to forcing myself to the gym three times a week for odious sessions on the treadmill. I steadily piled on the pounds.

Then I saw an ad in the local paper for a couch-to-5K program with Nancy McCarthy, a personal trainer and cofounder of Natural High Fitness Club in Newburyport. I actually cut the ad out of the paper and put it on the fridge with a magnet, so I’d see it every time I got more ice cream.

“I probably can’t afford it,” I muttered as I finally emailed Nancy.

She told me the program was free.

I emailed back. “I’m old. I’m afraid my knees will hurt,” I told her. “I’m a writer.”

“My knees are almost ten years older than yours are,” she replied. “We start very slowly and this program has a 95 percent success rate.”

With no more excuses, I went to the first practice session on a Saturday morning. It was cold and windy. There were a couple of dozen other people. We did a run-walk session around the track. I thought my lungs would explode, even though we only ran for 60 seconds at a time. I couldn’t imagine running for even two minutes, never mind 5K.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I told my husband.

But I went to the next session and put myself through the torture again. This time, I ran for 90 seconds at a stretch. We continued the practices three times a week, 20 minutes at a time, upping the number of minutes we spent running each week.

Why did I keep going back? Because of my coach. Nancy was high-spirited and cheerful. She had the body and energy of a teenager. Most of all, she positively believed in each and every one of us.

“You don’t think you can do it, I know, but you’ll all be running for twenty minutes at a time in just a few weeks,” she promised. “Remember our mantra: ‘Prepare, believe, achieve.’”

Gradually, our group became a team. I learned people’s names and their life stories. They heard mine. I found a couple of women who ran at my pace. We began running at different locations. Within five weeks, we’d worked our way up to running for ten minutes twice in one session.

The practices became something I looked forward to at the end of the day, because I could give myself over to the physical effort of following Nancy’s commands. She’d blow the whistle, and we’d all start running. I ran because everyone else did.

And, whenever I desperately wanted to walk—usually as I approached a hill—Nancy would suddenly materialize at my elbow, encouraging me to “take it slow, cut your steps in half.”

Once, she did this even though she’d been on the opposite side of the pond we were circumnavigating, appearing so suddenly behind me, it was like she’d popped out of the bushes.

“Where did you come from?” I protested. “Do you have a clone or something?”

I kept running because I didn’t want to disappoint my coach. She believed in me.

My knees complained. So did my lower back and my ankles. Not much—not real pain—just twinges of discomfort, reminding me that I’m not only a beginning runner, but an older one and overweight besides. Sometimes it was awful. But, once in a while, I felt a glimmer of delight.

“There’s a 5K coming up,” Nancy told us. “The Mother’s Day Indulgence 5K. Some of you might want to try that.”

Oddly, I did want to try it. I wasn’t nearly ready—I hadn’t run more than 22 minutes straight on any of our practice runs—but I decided to use it as a practice run for the 5K we were working toward in June, the race that marks the end of our couch-to-5K program.

I signed up. And, on Mother’s Day, I rose at 6:30, ate a banana and toast with peanut butter, and drove to the race. A few of my teammates were there.

Remarkably, Nancy was there, too, despite it being 7:30 am on Mother’s Day. “I’m so proud of all of you,” she said, and I wanted to cry.

How often, in our adult lives, does anyone say that to us? Who, as you go about your day, reminds you to be proud of your accomplishments? Or makes you believe you’re capable of doing even more?

A great coach exemplifies and communicates that sort of praise and positive attitude. All coaches push you to train harder, but the really great coaches, like the ones my kids had, and like Nancy, are those who push you to have enough faith to push yourself.

During the Mother’s Day 5K, I was passed by women in tutus, small children, and even women pushing baby strollers. I had set the bar low—my aim was to finish in under 45 minutes, try not to be the last one in, and avoid throwing up.

I admit it: there was one moment where I thought, “Why did I want to do this?” I wanted to quit and walk.

But, just as I had that impulse, I rounded a corner and there was Nancy, cheering me on. “You’re doing it!” she yelled. She was actually jumping up and down.

