Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Blog, page 6

Photo Essay 2: Oleander Girl, The Book Tour

Tours have their challenges.

You wake up at dawn to catch flights.

You stand in long security lines at the airports.

You go to cities where you are unknown and three people show up at your reading.

You find out at the last minute that your media interview has been cancelled.

You eat on the run, whatever you can find, and then you come home and discover that you've gained ten pounds.

BUT

Tours are also where you meet warm and supportive readers you would never have met otherwise. And that makes it all worthwhile.

[image error] At Copperfield's Books, Petaluma, CA

[image error] At Evergreen Valley College, San Jose, CA

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At Diesel Books, Los Angeles, CA

[image error] At Vroman's Bookstore, Pasadena, CA.

My deepest thanks to all who came out to support me!

On to Detroit, Portland, Seattle, San Antonio, Austin, New York, Washington D.C., and Chicago!

Photo Essay 2: Oleander Girl, The Book Tour

Tours have their challenges.

You wake up at dawn to catch flights.

You stand in long security lines at the airports.

You go to cities where you are unknown and three people show up at your reading.

You find out at the last minute that your media interview has been cancelled.

You eat on the run, whatever you can find, and then you come home and discover that you've gained ten pounds.

BUT

Tours are also where you meet warm and supportive readers you would never have met otherwise. And that makes it all worthwhile.

At Copperfield's Books, Petaluma, CA

At Evergreen Valley College, San Jose, CA

At Diesel Books, Los Angeles, CA

At Vroman's Bookstore, Pasadena, CA.

My deepest thanks to all who came out to support me!

On to Detroit, Portland, Seattle, San Antonio, Austin, New York, Washington D.C., and Chicago!

Photo Essay: Oleander Girl Book Tour

These are some photos of places where I read from Oleander Girl, my new novel, and Grandma and the Great Gourd, my children's book.

[image error] At Asia Society Texas, in Houston, the national launch, on-stage interview with St. John Flynn of KUHF.

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At Google, with Regina Sawhney, who invited me to present at Authors at Google.

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At Books Inc., a wonderful independent bookstore in Mountain View, CA.

More to come. . . .

Photo Essay: Oleander Girl Book Tour

These are some photos of places where I read from Oleander Girl, my new novel, and Grandma and the Great Gourd, my children's book.

At Asia Society Texas, in Houston, the national launch, on-stage interview with St. John Flynn of KUHF.

At Google, with Regina Sawhney, who invited me to present at Authors at Google.

At Books Inc., a wonderful independent bookstore in Mountain View, CA.

More to come. . . .

Getting Ready for the Book Tour, Oleander Girl

My new novel, Oleander Girl, will be out in about three weeks--I almost can't believe it.

Just received this brand new hardcover copy of Oleander Girl.

[image error]
[image error]An exciting moment in a writer's life, to see the actual, finished product, the result of years of planning, imagining, writing, obsessing, revising.

(Sorry, these are large files, and my techpertise doesn't extend to making them smaller, so you're only getting partial glimpses of the cover). The entire cover can be seen at http://www.amazon.com/Oleander-Girl-C...)

I've been writing a series of blogs titled Countdown to Publication about the whole pre-publication experience--including tips-- at SheWrites, a wonderful site for women writers. To read, please go to http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/blo....

Details of my national book tour for Oleander, which includes Houston, the San Francisco Bay Area, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, Detroit, Seattle, Portland (OR), Sacramento, New York, Washington D.C., Austin and San Antonio, are at: http://www.chitradivakaruni.com/about....

I hope to see some of you as I travel!

Getting Ready for the Book Tour, Oleander Girl

My new novel, Oleander Girl, will be out in about three weeks--I almost can't believe it.

Just received this brand new hardcover copy of Oleander Girl.

An exciting moment in a writer's life, to see the actual, finished product, the result of years of planning, imagining, writing, obsessing, revising.

(Sorry, these are large files, and my techpertise doesn't extend to making them smaller, so you're only getting partial glimpses of the cover). The entire cover can be seen at http://www.amazon.com/Oleander-Girl-C...)

I've been writing a series of blogs titled Countdown to Publication about the whole pre-publication experience--including tips-- at SheWrites, a wonderful site for women writers. To read, please go to http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/blo....

