Holly Robinson's Blog, page 12

Who’s Telling the Story? A Crash Course on Points of View

 

I’ve been writing fiction for many years now. Each book poses new stumbling blocks. Inevitably, though, the question that always plagues me at the start is this one: Whose story is it, anyway?

This question became imperative last month. I was supposed to be finishing my new novel, Folly Cove, for a December 1 publisher’s deadline, but the book refused to behave. I couldn’t figure out why. The three main characters are sisters who have grown up in an historic Massachusetts inn. They have delicious secrets and wrenching conflicts—yet so do their parents, their aunt, and their boyfriends. So who should tell the story? And how many points of view could I use without the book becoming unfocused or unwieldy?

My first choice: a single, first person point of view. So easy! This is typically the choice of thriller writers, because it puts the reader smack in whatever terrifying situation the main character is facing, as in, “I huddled in the shadows, knowing my attacker was close by, determined to finish the job he’d started.” Etc.

Another choice I considered was that sweeping third person, omniscient point of view. This point of view is often used in fantasy novels, or in family sagas where even the village seems to have a voice: “From the hill above the sea, the people watched the three girls, sisters whose beauty had caused men all over town to waste their money on promises and flowers, when it was clear that the sisters were as wild as the storms that battered the beach in winter.”

Oops. Sorry. That’s prose that blushes a little too purple. But you get the idea.

For Folly Cove, I tried using the oldest sister, then the youngest, then all three points of view, alternating them by chapter, and then within each chapter. Yet something still felt off.

Finally, I realized that the mother of the three girls–Sarah, who has been running the inn since her husband mysteriously disappeared—has secrets of her own that her daughters would uncover during the novel. The problem was that, by withholding Sarah’s point of view, she seemed unbelievably cold, almost a stereotypical Mean Mom. I wanted her to be more complex than that. What to do? Did I really want to weave in a fourth point of view so close to the deadline?

Fortunately, I had scheduled a writing retreat during National Novel Writing Month with my good friend, ace detective novelist and speed writer Toby Neal. She’s from Hawaii and I live in Massachusetts, so we met in California to spend a week squirreled away on our new manuscripts. While in transit, I ended up reading several books that, taken together, served as a crash course on “Point of View 101” and solved my problem.

First up was Karma Brown’s Come Away with Me, the story of a young widow who travels the world to come to terms with her grief. Told in the first person, this novel forced me to stay in the narrator’s muddled head and sorrowful heart—even though part of me knew this woman was grief-stricken enough to be unreliable. Because we’re trapped inside the narrator’s mind, the surprise twist at the end hits even harder.

Next, I read Me Before You by JoJo Moyes. This is the heartfelt tale of a young woman living in a working class village in England; she is her family’s breadwinner, and takes a job caring for a wealthy young man after a tragic accident has left him a quadripleic. Yeah, I know, doesn’t sound like a fun read—but Moyes does such a fine job weaving humor and pathos into a story told from multiple points of view that the book is an uplifting one, with some profound ethical questions besides.

What struck me about this book was the author’s decision to use the young woman’s point of view (obvious, since she’s the most relatable character), but every now and then, Moyes broke all the rules of fiction by tossing in the point of view of another character impacted by the situation: the young man’s parents, the woman’s father, her sister, the young man’s male caretaker, etc.

You’d think this would make the novel feel unbalanced. In fact, it’s perfect, because it gives this book a more sweeping, inclusive feel. With these varied points of view, we can see how the dilemma posed in the novel (whether the young man has the ethical right to choose to end his own life) impacts us as individuals and as a society, too. Yet the novel still feels intensely personal and emotional, because the young girl at the heart of the story still has the most air time on the page.

The third novel I consumed during this trip was Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. Ostensibly billed as a literary thriller, this novel is also told in the third person point of view, but very differently from Me Before You. This book tells the story of a young girl who goes missing in 1977. Instead of focusing simply on the mystery, Ng chooses to write about the mysteries surrounding each member of the girl’s family and why they kept the secrets they did. It’s also the larger story of cultural and gender clashes. The girl’s father is a college professor, but “Oriental” and therefore regarded with suspicion in this small Midwestern town. The mother, meanwhile, is frustrated because she had to give up her dreams of being a doctor when she married and had children. Ng weaves each character’s point of view—the parents, the siblings of the girl—seamlessly on each page, so that the family’s voice emerges as a whole, rather than as four individual voices, giving the novel more emotional depth.

Finally, on the last leg home, I read Liane Moriarty’s novel, What Alice Forgot. I love Moriarty because she is so sharply observant of domestic scenes, particularly scenes that involve a hierarchy of women or parents trying to manage children, and because her humor is sharp and cutting, while still forgiving of the flawed characters. She also does a great job of weaving mysteries into her supposedly domestic novels.

In this book, a woman who has lost her memory must figure out why she ever wanted to live the life she’s apparently trapped in now, as a single mom, when what she remembers is being happily married and expecting her first baby. Although the novel is mostly told from Alice’s point of view in the third person, Moriarty cleverly weaves in the story of her sister through journal entries directed toward the sister’s therapist, and the story of a loving neighbor through letters that neighbor writes to her long-gone lover. So, we get three points of view, and all of them added together give not only a fully-rounded portrait of Alice’s life, but also offer us some profound insights on love, loss and forgiveness.

Taking this crash course on Point of View ultimately led me to include Sarah’s point of view in Folly Cove, because I realized she really did deserve a voice, if the novel was going to feel complete. At the same time, it also made me realize that whatever number of scenes she had didn’t need to equal the number of scenes I’d given the three other characters.

I want to thank my fellow writers for being so instructive. And, for all of you readers out there, the next time you pick up a novel, consider this: Why did the author choose this point of view? What would have happened if the book had been told from a different perspective? Or even multiple vantage points? The answers may surprise you.