I grinned at her. I was doing it!

 

I finished the race at 37:15, #153 out of 209 runners.

Yes, that’s slow. But I crossed the finish line. I met my goals. And, because of my great coach, I know I can run the next 5K in June.

Maybe even a few seconds faster.

The post In Praise of Great Coaches: How One Out-of-Shape Older Mom Ran Her First 5K appeared first on Holly Robinson.

I Wrote for 17 Minutes Yesterday!

 

 

Last weekend, I participated on two different author panels during the 2016 Newburyport Literary Festival, an event packed with over 70 different authors that drew 2,000 people to our tiny seaside town.

The panels were very different. In the morning, I joined Anita Diamant and Yona Zeldis McDonough in talking about writing in different genres. The afternoon panel—with Carla Panciera, Sarah Yaw and Myfanwy Collins—was devoted to writers publishing debut books after age forty. What struck me was that, during both Q&A sessions and afterward, many people asked a variation of the same question:

“How do you find time to write?”

That’s the million-dollar question. Maybe you’re working full time or have small kids at home. Maybe your husband is ill or your daughter’s getting married. And, look! It’s time to mulch the garden again!

The truth is, there are many reasons not to write. Life is busy and writing is hard. Putting words on a page takes discipline and patience. It’s also an act of faith, one where you have to say, “Yeah, this is going to be really bad writing, but I’m going to put the words down anyway and fix them later.”

How do you find time to write? You don’t. You have to believe in yourself enough to make time to write.

That doesn’t mean giving up your day job (though that would be lovely). Nor does it mean ignoring your family (at least not entirely).

What it does mean is finding a way to believe the effort is worthwhile, and giving yourself permission to fail. Then you start carving little blocks of time out of your day.

Don’t think of it as writing a novel or even a story at first. Think of it as practice. Or, even better, as playing with words. You didn’t learn to walk right away. You first had to master turning over, then pulling yourself to stand. Maybe you crawled before you took your first steps—and fell down. Then you pulled yourself up again with your sticky fingers, over and over.

Approach writing the same way: slowly put one sentence down, then another. If you fall, so what? Get up and try again. Eventually the habit will form and you’ll find yourself making time to write, instead of waiting for that time to come to you.

Yesterday morning, I had two precious free hours before driving out to my son’s college to help him pack up his dorm room for the summer. Before leaving, I had to walk the dog, clean the kitchen, throw in a load of laundry, answer a couple of emails, and work on a freelance project. By the time all of that was done, I had only 17 minutes left for fiction.

What did I do? I spent 17 minutes tinkering with my new novel. I didn’t get very far, but because I’d looked at it and tightened a couple of sentences, I know exactly where I’ll start today.

 

Every day contains a few precious minutes for writing. You just have to look for them instead of waiting for them to find you. Here are a few strategies—let me know if you have others that work for you.

Keep a notebook in your car. It’s amazing how much writing you can do if you pull into a parking lot and sit there for fifteen minutes before going home after work.
Create a ritual around writing. I make a cup of mint tea at night after dinner and carry it upstairs to my desk, promising myself I’ll only write while I drink the tea. I always write longer.
During your fifteen minutes of writing, shut off your cell phone and disable your Internet connection.
Find a writing partner. Agree to meet in a cafe one evening each week, and allow yourselves only fifteen minutes of chatting before opening your laptops.
If you have small children, find enclosed parks or even indoor play areas and bring your laptop there.
Arrange your own writing retreats. A Saturday spent in a library carrel can really launch a project. Then it’s easier to peck away at it during your busy week.
Keep word counts. I always scoffed at this idea, figuring the quality of my words is more important than the quantity. But knowing your word count will help keep you on task, even if you set a goal of only 500 new words per day.
Leave off in the middle of a sentence, so you’ll know exactly what to write when you start next time.
Most of all, have fun writing! You can always fix it tomorrow.

The post I Wrote for 17 Minutes Yesterday! appeared first on Holly Robinson.