Details of my national book tour for Oleander, which includes Houston, the San Francisco Bay Area, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, Detroit, Seattle, Portland (OR), Sacramento, New York, Washington D.C., Austin and San Antonio, are at: http://www.chitradivakaruni.com/about....

I hope to see some of you as I travel!

Writing Tip: Ways to Boost Creativity

 

Some time back, I came across a thought-provoking
list at The World's Best Site Ever, titled "Thirty Three Ways to Be Creative." http://www.theworldsbestever.com/2011/06/06/33-ways-to-stay-creative/

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We had a lot of fun with it
on my facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/chitradivakaruni,
noting which ideas people related to most. For me, it was numbers 18 and 2, Carry
a Notebook Everywhere, and Allow Yourself to Make Mistakes, in that order. I'll
write about Using a Writer's Notebook, which I do in several ways, in another
post. But for now, I want to explain why I believe allowing ourselves to make
mistakes in our writing is so important.

When we are afraid to make
mistakes, it means that the little voice in our head is in control. This is the
voice that tells us, This is no good; or, Better do something that's tried and
tested that you know works; or, I don't think readers will like/understand/be
interested in this; or, What makes you think you can pull this off?or, People
will laugh at you for attempting this. (I say "us" hopefully. I sure hope I'm
not the only one who hears this subversive voice!)

It's really important to
get past this voice, and sometimes to do that we have to consciously push
against what we think our limitations are--and this can be a bit frightening. Sometimes
it helps to think of what we're writing (this could be a paragraph, a scene, an
entire story, a novel) as a game or an experiment.  (I often tell myself, If it doesn't work,
I'll throw it away & no one needs to even know I tried it). 

For instance: Men's voices
don't come to me as well as women's, so I forced myself to write a story titled
"The Disappearance" (later published in my collection Arranged Marriage),from the
point of view of a husband whose wife disappears one day, leaving him to obsess
over what might have become of her. It was difficult. I stuttered and came to a
stop a couple of times. I began the exercise in the first person, and realized
after a while that I needed more distance. After some rewriting, the story
ended up in a close third person point of view, and I believe this allowed me
to bring out the complexities and ironies in the situation (the man is abusive
but doesn't realize it until the very end of the story) far better than if I
had told the story from the wife's point of view.

I wrote a big chunk of my
first novel Mistress of Spices as a
collection of linked poems before I figured out that that was not the right
form for this tale of magical realism set in inner-city America. I had to
rewrite the entire first part, but I gained several valuable insights from the
experiment. Mistress of Spices ended up as my most poetic novel, filled with
unconventional verbal leaps, and this elliptical style strengthens the mystery
and magic that permeate the story.

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Which, if any, of these 33
ways appeal to you? Which one might you try? Do you have a different method
that works to keep you creative? What is a challenge you would like to push
past in your art by allowing yourself to make mistakes?

Please let me know.

Sneak Peek at my Upcoming Novel Oleander Girl plus 2 possible covers for you to vote on

Friends, if you have a couple of minutes,
would you please take a look at the 2 possible covers for my upcoming
novel Oleander Girl which my publisher, Free Press, just sent me, & give me your opinion? I'd really value your input before I make a decision.

Unfortunately I can't seem to upload the images here, so please go to https://www.facebook.com/chitradivakaruni, and vote for
the one you prefer (version A yellow, or version B white). Please,
if you have a moment, tell
me why you like it better.

You can comment on this blog or on FB. I do appreciate your time!

Below is a brief description of Oleander Girl,
so you'll have a sense of which cover is more fitting.

Thanks as always for your support of my writing.

Chitra

OLEANDER GIRL, A SNEAK PEEK

Korobi Roy, heir of an old and distinguished Kolkata household, has met
and fallen in love with Rajat, the only son of the Boses, a high-profile
nouveau riche business family. Their engagement is a grand affair, but that
same evening Korobi's grandfather, who has brought her up since the death of
her mother at Korobi's birth, passes away. He leaves behind a dark secret, at
once devastating and exhilarating, which will shatter Korobi's sense of self
and will thrust her out of her sheltered Kolkata life into a courageous and
troubled search, with few resources, across 
post 9/11 America, a country that she finds at once dangerous,
unwelcoming and alluring. What she discovers at the end will force her to make
the most difficult choice of her life.