The post Who’s Telling the Story? A Crash Course on Points of View appeared first on Holly Robinson.

What Happened When My Characters Hijacked My Novel

 

 

 

I write emotional family mysteries, the sort of fiction where the characters suffer through freakin’ horrible crises: abandoned children, missing parents, wandering husbands, suicidal wives, etc. Give me some characters, and I’ll show you how to torture them.

When I wrote the synopsis for Folly Cove, a novel about three sisters who grow up in an historic inn (to be published by Berkeley in Oct/Nov 2016), it seemed to hit all of my favorite high notes. I was gleefully rubbing my hands as I anticipated the pleasure of making my characters cry, rage, or even lie prostrate on the ground with grief before they could resolve their conflicts.

Since I had less than a year to write the manuscript, I began churning out thousands of words every day. Things started out smoothly. I’d decided all three sisters should have points of view, and I loved their voices. This was going to be a snap to write.

But then, about 200 pages into the book, their mother began bullying me. “I need a voice, too,” she demanded.

“No,” I said. “You’re meant to be an enigma to your daughters! Besides, I don’t have time to go back to the beginning of this book and rewrite everything. Forget it.”

But the mother—Sarah—kept pounding on the doors and windows of my brain until it felt like a jack hammer was drilling 24/7.

“What about this,” I said finally. “You can have more dialogue. I’ll even let you go out on a date, Sarah. But you do NOT get a point of view. I’m sorry. There’s just no room.”

By then I’d reached, oh, maybe 300 pages. But Sarah refused to shut up. So I decided to let her out just a little. “Fine,” I told her. “You know how JoJo Moyes let a few secondary characters have their say for just one chapter each, in Me Before You? That’s what I’m going to do here. You can speak one time. So make it good.”

The thing is, Sarah had no intention of speaking only once. Her point of view turned out to be so enlightening to me, as well as to her daughters, that eventually I caved and put her in the book. That meant revising the entire novel. My hands were lame from so much typing because I was running out of time.

 

“You can thank me later,” she said as I finished her last scene.

The next characters who refused to behave were two of the husbands. I’d made one into a lying jerk—only to discover that his secret was causing him to suffer even more than his wife. Another husband, who abandoned his family for thirty years, surprised me by having some good reasons for leaving.

But probably the worst rebel among the characters in Folly Cove was the youngest sister, Anne. She wanted to be in both the first scene and the last scene of the book, no matter how much I tried to give that honor to her oldest sister. “The editor will agree with me,” I assured her.

“No,” Anne argued, “you need me here. I’m the one you like the most. Come on. Admit it. Who do you identify with in this book?”

Anne was also pigheaded about falling in love again, even though it was far too soon after the relationship with her baby’s father disintegrated. “You don’t want me to be alone and unhappy when you end the book, do you?” she pouted.

I argued in favor of her being an independent woman. “Come on. Do you really need a man in your life?” I said. “I’m not writing a romance here. And you should take some time on your own to process stuff.”

“Oh, yeah, right,” Anne said. “Like that’s any fun.”

Finally I caved in to her, too.

And you know what? The book took much longer to write than it should have—I’m barely going to scrape in under the deadline—but it’s better because I let the characters hijack it and take it for a ride.

Bottom line? It’s fine to carefully craft (translation: sweat over) a synopsis or an outline for your novel. But, if the characters want to take over, let them have their say. They may surprise you by teaming up to make it a better book—even if they’re only doing it to get back at you for all of the other characters you’ve tortured in the past.

The post What Happened When My Characters Hijacked My Novel appeared first on Holly Robinson.

The 5 Worst Things a Writer Can Say

 

This past week, I launched my fifth novel, Chance Harbor, provoking a friend to exclaim, “Wow, you’re popping out books like Tic Tacs, aren’t you?”

She has a point. Six years ago, I hadn’t even published one book. It took me a quarter century to land a traditional publishing deal, so nobody could be more surprised—or thrilled—than I am to see my books be born.

These days, I’m often approached by aspiring writers who want to know how I beat the odds. I’m always happy to chat with anyone about writing and publishing, but sometimes I hear writers say things that make me cringe. Here are some of the worst things writers have said to me lately:

1. “I have the best idea for a book. Too bad I don’t have time to write it!” Many writers love to talk about what they’re “thinking about writing.” But here’s the thing: if you never actually start writing, you will never have written a book. Or anything else.

2. “I’m trying to decide whether it’s better to make a living writing fiction or nonfiction.” Honey, stop right there. Creating novels, essays, poems and short stories takes passion and dedication. Selling them takes the stubbornness of a mule chewing through a steel fence. If you want to be a writer, fan the fire burning in your gut. If there’s no fire, do something else.

3. “Will you read my novel and tell me what you think of it? It’s handwritten and about 700 pages.” Uh, no. Just no.

4. “I got this really great rejection letter from a great agent who says she’d love my book if I just change the point of view and cut it down. But I can’t do that. That’s not my vision!” Wrong. That may be your vision, but it’s their marketplace. Unless you win a Booker prize or the Nobel, or sell like John Grisham, you’d better expect to make compromises along the way. Remember Harper Lee and what she did to sell To Kill a Mockingbird?

5. “I quit my job, because I’m writing a best seller!”

The post The 5 Worst Things a Writer Can Say appeared first on Holly Robinson.

Author Amy Sue Nathan Dishes on Writing, Social Media Savvy and Why Books Are Like M&Ms

Like many writers, I was first introduced to Amy Sue Nathan through her wonderful site, Women’s Fiction Writers, which has become one of those essential go-to sites for writers seeking out conversations on every topic imaginable by a broad spectrum of novelists. I wrote a guest post for her, and from there, Amy and I began communicating via Facebook and email, then progressed to phone calls where we realized we had many things in common: divorce, a love of dogs, kids going off to college. When I realized she lived near Chicago and I could meet her in person on the way to visit family in Wisconsin, I was ecstatic but anxious: what if the “real” Amy didn’t live up to her online persona?