Everything Is Fine, Until It’s Not

 

You know how it is: you get up in the morning and grumble because there’s too much to do. The dog wants a walk. You have to crowbar the kids off to school despite their whining. The breakfast dishes need to be washed and there’s traffic to fight on your way to work.

Another day goes by, and another and another, with occasional bright spots: that weekend hike, dinner with friends, accomplishments at work.

“How are you?” people ask.

“Fine,” you answer. Or, maybe if it’s a good friend: “Busy and overwhelmed, but okay.”

And everything really is fine, until it’s not.

Recently, my husband was trying to buy a toilet at Home Depot when the credit card machines crashed. He had the toilet, some lumber, and some tools. When it became clear that the machines weren’t going to work any time soon, he put everything back—even the toilet, although that meant lifting it up onto a shelf.

Dan banged his elbow in the process. “That really hurts,” he said when he came home.

“You should have let someone help you,” I scolded.

His elbow got bigger. And then redder. Two days later, his elbow looked like a clown’s nose attached to his arm. He started to run a fever. Fortunately, Dan had a doctor’s appointment on Monday because his knee was bothering him. The doctor took one look at the elbow and put him on oral antibiotics.

Things didn’t improve. His fever persisted and his arm continued swelling. The redness spread from his wrist to his underarm. Last Wednesday, Dan ended up being hospitalized with an antibiotic-resistant staph infection, the sort of bacteria that can go systemic and kill you pretty quickly.

We were lucky. We live near doctors and hospitals. Laboratories can do magical things like culture bacteria from your body and determine which drugs will kill it. Dan stayed in the hospital for five days, having IV-antibiotic treatments, and came home with a tube through his veins connected to an infusion pump that dispenses antibiotics every four hours.

He’ll have that pump for a few more weeks, and wears it in an oversize black fanny pack. “I look like a tourist,” he complains.

I tell him he looks like a rock climber. “Just clip some carabiners on the outside,” I suggest, “and chalk your hands.”

We keep joking about the pack, which he has to take to bed with him. He hangs it on the bed while he sleeps. The pump makes whirring and beeping noises like the Roomba vacuum we used to have that committed kamikaze on the scarves dangling in my closet. We’ve named it “Robert.”

We joke, but every time I hear the pump whir, I look at my husband and remind myself that everything is fine in life, until one day it isn’t. My husband made it through this. Others don’t. And who knows what’s around the corner for us? Life always has surprises in store.

“Pray for boring days,” my grandmother used to say.

I never really knew what she meant. Now, I think I do. As I lean my head against Dan’s shoulder, I am reminded that what really matters aren’t how many tasks you cross off your list, or even your accomplishments, but the beating of your loved one’s heart.

The post Everything Is Fine, Until It’s Not appeared first on Holly Robinson.

Author Jennifer Brown Talks about How to Research a Novel, Conquering Rejection, and Writing Even When It Hurts

Author Jenny Brown

I’m addicted to book review porn the way some people ogle real estate ads, vacation brochures, or the latest iPhone gadgets. When I first read the advance reviews of Jennifer Brown’s debut novel, Modern Girls, I knew this was a must-read. The book launches this week, and I’ve circled one of Brown’s book signings on my calendar so I can meet her and buy my copy. (Sorry if that sounds stalkerish.)

Before publishing Modern Girls, Brown earned some serious writing credentials. Her fiction, articles, and essays have appeared in numerous publications, and she was the winner of the 2005 World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest (judged by Robert Olen Butler) in the Southeast Review. Her creative nonfiction piece, “The Codeine of Jordan,” published in the Bellevue Literary Review, was selected as a notable essay in 2012’s The Best American Travel Writing and included in volume 9 of The Best Women’s Travel Writing.

Modern Girls, set in 1935 in the Lower East Side of New York, is about a Russian-born Jewish mother and her American-born unmarried daughter. Each discovers that she is expecting, although the pregnancies are unplanned and unwanted, in this story about women’s roles, standards, and choices, set against the backdrop of the impending war.