Meanwhile in India
Rajat must struggle with his own challenges--outbreaks of Hindu-Muslim violence,
in the wake of the Godhra riots, in the Bose's warehouse; money problems
stemming from the vandalism of their New York art gallery; an ex-girlfriend who
refuses to let him go; and his own jealous suspicions as Korobi travels through
America in the company of a disturbingly attractive private investigator named
Vic.

Set against a
fast-changing world of social, economic and political tensions in India and
America that will force the characters to question the beliefs and
preconceptions they have grown up with, Oleander
Girl is ultimately an exploration of the nature--and the cost--of love, and
the ways in which it can help us survive in the midst of hate.

GREAT WRITING TIPS FROM GREAT WRITERS: ROBERT FROST

Here  is a quote I present each
semester to my Creative Writing students for discussion:

 

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Robert
Frost: "No tears in the
writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the
reader."

 I believe Frost has encapsulated some great writing
advice and practices here, and I hope they will help you ponder some important
writing issues and excite you about trying the related techniques out in your
own work.

I am
going to refer primarily to fiction, since that's what I teach and write, but I
think these techniques will work well for nonfiction and poetry, too.

Frost
has, very economically, given us 2 important precepts here.

 

A)  "No tears in the writer, no tears in
the reader."

 

It is
important to feel the power of whatever issue we are writing about. The best
way to do this, for me, is to feel the characters and be moved by their sorrows
and concerned about their situation. Also, be excited with them, afraid with
them, happy with them.  In other words,
get inside their head and have them become real to us. Otherwise they will
become wooden mouthpieces for our ideas, and the reader cannot respond to that
except with exasperation.

Often, to
make this happen, I have to visually imagine a character going through a
situation, (I use my other senses, too). For instance, in my novel One Amazing
Thing, a group of characters are trapped in the basement of the building by a
major earthquake.

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As I wrote that section, I really tried to feel their panic.
I closed my eyes and placed myself in a dark, claustrophobic space. I tried to
feel the cold, dank water rising to my ankles. When I was writing the section where
they are running out of food, I wrote on an empty stomach so I could find the
right descriptions for the hunger and the panic they are experiencing.

 

B)  
"No surprise in the
writer, no surprise in the reader."

This is a
more complicated piece of advice. I take it to mean that the work, as we are
writing it, has to develop in some kind of unexpected way. It is important to
let the work (short story, novel, etc.) unfold organically so that this can
happen. Often we plan the work--the scenes, the chapters, the rising action, the
climax, etc. very meticulously. There's nothing wrong with that. I believe we
have to do that to a certain extent if we are not going to get lost. As
creators and architects, we need to have a plan or vision in mind. But we need
to also allow the work itself manifest its power, to allow characters to do
unexpected things, to approach the fictional world we are creating with a sense
of child-like wonder, to be ready to see what might happen. It is a matter of
balancing the two sides of our brain. Things come up out of our subconscious
when we write. We have to give them space to be born. We have to trust that
this will happen. Sometimes this means not knowing the end until we get there,
and being okay with that.

 

E.L. Doctorow
puts it perfectly: "Writing is
like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights,
but you can make the whole trip that way."

Sometimes
those unexpected moments when shapes loom up out of the dark as we're driving
through unknown territory turn out to be the richest in our writing. When this process
works, it creates a powerful moment of discovery in the reader, echoing the
discovery we felt as we were writing.

In my children's
novel The Conch Bearer, I knew early on that the young hero Anand would be
faced with a major choice at the end of his quest to return a magical conch to
its home in the Himalayas.

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He would have to decide whether to remain with the
conch and the brotherhood of healers who were its guardians in the idyllic
Silver Valley, or to return to his family in the city of Kolkata. Though I was
tempted to figure out what Anand would do midway through the novel, I held off.
I went back to the first part of what Frost suggested and tried to feel the
boy's dilemma, his desire to be in both places at once, to balance the
different loves and commitments in his life. It took me a while to discover
what Anand would do. It was frustrating as I wrote and rewrote portions. When
the decision finally became clear to me, both Anand and I were surprised by it.
Readers have told me they were, too, and that this surprise made the ending powerful
for them. Had I forced a shape on the ending of the novel, I know it would have
been far inferior to what I finally managed to get.

 

I hope
this post has been helpful and perhaps given you some techniques to try in your
work. I would love to hear your thoughts, examples or questions on this or
related topics.