I needn’t have worried. Amy is as lively, generous, good-humored and clever in person as she is online. Tomorrow her second novel, The Good Neighbor—an incredibly fun read—will be released, so I thought it would be fun to celebrate her pub date with an interview that turns the tables on Amy and puts her in the spotlight this time. Here, she talks about everything from how writers can use social media effectively to why books are like M&Ms. Read on! If you aren’t an Amy Sue Nathan fan yet, you will be after this.

 

Q. I’m a big fan of your books because you tackle emotional conflicts that so many women face, like divorce, death of a spouse, betrayals by friends, financial stress and the complications of single parenting. Yet, your books are never downers, because they’re so rich with humor and sharp social observations. You make it possible for readers to relate easily to your protagonists as they handle various challenges…keep ’em coming!

A. You are way too kind – and thank you!

Q. As someone who seems to embrace the category of “women’s fiction” in all its forms, tell us how you define this genre—and why you chose it as your own.

A. To me, women’s fiction is an umbrella term, but in its purest form it’s a book about a woman where her journey is to better herself through self-discovery. If romance is part of that, great. If not, that’s fine. Even with women’s fiction that’s heavier on romance, the women are handling things on their own and the end-all-be-all is not to be with a man. Women’s fiction is a character-driven journey where the protagonist saves herself.

Q. Obviously, the publishing industry has undergone some significant transformations in recent years. Can you talk a little about how those changes have affected you most directly?

A. My book publishing journey started in 2011 when my debut novel sold to St. Martin’s Press. So in publishing years, that’s not too long and I came in when e-books and e-readers were already somewhat normal, although not quite so thin and light and diverse as they are now. In terms of what I’ve seen as a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines? Well, that’s different. Fewer assignments, dwindling pages, lower pay.

Q. This is your second novel, and now you’re working on a third under contract with a major publisher. Congratulations! As you’ve asked so many other authors in your blog, I’d love to know whether you’re a plotter or a “pantser,” and how your writing process has changed with each novel.

A. I’m a PLANTSER! A little bit plotter and a little bit pantser. Or a lot of each, depending on the day.

The way I write first drafts has changed a lot. For my first novel, I’d write and write and when I’d stop, I’d write a few sentences about what came next. No outline, no timeline, no character notes. All that came later. For The Good Neighbor I worked from a twenty-page outline but deviated quite a bit in the first draft. For Left To Chance, my third novel coming out in 2017, I’m writing scenes out of order and following an outline that consists of post-it notes and index cards but things changed right away. I always let my heart guide the first draft, however I approach it. For subsequent drafts I’m more methodical and I go very slowly, making sure everyone is where they should be doing what I want them to be doing. The best part, of course, is when they surprise me.

Q. In The Good Neighbor, you offer us a unique—and often very funny—tale of a blogger who spins an increasingly far-fetched fiction about who she is and how she lives. I love the very concept of this book. How did you come up with it?

A. I’ll tell you a secret no one knows yet (unless they’ve read the acknowledgments). The idea for the book grew out of a 1945 Christmas movie starring Barbara Stanwyck, called Christmas in Connecticut. It’s a hoot! If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it any time of year. The movie is about – you guessed it, Elizabeth Lane (same name as my main character, although she goes by Izzy) who is a magazine columnist writing about her happy married home life in a Connecticut farmhouse, her cooking, housekeeping, and parenting tips, since she has a young child. Except she doesn’t! This Elizabeth Lane is a single gal in New York City who can’t even boil a pot of water. Hilarity ensues.

So, you can see where I got the idea for a blogger who tells a story that gets out of hand! I set the story in a Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood because that’s where I grew up and I so wanted to write about it, without placing the characters in the 1970s. So Izzy grew up on a street like mine, but in the 1980s, and that’s where she moves back to with her young son.

And no, I did not move back home with my kids after my divorce, in case you were wondering!

Q. As a popular blogger yourself, what’s your view on how authors can use social media to their advantage in marketing their books? Do you find that you use social media differently now than when you first began your Women’s Fiction Writers web site and published your first novel?

A. I started blogging in 2006 as a “mommy blogger” when social media, for me, consisted of reading and commenting on all kinds of blogs on a daily basis. This led me to my philosophy of social media. GOOD CONTENT. If you’re interesting, funny, informative, unusual or any combination thereof, you can attract some attention – IF AND ONLY IF—you’re willing to give attention in return. With social media one must be SOCIAL. Throwing content into the internet winds and not expecting it to just blow back on your face is naïve.

Q. Probably few other authors have been as supportive of their sister authors has you have been through the years. (I include myself in that lucky category!) I imagine that you’ve done this in spite of suffering the same crises in confidence and even pangs of envy the rest of us experience from time to time. What strategies do you use to keep pushing yourself to write during those dark hours of doubt?

A. Thank you! I am kind of programmed to help other writers and have been doing that since long before I had an agent or book contract. It inspired me to be around (virtually) other writers, published and not. Honestly, even when I’m a little green with envy I remember that no one reads just one book. If readers like your books, Holly, maybe they’ll also like mine. And if they like mine, maybe they’ll like another author’s. And so on. I truly believe there’s room for everyone who writes whatever someone wants to read. Books are like M&Ms. One is not enough.

Do I compare myself to other authors? Sure. But I know I shouldn’t. Do I know there are disparities in publishing? Sure. When it comes down to it, I also know that while I’ve worked my tail off to get where I am, so have many others who, for whatever reason, won’t sign with an agent or get a publishing contract like I have.