Before meeting Brown this week, I fired off some questions that she was good enough to answer despite her busy book launch schedule.

 

First of all, congratulations on the publication of Modern Girls! This is a novel after my own heart: a mother-daughter tale chock full of family secrets. What inspired you to create this particular plot line?

Genealogy! I went through a phase of serious family history research, and the mother character, Rose, was based on my own great-grandmother who was, not coincidentally, also named Rose. My father told me that real-life Rose had an unwanted pregnancy during the Great Depression. That led me to wondering what would it be like, in a time of limited choices for women, to be accidentally pregnant. What if a woman were young and unmarried? What if she were older and thought she was done having children? From this grew my characters of Rose and her daughter, Dottie, both of whom become pregnant, which neither wants to be, but for very different reasons.

How did you go about researching a story set in 1930s New York City?

Reading, reading, reading. Novels. Memoirs. Guidebooks. History books. I can’t tell you how many rabbit holes I fell down in the course of my research, seeking out tiny facts that ended up not being used in the novel. (I know more about the history of female hygiene products than I will ever be able to use. I can only hope at some trivia bee, I’m asked, “From what were Kotex pads originally made?”*)

Of course I also had to move beyond books. To do that, I visited the Tenement Museum in New York City to see how Rose would have lived when she first came to America. I bought magazines on eBay from the 1930s that Dottie would have read. For an entire day, I sat in the New York Public Library reading Socialist newspapers to understand Rose’s worldview and scouring transit maps to make sure Dottie knew how to traverse New York City. My favorite form of research, though, was watching movies filmed in the 1930s; nothing beats Clare Luce Booth’s The Women for the slang and dialogue of the day (and for a fabulous story—if you haven’t seen the original film, you must do so immediately).

*Oh, okay, I’ll tell you: Kotex pads were originally made from woodpulp fiber (called Cellucotton) that was used in bandages in World War I. When the war ended, there was a surplus of the material, so it was cleverly made into sanitary napkins. Now please don’t use this against me in a trivia bee.

I’m always curious about historical novels and how authors create fictional worlds that are realistic, based on the time the book is set, without weighing the reader down with cement blocks of research. Any special tips for writers who are struggling to research and write historical fiction?

Learning to let go is important. It’s tempting to want to use every single fact you discover. It’s all so interesting to the author, but to the reader it can end up feeling like the author is merely showing off her knowledge. I found it easiest to put in too much in the first draft and then to go through and edit. I have pages and pages of descriptions of theater shows, sporting events, and social news that were never used. The fun part of this is that I feel like I have secrets about characters and places in the novel. For instance, Rose’s youngest son is named Eugene. It’s never mentioned in the book, but Rose named him after Eugene Debs, who ran for president five times as a candidate of the Socialist Party.

Of course there’s the opposite problem too, where the writer can get stuck trying to find a fact and it holds up the writing. When I found myself halted because I wanted to know the name of a store on the south end of Union Square or who was lecturing at Cooper Union, I’d force myself to let it go so I could continue writing. It’s too easy to lose hours to research. In those cases, I’d write in the draft “[input name of cafe on Lower East Side]” and plow on with the writing. When the draft was done, I could take more time to research and fill in the missing facts.

You and I are lucky enough to be with a major publishing house, Penguin Random House, where we even share the same editor. What was the process of working with an editor like for you as a debut novelist? Was it a lot different, say, from sharing your manuscript with a critique group or writer friends?

My writing group is absolutely fabulous and because of their advice and critiques, my manuscript was strong enough to be sold to NAL/Penguin. However, working with my amazing editor (excuse me, our amazing editor!), Tracy Bernstein, took the novel to an entirely new level. I was so afraid that working with an editor would lead my book in a different direction, but instead, every time she made a suggestion, it drew out a new layer of the story. She motivated me and brought out the best in my writing. I was eager to revise under her tutelage.

You’ve bounced all over the country, living in places as diverse as Miami, New York City, Seattle, and now Boston. What made you choose New York City as your setting? And how did living in all of these different places inform your perspective on New York?