Publishing Tip: How to Find a Literary Agent

Many people have been asking me recently about the process of finding an agent and whether it's really important. Thus, this post.

If you are a fiction writer
in America today, your chances of being picked up by a reputable publishing
company--and of landing a good contract--will be greatly increased if you have an
agent who is known and respected in the industry. I believe that, increasingly,
this is occurring in other countries as well. Getting an agent is tricky but
worth all the effort you put into it, because if things go well, this is
probably going to be the longest professional relationship in your writing
life. I've been with the same agent, Sandra Dijkstra, ever since my first book
of stories, Arranged Marriage, and she has been a great boon to me.

A good agent will have many
contacts, including personal relationships with editors, and will know where to
place you and how much money to ask for. Agents will also know how to get
you the best contract, and which clauses to watch out for. Come publication
time, agents can push for more publicity, a better marketing budget, etc.

Below I'll list a few steps
that I've found useful, and that have worked for many of the writers I
know. 

The first is to create a
manuscript that you're proud of, and that you've revised until you don't think
you can make it any better. Being in a classroom/workshop situation helps
because it gets you valuable feedback. At the very least, try to be in a
writing group with people who know what they're doing. Not only will the
community support help your writing, it'll help you through the (sometimes long
and disheartening) publication process.

Next, try to get short
pieces published in good places, because this will get your name out there and
will spark interest in agents.  There are many
excellent venues for short fiction and nonfiction. Do some careful market research. Choose
magazines/journals that publish your kind of story, or stories by writers you
admire. Don't start with the very top magazines unless you have rhinoceros
skin. Many of them will not look at unsolicited manuscripts, anyway. The
university journals are a great home for writers of literary fiction. You'll
find a good list at the Newpages site, http://www.newpages.com/literary-magazines/,
but there are many others. For every genre, there are many magazines out there,
including reputable e-magazines, so just keep searching. Literary Marketplace http://www.literarymarketplace.com/lmp/us/index_us.asp  is another comprehensive site, with a great
section on agents.

For readers from India, here's a link to a general writers site
which also lists Indian literary agents: http://www.writers.net/agents/country/99/.

Once you've established
somewhat of a publishing history, you can approach an agent. Referrals work
well-- if you know a writer you might approach, do it. Creative Writing programs are
an excellent help in this regard--your professor might refer you to an agent if
he or she likes your work. Also, attending writer's conferences is a good strategy.
You can sign up for agent consultations at many of these, plus you get to know
many people in your field. In general, it is an excellent idea to participate
in writers communities and add value where you can. It keeps you motivate and abreast
of what's happening, and the goodwill you earn will help in the long run.

If you can't get a referral,
you can still approach an agent on your own. Do careful research; find an agent
who works with writers in your genre, writers whose work you like.
Acknowledgement pages of books are a quick way to find your favorite writers'
agents. Research the agent's website thoroughly to find out their preferred
means of being approached (email, snail mail, etc). Most agents want a query
letter and a synopsis; some also want about 30-50 pages of your manuscript.
Most prefer electronic submissions. But, as I said, check the website. It's
usually fine to approach several different agents (though not from the same
agency) simultaneously.  Here's Sandra Dijksta's site, which should give you a good idea of the process of approaching an agent. http://www.dijkstraagency.com/bestsellers.html.

Next, write a great query letter
and send off everything. Here is an excellent article on writing a strong query by
Nathan Bransford: http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2010/08/how-to-write-query-letter.html.

Then it's time to sit back,
and be patient and resilient. This may take several attempts. Don't get disheartened. Remember, most of
us writers had to go through the same process.

When agents shows
interest, before you sign a contract, make sure to ask questions about their
approach and what they believe they can do for their authors. Make sure you're
in sync, because this is an important relationship, and you have to be able to
trust your agent's judgment as well as his/her abilities, understanding of your
work,  and commitment to you.  And remember: legitimate agents will take a
percentage of your royalties and on-signing payment, but they never ask the
author to pay a fee up front.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of scammers out
there. Read about how to avoid them at this great website, Writer Beware: http://www.sfwa.org/for-authors/writer-beware/agents/.

That's it, friends. The process is fairly simple, though painstaking and time-consuming. Good luck with it!

Let me know if you find
this helpful, or if you have questions I didn't address.If you know of other useful links, please share them here.