Q. Do you have any advice for debut or aspiring authors?

A. Many people care a lot about your writing and your book. But no one cares as much as you do.

 

The post Author Amy Sue Nathan Dishes on Writing, Social Media Savvy and Why Books Are Like M&Ms appeared first on Holly Robinson.

Celebrating a 20th Wedding Anniversary and a New Book: What Marriage Has Taught Me about Creativity

This week is a big one for me. I’m celebrating both the launch of Chance Harbor, my fourth novel with Penguin Random House, and my twentieth wedding anniversary with Dan. As I pop the champagne, it’s a good time to reflect on what marriage has taught me about living a creative life.

 

You Must Commit with Your Whole Heart.

Standing beneath a tent in our backyard with our four young children, Dan and I vowed to love and support one another with our whole hearts. It hasn’t always been easy, especially during the days when we were thigh-deep in children, but we have constantly reaffirmed our devotion to each other.

Being a writer requires the same devotion and determination to forge ahead no matter what obstacles cause you to stumble, fail, weep, or rage because you feel weak from rejections or from wrestling a thorny manuscript to the ground. You must always look forward and reiterate your vow to keep writing daily, if not hourly.

You Must Be Flexible.

Dan is a software engineer. He plans things on lists and flow charts, and pays attention to details. If you load the dishwasher the wrong way or don’t put the tape back where it belongs, you will hear about it. Me, I’m the impulsive sort, a noisy mess of a person who uses the spare bed as a horizontal filing cabinet. You see the problem there, right? Yet, by being flexible, by adapting to each other and appreciating our differences, Dan has learned to let go of trying to control every little thing, while I’ve benefited from learning how to be more organized.

In my novels, I have learned to be more flexible as well. Each one poses a new set of challenges as I wrestle with different characters and story lines. You think you know how to write a book after you’ve written one, but oh, no. The challenges of each new manuscript are different from the last, and so is the process of getting it written. That’s part of the joy.

It Takes Time to Get Good at It.

Writing, like marriage, requires a long apprenticeship before you’re skilled at it. Dan and I traveled to Italy for our honeymoon, where I had a tantrum and went stomping out into the olive groves after Dan said my Italian sounded more like Spanish. Now, twenty years later, if Dan made that same comment I might snap at him, but then we’d both laugh.  We know small things aren’t worth getting in a lather about,with so many more important things between us.

I had many doubts about myself as a writer before publishing my first novel. (And now, too, sometimes.) Along the way, my rejected manuscripts gathered dust on the shelves. “I should just quit writing and get a real job,” I’d moan after every rejection. “This isn’t worth it. I’m wasting my life.”

Dan always convinced me to keep going. He believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. And you know what? Those hours weren’t wasted. No artist—or plumber or race car driver, for that matter—can perfect a craft overnight. It took me a while to get good at marriage, and it has taken me years to become a successful novelist. It takes time to succeed at anything.

You Will Fail.

Being married means that you will fail each other. One spouse might forget that the other hates tarragon, or will do something worse, like lie about a credit card bill or be tempted into an affair. Staying married means learning how to accept failure, learn from it, and move on, stronger than before.

Writing is one failure after another. Over the past two decades, I have probably thrown away a dozen novels that simply did not work. They were in every genre from paranormal mysteries to romances, from detective fiction to serious literary works, and they really were terrible. As my agent said after reading one of them, “This book repels me.”

By now, I know that I can learn as I go, in marriage and as a writer. Each book teaches me how to do something better next time. I have even gone back to some of those old manuscripts and plucked out good scenes, characters, or even entire plot lines to rework into a new book.

 

It’s Worth Making Sacrifices.

Dan and I have made sacrifices to support our family. He has always worked full-time, keeping up a steady income and family health benefits, too. I have chosen to work part time, and out of the house, so that someone could be home after school with our five children. This has meant sacrifices. We never drive new cars. We buy clothing in consignment stores. We don’t take a lot of trips. And now, with our last child in college, the restaurant budget is minimal and we’re in debt.

It has all been worth it. Occasionally, I have considered giving up being a novelist—not the highest-paid profession—and doing something “real” like public relations or marketing. Every time, Dan says, “But you’d be miserable, and then I’d be miserable.”

He’s right. As all spouses know, especially those with children, supporting a marriage and a family means you must give up certain things, like those spontaneous pub nights or all-night raves, or buying a used Honda instead of a new BMW. Similarly, if you’re going to live a creative life, you will probably be shopping at Target, if you buy anything new at all, and that’s okay. You are living the life you chose with love and joy and passion, and that’s worth any amount of sacrifice.

Trust the Process.

Dan and I have learned to trust the process that is marriage, the way it forces us to come together again and again in an attempt to make peace with ourselves and with each other. Because of each other, we have become better people.

Writing, too, has forced me to do things I don’t want to do, to confront that stubborn blank page or that silly plot or the characters whose emotions keep eluding me. I have learned to trust the process of writing, to believe that patience wins every time. The reward is that these books are born.

Happy anniversary, Dan. And happy book birthday, Chance Harbor! There will be parties, but the parties are secondary to the true celebration, which is the joy I feel every morning when I wake up and get to do it all again.

The post Celebrating a 20th Wedding Anniversary and a New Book: What Marriage Has Taught Me about Creativity appeared first on Holly Robinson.

Discovering Prince Edward Island and Buying a House at the End of the World

 

 

A few years after first discovering Prince Edward Island as a single mom with two young children, I invited my second husband, Dan, to see the island for the first time. I was beyond nervous. What if Dan saw this island and shrugged his shoulders? What if he couldn’t understand the magic I felt every time I went there?