Despite having lived all over, if you ask me where I’m from, I’ll say I’m a Floridian. Growing up in Miami Beach was surreal, watching it change from an old-fashioned, backwater town into the vibrant, strange, wonderful city it is today. I feel fortunate to have spent my formative years there.

Yet as much as Miami Beach is home, New York is my heart. I can’t claim to be a New Yorker, though I was born in East Harlem at a now defunct hospital, went to college at NYU, and spent my young adulthood in the East Village. New York has a vibrancy to it like no other city. But as a young person, it was difficult to make ends meet, and I worked extremely long hours to pay for an illegal apartment that was a complete fire trap.

When I moved to Seattle for graduate school, I planned to move back to New York, however something in that Seattle air got to me, and I fell in love with the city. I began biking and hiking and not using an umbrella in the rain. It took my husband’s career to lure me back to the East Coast. Boston has its charms (although the sports thing here is a little crazy) and it’s where both my kids were born, so I think we’re here for the long haul. Boston feels like home.

One thing I learned from living so many places is that cities have personalities. A story that takes place in Seattle wouldn’t happen the same way in Miami Beach. The characters, the situations, the feel of the story would all be different. For Modern Girls, New York had everything I was looking for: an immigrant community on the Lower East Side, a white-collar working atmosphere in Midtown, and a crusty upper-class on the Upper East Side. Another reason I chose New York is because it’s where my own ancestors originally settled. My great-great grandparents moved to East 11th Street in New York City. In 1910, eleven of them lived in a single apartment and my great-great grandfather sold newspapers at a stand. I thought placing the story in New York was a nice way to honor my family.

Originally, you went to college to study film making. What aspect of making films interested you, and how did your background in that field help (or hurt) your fiction writing?

Three aspects of film making intrigued me: editing, animation, and screenwriting. Unfortunately, I wasn’t particularly good at film editing. Animation I loved, but the process is laborious, and I spent weeks making a single three-minute stop-motion short. When I graduated from NYU, I began working in the production department of an advertising agency, determined to write screenplays on the side. Every morning I woke up early to create the most magnificent screenplays. Only here’s the thing: they weren’t. Magnificent, that is. And when I showed them to people, I was told, “You have too much exposition in here for a screenplay. Pare it down.” I didn’t want to pare it down. That’s when I realized I was more interested in writing prose.

Film making did give me a grounding on how to create scenes and story arcs. In my mind, my stories unfold cinematically. That said, don’t ask me who would play Dottie and Rose in a movie; my favorite film stars are all from the 1930s and ‘40s.

Fun fact: that ad agency where I worked? It was Saatchi & Saatchi, which just happens to be in the same building that houses NAL/Penguin today.

What’s the worst disappointment you’ve ever had in your writing career, and how did you get through it?

Not selling my first novel. And by first novel, I mean fourth novel, but it was the first novel that I queried and it was the novel that found me my amazing agent. We worked on revising that novel, called Continuity, for over a year, but it never found a home with a publisher. Devastated doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of what I felt. I questioned if I could really do it all over again, knowing that the next novel might live its life in my bottom desk drawer. But as any writer knows, writing is simply what you do. So I wrote. I wasn’t ready to dive back into a novel, so I worked on shorter pieces, which are easier to publish. This gave me the ego boost I needed. I began toying with my two new characters—Dottie and Rose. Their story excited me enough that I wanted to see where I could take it, even if no one ever read it. Luckily for me, folks will be able to read it.

As hard as it was not selling Continuity, it made the publication of Modern Girls that much sweeter. And I think Modern Girls is a much stronger novel. In this case, at least, things worked out for the best.

If you could offer writers only three nuggets of advice that we could carry around in our pockets like lucky talismans, what would they be?

Splurge on the good bourbon? Seriously, I think it’s important for writers to know that writing is hard and while practice will make you a better writer, it doesn’t make the act of writing any easier. Dorothy Parker put it best when she said, “I hate writing; I love having written.” To that end, my advice would be: savor the rare moments when it feels good to write; write even when it hurts; and yes, splurge on the good bourbon.