I decided to play it safe. For starters, I got a sitter for our four young children and took Dan to Prince Edward Island for a long, romantic weekend alone in the Great George Hotel in Charlottetown. I’m a diner gal, but Dan is a foodie; I hoped to find meals that would satisfy his culinary quests.

I also avoided the ceilidhs. Children who grow up in the Canadian Maritimes pick up fiddles as soon as they can walk, which means Prince Edward Island produces world-renowned fiddlers like Richard Wood. If you haven’t seen him, just picture Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones with a fiddle, and you’ve pretty much got the idea, tight jeans and long hair and all. I happen to love Celtic music, but Dan literally winces and plugs his ears at the first faint sounds of fiddling. (Hey. Nobody said marriage was perfect.)

To my delight, Dan fell in love with the artsy pulse of Charlottetown, and he loved exploring the coastal roads, red beaches and rolling hills of the island as much as I did. On one of our trips, we discovered the Shipwright’s Cafe in Margate, where the chefs rely on locally grown produce to cook innovative meals. Dan was equally happy with my favorite Charlottetown fish and chips place, Brits, where dinner is served on newspapers in baskets and the beer is always fresh. More importantly, the island worked its magical spell on my high-energy techie husband, causing him to relax.

And so began our life as a family on Prince Edward Island. We had four children when we married—a boy and girl from each side—and added a child of our own a year later. Not long after your youngest son was born, we decided to buy a Victorian cottage in Hamilton, a tiny town outside of Summerside. The cottage cost less than most people pay to buy a new car in this country, and it was easy to rent out the cottage when we weren’t using it, given its location close to the Anne of Green Gables attractions in Cavendish.

There were just two small problems with the place: my favorite times to be on PEI are spring and fall, and our cottage had no insulation and hardly any heat. In addition, our kids craved outings to Basin Head, a beach at the eastern end of the island and nearly a two-hour drive from our cottage in central PEI.

 

 

One August, about four years after buying the cottage, our family stayed at a friend’s house near Souris because our cottage was being rented that particular week and it was the only week we could all make the vacation work. The last day of that vacation, it was pouring rain and the kids wanted to sleep late. Dan and I decided to take some rare time alone and drove to the easternmost end of the island.

One of our stops was the East Point Lighthouse, where the Gulf of Saint Lawrence crashes into the Northumberland Strait. On a clear day, you can see the outline of Cape Breton from there.

This wasn’t one of those clear days. The water was pewter-colored and rough and the fog was coming in, so it was difficult to discern where the sea ended and the sky began. We were completely alone except for the seals bobbing in the roughest water where the tides meet.

 

Someone had posted a sign here declaring this spot of land to be “End of the World is Here.” Standing there, it was easy to believe it was true. Dan and I held hands in the light rain, facing out to sea, letting the wind tug at our clothing. Later, though I didn’t know it then, this particular setting would provide inspiration in my newest novel, Chance Harbor.

Afterward, we drove away and I turned down a road we’d never been on before, so we could drive back to my friend’s house along a different route. About a mile down on the left was a “for sale” sign on the lawn in front of a late 19th-century house. The house, with its simple lines and steeply-pitched roof, and its trio of weathered barns, could have been the little sister of the farmhouse where author Lucy Maud Montgomery had set Anne of Green Gables. It was surrounded by flowering potato fields and completely abandoned. Down below the house, I could see sheep grazing in a field and a man on a red tractor.

 

“This is our house,” I declared, pulling into the driveway. “It’s the one we’ve been looking for.”

“What? You’re insane,” Dan said, but he got out of the car and walked around the house with me, inspecting it from every angle. “Roof needs work,” he said. Then, seeing me on my phone, “Wait, who are you calling?”

“The realtor.”

“Come on,” Dan said. “We already have a house.”

“A cottage,” I corrected, and then said hello when the realtor answered.

The realtor was busy with his family, he said, and apologized. He couldn’t show us the house and didn’t know anyone else who might be willing to trek out to the eastern end of the island on short notice, either.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “The thing is, we’re leaving early tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have a family.”

I felt desperate. What if we lost the house?

We didn’t. Within a week, we had made an offer over the phone, without ever having stepped foot inside it. Would the house be a disaster? Would we like it as much on the inside as we did on the outside?

We’d have to come back in October for the home inspection. Meanwhile, all we could do was hope we’d made the right move. (To be continued.)

 

The post Discovering Prince Edward Island and Buying a House at the End of the World appeared first on Holly Robinson.

How to Love the One You’re With (Even If It’s a Manuscript): Four Tips that Really Work

For many writers, word count is everything. Me, not so much. At the start of every manuscript, I might write 2,000 words one day, only to decide that 1800 of those words should be trashed the very next morning.

This particular book I’m working on now—a novel under contract with a publisher, with a deadline looming like a cliff casting chilly dark shadows—has been more difficult to write than my previous books.

Why is this one so hard?

Maybe it’s because the editor didn’t like my first synopsis and made me write a different one, so I started out with a book idea that felt manufactured. Maybe it’s because my youngest son left for college and I’m helping my mom move. Maybe it’s my husband’s new gluten-free diet.

Or maybe I only THINK this book is the most difficult one I’ve written because I’m only 200 pages into it.

I have to keep reminding myself that this happens to me every time. When I write a novel, I churn out about 200 pages and then encounter this huge brick wall with no way up it and no way around it. The plot is a tangle. The characters and their motivations are muddied. The descriptions are duller than dirt. The emotions elude me. The agent will hate it. The editor will hate it even more.

I hate myself! I’m going to just return that advance money to the publisher and quit this torture!

That’s what I want to say, but I won’t. I’m far too stubborn.

I have also learned to trust the process of writing. Here are four key strategies I use to get me through this crisis in confidence. I hope they’ll help you, too—and, if you have any strategies of your own to share, please do!