The post Author Jennifer Brown Talks about How to Research a Novel, Conquering Rejection, and Writing Even When It Hurts appeared first on Holly Robinson.

How One Coach Got Me Off the Couch—and Inspired My Writing

I’m the mother of three champion long distance runners. I honestly don’t know how that happened, since I was never a runner. But I showed up at almost every race, bellowing, “Go, go, go!” in the best imitation of my days as a high school varsity cheerleader. Then I’d go home and eat cookies on the couch.

Time passed. My kids left home and continued to run—two of them recently ran a 50K race. (Yes, you read that right.) Meanwhile, my butt has gotten wider and my belly softer. I’m a writer, not a runner.

Then, one day, I spotted an ad in our local paper for a “Couch to 5K” program run by Nancy McCarthy, a fitness trainer at Natural High Fitness Club in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

“I can’t afford it,” I thought, as I emailed Nancy for details about the program.

She emailed back and said it was free. “Hope to see you there!”

I snorted and emailed back. “I’m afraid I’m too old. My knees bother me on stairs.”

“We start very slowly,” she promised. “Come join us!”

I probably wouldn’t do it it, I thought, but I needed sneakers anyway, so I went to the local running store and bought a pair on sale. I brought them home and, just for laughs, went for a run. My feet were crippled afterward. My lungs burned.

“I can’t run,” I told my daughter. “It’s official.”

“You might need to buy running shoes a half size up,” she explained. “That’s what I do.”

“I can’t afford another pair.”

“They’ll take them back.”

Amazingly, the store exchanged the shoes (three cheers for The Greater Boston Running Company in Newburyport), even though I’d already worn them, had no receipt, and had recycled the box. “No problem,” the cheerful (and very fit) sales clerk said.

Saturday dawned bright and sunny, and I had run out of excuses. I drove to the local high school track and met the coach, Nancy, who was every bit as chipper as her emails: an older woman with the body of a woman in her twenties. She and Beth H. Macy are filming this Couch to 5K program as an inspirational documentary, “A Long Way for a Short Run.” About three dozen people were gathered on the track.

At the sight of the camera, I pulled my sweatshirt down over my hips and wished I’d worn something on my head other than my daughter’s Rastafarian striped wool hat.

“I have three words for you to remember,” Nancy said, as she explained the program and the possibility of some of us being ready to run a 5K as soon as Mother’s Day. “Prepare, believe, achieve.”

We were preparing to run the 5K starting today, she said. Now we had to believe in ourselves enough to stick with the program—twenty minutes, three times a week—and we would achieve our goal. It was as simple as that.

I set off in the middle of the pack. The twenty minutes flew by. I was winded, yes, but I was still upright and breathing. My knees didn’t feel a thing. I shed my jacket, then my hat and gloves. I was here. I was making it through the first day. Maybe I’d come on Monday and make it through a second training session.

“Each race starts with the first step,” I heard a woman encourage her friend huffing along on the track beside me.

Suddenly, it dawned on me: “Prepare, believe, achieve” is the perfect motto for my fiction writing. I’ve been feeling a little down about my fiction lately, since the book I’m writing now is partly historical fiction, a genre that’s way outside my comfort zone. To be perfectly honest, I have no idea what I’m doing, so I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research. I have felt like a nonproductive procrastinator, because I’m not committing words to the page yet.

Now I get it: I am preparing to write this novel, the same way I’m preparing to run a 5K.

If I can believe in myself enough to keep up this preparation, gradually working my way up to actually writing the manuscript a sentence at a time, I will figure things out.

And, if I prepare and believe in myself, I will achieve my goals.

So I’m up off the couch. One step at a time, I will reach the finish line of that 5K, and I will write this novel.

You can do it, too.

The post How One Coach Got Me Off the Couch—and Inspired My Writing appeared first on Holly Robinson.