1. Start Your Book Somewhere New

For the last three books, whenever I’ve been brought to my knees by the process of pushing word boulders uphill, I start the book somewhere new—generally around fifty pages deeper in, maybe Chapter 3 or Chapter 4. And then, like magic, things start to come together.

 

2. Ditch Characters Who Annoy You

If a character gives me too much trouble, or even if I don’t particularly like her, I delete her from the book. Few things are as satisfying as using that “Edit” key and finding passages with that inessential character who is cluttering my pages and deleting them. I just did that with my current manuscript, eliminating a daughter who did nothing but whine to her parents. I thought I needed her, since I’d planned to have her play a big role in uncovering her father’s deep secret. Then I realized that her younger sister, who was hiding a secret of her own, could do the job. Two birds with one stone! And I don’t have to listen to that awful whining girl a minute longer!

3. Create a Flashback Dump

One reason my novels limp along when I first start writing them is because I’ve clogged the front half with too many flashbacks. This is an essential part of my writing process, because it lets me get to know my characters. I learn their histories, hear their voices, and start to sprinkle fairy dust to bring them to life. Eventually, though, I get so frustrated moving pieces around that I have to create a “Flashback Dump,” an actual file of flashbacks. I continue writing the draft without flashbacks, and then go fishing in the dump later to see if there is any useful back story that will add depth and nuances to scenes in an organic way.

4. Give Your Book Time to Grow

I once had a writing teacher tell me that every book should be allowed to be a child—no rules, no manners. Play time! Later, once the book has grown to its full height (or page count), you can demand more of it and tell it to shape up. This may take six months or six years. It will definitely take some healthy dieting (cutting) and hygiene lessons (cleaning up messy grammar and off-the-shelf imagery). Oh, and you’ll need your book to be more confident, too, about showing its narrative tension. Finally, your book will be a young adult, ready to go out into the world with shiny shoes and a new haircut, prepared to strut its best self.

The post How to Love the One You’re With (Even If It’s a Manuscript): Four Tips that Really Work appeared first on Holly Robinson.

Discovering Prince Edward Island, My Magic Sweater, and the Woman Who Made It

 

 

Before buying a house on Prince Edward Island, my husband and I rented places all over the island. Whether we were staying in Tignish or Fortune, Rustico Bay or Souris, though, we always spent time in Charlottetown. This historic city on the island’s south shore is known as the “birthplace of the Confederation” because it was here that, in 1864, a conference was held that led to Canada’s confederation. Today Charlottetown is a colorfully quirky mix of historic brick buildings, art galleries, shops, restaurants, and houses that range from dollhouse Victorians to glassy contemporaries overlooking the water.

With children in tow, I got to explore corners of the city that most tourists seldom visit, like the skateboard park, the huge indoor pool at the university, and The Comic Hunter, where my son competed in Magic card tournaments. No matter what we did, though, our visits to Charlottetown always included a stop at Cows Ice Cream on Peake’s Wharf. It was here that I found a magic sweater.

It was a chilly day in August. I’d forgotten my fleece and couldn’t bring myself to buy one of those tourist favorites, a :sweatshirt dyed orange-red using actual PEI clay. Somehow I’d already acquired two through the years.

So, when I walked by one of the shops at the wharf and spotted a sweater hand knit in gray tweed yarn, I bought it on the spot. It was the kind of sweater that seemed like it had been made just for me in the softest wool I’d ever worn. I wore that sweater every night for the rest of our stay.

 

“My PEI sweater,” as I began calling it, became one of my favorite articles of clothing and followed me everywhere. “Wait, let me just get my PEI sweater,” I’d tell a friend if she suggested walking the beach on a damp spring morning. Or, “No, I have to bring my PEI sweater,” I’d tell my husband as he tried to help me zip a reluctant suitcase shut for a trip.

This sweater represented everything Prince Edward Island meant to me: Freedom. Beauty. Comfort. Originality. Creativity. Because of this, it became my favorite garment to write in, especially if I were starting a new novel or working on a particularly tricky chapter.

As the years went by, of course I began to notice that my precious sweater was getting a little thin in the elbows. (Writers spend a lot of time resting our elbows on desks, usually when the words won’t come and we’re tearing our hair out.) I began to panic. What if my sweater wore out?

“You should buy another one,” a sensible friend suggested.

Of course! There was just one problem: the shop at Peake’s Wharf had changed hands and there were no sweaters like it for sale there anymore. How could I find another sweater as perfect as this one? Could I locate the woman who’d made it and beg her to knit me another?

Finally, it dawned on me to look at the tag inside the sweater. I knew the knitter’s name was in there on a small white tag—“Audrey Day”–and, because so many years had gone by, I thought it might be possible by now to Google her. (Yes, I bought this sweater before most people had home access to the Internet. That’s how old it is.)

To my shock, there, beneath Audrey’s name, was an actual phone number!

So, one day last winter when we were shoring ourselves against yet another blizzard here in Massachusetts and they were doing the same on Prince Edward Island, I called the number. It was for a residence in Summerside.

A woman answered. When I explained who I was looking for and why, she said I had the wrong number.

I apologized and prepared to say goodbye. But, because this was an islander I was talking to, this woman was determined to help me.

“I know an Audrey Day who knits,” she said. “She sells her sweaters at our Christmas church fair.” This woman—who happened to be a brewer of craft beer, another subject we covered in the course of our conversation–went on to tell me that, if I’d hold on just a second, she’d look up Audrey’s number for me in the Summerside phone book.

Lo and behold, just like that, I had another number to call. This time it was the right number, but Audrey’s husband answered. “Sure, Audrey knits sweaters and sells them here and there,” he told me, “but she’s out on a walk right now. Shouldn’t be too long, though, because it’s some cold out there and the snow’s coming down pretty good.”

That started a long conversation about the weather on the island—always a favorite topic. We also discussed the new roundabout in Summerside and whether that would be good or bad when the roads disappeared under the blowing snow.

“Is your wife really out walking in the blizzard?” I asked finally.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Audrey walks no matter what the weather. But you call back in an hour and she’ll be glad to talk to you about her knitting.”

I did call back, and Audrey answered. Not only that, when I described the sweater, she identified it as one she’d made and sold along with a few others to the shop in Peake’s Wharf. “Of course, I don’t sell to them anymore,” she said. “That was a while ago.”

“So where do you sell your sweaters now?” I asked in desperation. “Could I buy another one?”

“Well, now, you just give me your measurements and tell me what you want, and I’ll make you one,” she declared. “I can have it for you to pick up in June when you come back to the island. Do you need one for a friend, too? Just as easy for me to make two as one.”

To me, a new knitter who had made only one sweater so far in her life at that time, a sweater would have best fit The Hunchback of Notre Dame, this seemed incredible. But I dutifully hung up the phone, took my measurements, and called Audrey back. When I gave them to her, she chortled.

“Oh, your husband is a lucky man,” she said. “You’re a nice solid island girl.”

I laughed. This was possibly the best compliment I’d ever received. I requested a sweater for my mother, too. Hers would be a brown tweed, mine a blue.

“How should I pay you?” I remembered to ask.

“Oh, don’t you worry about that. You just pay for the sweaters if you like them when you come up in June,” she assured me.

I insisted on sending her a check for half anyway. I knew, from screwing up various knitting projects, just how expensive good yarn can be.

By the time June rolled around, our six feet of snow had melted and sweaters were far from my mind. But I stopped in Summerside and, in a tiny complex of apartment buildings designed for seniors, I met Audrey and her husband. We had tea in their living room and talked about everything from the historic fox farms in Summerside to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Then Audrey showed me her Mecca of a knitting room, with its treasures of yarn in every imaginable color and texture.

Finally, I met my new PEI sweater, a dreamy concoction in blue tweed, carefully packaged in plastic by Audrey Day. My mother’s sweater—which I planned to give her as a Christmas gift—was equally gorgeous, in a soft chocolate tweed.

As I drove away, Audrey stood on the steps and waved. “Toodle-loo!” she called. “Don’t be a stranger!”

How could I be, on Prince Edward Island?

The post Discovering Prince Edward Island, My Magic Sweater, and the Woman Who Made It appeared first on Holly Robinson.

Discovering Prince Edward Island and a Sister-Writer

 

After making my first foray to Prince Edward Island with my friend Emily and our four children over twenty years ago, I returned to Massachusetts and vowed to return every year. I made good on that vow.

The first house I’d rented was a cottage on Rustico Bay, near the center of the island. Emily and I returned there the following year. We frequented Brackley Beach—which the kids called “Broccoli Beach”–and explored museums dedicated to Lucy Maud Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables.

As the years passed, we also discovered the wild westernmost corner of Prince Edward Island and the wonders of Basin Head, a beach near the eastern tip of the island that immediately became a favorite destination. This is because the bridge over the river at Basin Head feeds into the Northumberland Strait. Despite “no jumping” signs posted around the bridge, everyone leaps and twirls off it into the swirling green river below, which has such a powerful current that you are convinced that you’ll be swept out to sea. Then the river deposits you on a sandbar and you wade back to do it again.

Year after year, I returned to the island. When Emily couldn’t go, I began cajoling other friends to accompany me. Finally, my friend Susan Straight—my best friend from graduate school—said she’d like to see the island, too.

“Really?” I sputtered. We were talking, as we so often did, by phone, because Susan and I have never lived near one another. In fact, we’ve never even resided on the same coast. She is a native of Riverside, California, and still lives in her hometown. My father was in the Navy and I moved nearly every two years of my childhood. Since graduate school, I have mostly been in Massachusetts.

Susan and I met through our thesis advisor, the writer Jay Neugeboren. When Susan began the program, he assured her that she and I would become best friends. She scoffed. “What would I have in common with some New England chick?” she wondered.

I had gone off to teach that year at the American School in Guadalajara, Mexico. Jay wrote to me and said, “When you come back to finish your thesis, I know you’re going to be good friends with Susan Straight.”

I had my doubts. “Why would I want to know some southern California blonde who’s probably as dim-witted as she is gorgeous?” I wondered.

Politely, Susan and I sidled up to each other at one of Jay’s parties the fall I returned from Mexico. We started talking that night and we haven’t stopped since. We have supported one another through publishing rejections and successes, divorces, pregnancy and motherhood, aging parents, dying dogs, personal health crises, and works-in-progress that we still swap faithfully as we craft our new stories, essays and novels.

When Susan agreed to come to PEI with me, I was overjoyed despite the nightmare logistics: she was in southern California. How the heck could she and her three children join me in the Canadian Maritimes? And how would we transport all of our kids up to the island?

The solution: Susan and her family flew to Boston. From there, we each drove a van stuffed with kids, toys, beach towels and luggage on the twelve-hour car-and-ferry odyssey to Prince Edward Island. And, just as Susan and I formed an instant friendship, the island worked its magic on my best friend. She, too, has been coming to the island nearly every year since.

As the years flew by, we mothered not only our own children on the island, but the children of friends and neighbors, too. One golden week in July, Susan and I rented a pair of cottages in Fortune Bay where the kids played tag with French-Canadian and Spanish speaking families staying in the same compound.

Another time, we rented an octagonal house on the edge of a steep red rock cliff overlooking Souris Harbor with eight children. Always, our rhythms have been the same: we tired the kids out during long days at the beach, and at night we’d give them a massive meal and play board games.

Between dinner and board games, or even after the games were done and the children watched a movie, Susan and I sneaked in time for ourselves: cups of tea with chocolate bars at one kitchen table or another, and long walks on the red sand beaches or up quiet clay roads past tidy farmhouses. One summer we brought Susan’s dad, who had grown up in New Brunswick, so that he could visit his brother and eat dulse, the dried seaweed he’d grown up snacking on as a child. And this past summer I brought my mother, because none of my children could come and Susan’s had already been and gone.

How have we sustained this friendship for over thirty years? Susan and I are two women with vastly different upbringings. We married men who are polar opposites. She is blond and I am brunette. She is a tenured university professor and literary writer who has won nearly every award in existence. I earn my living as a ghost writer, journalist and, now, by writing commercial fiction.

We see each other, at most, twice a year—on Prince Edward Island every summer, and then sometimes in New York or Boston or California, if one or the other of us has a book event and the other can escape the Bermuda Triangle of her domestic responsibilities.

This friendship should have faded away after graduate school. It should have shattered through the years, forgotten or buried by all of the other responsibilities and relationships the two of us are constantly juggling. And yet, it has not. It has sustained us. I believe that’s largely because of this magical island that has such a hold on both of us.

Susan and I recently bought houses on Prince Edward Island. (We both came by these houses in strange ways—I’ll save that story for another time.)

Both of our houses have a lot of history and are located near our favorite part of the island, the easternmost tip. I’m publishing a novel set there, called CHANCE HARBOR, in October. Susan is working on a book of her own set on the island.

Meanwhile, she and I will keep walking those red clay roads and the wide empty beaches in the years to come. Best of all, we can be neighbors once a year, sharing tea and biscuits as we tell our stories.

 

 

The post Discovering Prince Edward Island and a Sister-Writer appeared first on Holly Robinson.

Discovering Prince Edward Island: Anne’s Land, a Fiddle Festival, and Four Kids in Tow

I received the advance copies of Chance Harbor, my new novel yesterday. The publisher’s box arrived at the perfect time: tomorrow I’m going to Prince Edward Island, where much of the book is set.

All of us carry our favorite landscapes inside us, whether they’re the landscapes of our childhoods or our favorite trips abroad. Mine is PEI. Discovering this island changed my life.

When I was a newly divorced mom with two young children. I was determined to give my kids what so many other families have: a beach vacation. But I couldn’t afford to rent a house on Martha’s Vineyard or Cape Cod, or even on most of the beaches in Maine. Then, one morning, I flipped open our morning newspaper to the classifieds section—yes, people advertised that way back then—and found a house for $300. For a whole week. The ad read something like, “A dreamy seaside cottage in Anne’s Land.”

Anne, of course, is Anne of Green Gables, the famously plucky heroine whose adventures I’d loved as a child. And Prince Edward Island ranked as one of the Holy Grails in my family, since my parents had set out to take us there when my brothers and I were children. We never made it. My parents were on the brink of divorce, and fought so much that they made it only as far as Maine before turning around.

I called my friend Emily, another single mom facing a summer alone with two kids. “I have a proposition for you,” I said, and read her the ad.

Neither of us had a van, so I rented one from a rent-a-junker place. It was the kind of vehicle bands use when the band members are still living in parental basements: no carpeting, no radio, one bashed fender. We didn’t care. We piled into the van and started driving, tossing juice boxes and snack bags into the back seats for the kids as we made our way through the endless stretch of pine trees in Maine and crossed the border into New Brunswick.

This was over twenty years ago, so the Confederation Bridge connecting PEI to New Brunswick—an 8-mile technological marvel across the Northumberland Strait—had yet to be built. Between the kids needing to pee at different times, the ten hours of driving and the ferry, it was nearly midnight when we finally made it to the cottage. The island roads have few streetlights, and our directions took us onto some bumpy clay roads. We found the right house despite the inky black, starless night, unlocked the door, and fell into our beds without bothering to unpack.

I was awakened the next morning by fiddle music. I sat up and looked out the window, and was greeted by a pair of great blue herons standing on the edge of Rustico Bay. It was the bluest water I’d ever seen, but perhaps that’s because there was such a dizzying array of colors around it: the deep red clay road, the pink and purple lupines, the white church across the water with a steeple striped in red like a barber pole. I felt like Dorothy arriving in Oz. If a horse of many colors had pranced by, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

We threw cereal at the kids, drove around the bay to the church, and landed in the middle of a fiddle festival. Prince Edward Island became the home to French, Scottish, and Irish immigrants, so the tradition of Celtic and Acadian music is strong there. Every night, you can go to an Irish ceilidh if you want to—in town halls, on village greens, in pubs, in churches, or beneath tents, as we did that day.

That summer, I discovered some of the island’s wonders for the first time: the red sand beaches and magenta cliffs, the flowering potato fields surrounding Victorian houses, fish and chips, strong steeped tea with biscuits and island butter, and shining water everywhere you look. And, yes, the Anne of Green Gables museums.

I could say so much more about the island here. I have spent part of every year there since that first trip, and my husband and I now own a 1910 farmhouse on Prince Edward Island much like the one Anne lived in at Green Gables. We bought the house on a whim, without even stepping inside it first. But I’ll save that story and others about PEI for future blog posts.

Right now I need to pack. Tomorrow I’m headed to Prince Edward Island again, and this time I’ll be offering advance copies of Chance Harbor to the island’s bookstores. This novel is my way of saying thank you to a place I love, for its beauty, peace and creative inspiration.

What about you? What landscape is your inspiration?

The post Discovering Prince Edward Island: Anne’s Land, a Fiddle Festival, and Four Kids in Tow appeared first on Holly Robinson.