Ask Emma Donoghue - Tuesday, April 22nd! discussion
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Ask Emma!
Hi there Ms. Emma Dounoghue my name is Telia Battle & I from Newark, NJ Usa. I love to read so books ever since I was a little girl & also love some types of authors as well. So anyway I've not read some of your books. But I'll got Room book at my local library yesterday. So my question in the book Room how did a 5 year old character Jack's mother lives in prison where she has been held for about 7 years? So now I'm waiting to read this book Frog Music which it came out this month also. But first I'm going to read Room.
I read your book, Room, and I am very curious if you will continue the story with a little bit more? I am curious how Jack lives through his life when he is older say, a teenager, and when his mother passes away.
Hi Emma! I loved reading "Room". I found it so realistic and heartwrenching. I was wondering how you managed to get into that mindset while writing. What kind of research did you do on those situations, and how did you find the voices of the characters? Was it hard to come out of that whenever you finished a writing session? Thanks! Can't wait to read your new one!
Dear Ms. Donoghue,Astray was a buddy read in one of my GoodReads groups for Summer 2013. What a wonderful collection of short stories! Every time I try to decide which of the stories I like best, I remember one of the others. I gave it 5/5 and would definitely read it again, with a buddy or on my own. Frog Music is on its way to me. I am looking forward to it.
Best from
Portia
Funny story, I was pitching my book to an agent at a writers conference in San Diego, years ago—but all the agent talked to me about was her latest find called "Room", and how she chose it because it had an unusual voice. The voice is a young child with limited understanding of objects and words but I still wonder, was the unusual voice something you actively developed first, or was it organic and a by-product to the story. How did you develop it? How much attention do you pay to the voice of the character in general?
Hi Emma! I love your work, but my questions are more about your writing process. What do you do when you're experiencing writer's block? What's the longest period over which you have been unable to write (i.e. if you have ever had such an experience)? And lastly, do you ever get supercritical of your own work? Do you think that's helpful or does it get in the way of you writing?
Hi, Emma. Greetings from Tennessee. Thanks for your time. I was wondering if you had any favorite authors who inspired you to write yourself? Just curious. Have a good day.:)
Dear Ms Donoghue,I absolutely loved reading Astray and it has aroused my interest in short stories. My question, therefore, is about the ideas behind writing short stories: Is it easier to place all stories in the same universe, or is it less trouble to create a fresh world for each one?
Hello from the Oregon coast! I enjoyed your By The Book interview in the NY Times, have you found out if President Obama has read Room yet?Cheers, Elaine Lynch
I loved Room! Looking forward to reading the new book. But, "Frog Music?"I'm really curious why this book has such a weird title.
DON'T TELL ME!
DON'T TELL ME!
8(|) ribbit!
Hi, I'm Megan from New Zealand. My questions for Emma are; where did the motivation for 'Room' come from? and what is your favourite genre to read?We read 'Room' as part of our book club and it was the most enthralling book, highest rated and most animated subsequent discussion we've had in 5 years.
I can't wait to read your other books.
Hello! First off, I would like to thank the mods and organisers for this opportunity to ask Ms Donoghue questions. I am currently doing a thesis on one of her story, "The Tale of the Shoe" and this such a good opportunity :) I would like to ask Ms Donoghue on the reasons for the removal of the protagonist's mother and the role of the stepmother from the story. Why are they not featured in the tale?
Also, does the mother play a role in the tale at all? After all, she does exist as a memory and is there any significance in that?
Thank you so much and I appreciate your reply :D
I have long been intrigued by stories that work real people into the narrative. Going back to "Ragtime" by EL Doctorow, all the way to the recent "Transatlantic" by Colum McCann. Were you inspired to write about the real case in "Frog Music" by other authors? If so, which ones?
Hi, Emma! I have a question about Room (yes, sorry, I'm one of the many asking about the same thing): when you wrote Room had you read The Collector by Fowles? Did it influence you? If not, can you see the similarities? :)Thanks!!!
Billy
Hi Emma, I am an aspiring writer and I loved your book Room. I wanted to know how you got started with your writing career and how should a rookie, like myself, go about approaching the fiction writing and publishing industry? THANKS!
Hi Emma, Thank you for the time to read and answer our questions, I hope you had a fun filled Easter with Family and loved ones. I have the opportunity to read ROOM and loved it like so many on this thread. I am looking forward to reading your other works including Frog Music.
My question to you is - does music have a place in your writing process? If so, how?
Thanks,
Nat
Hello Emma. Room was my first experience with your work and I listened to the audiobook and absolutely loved it! I am listening to Frog Music on audiobook right now and it is great so far.My question is about your audiobooks. For me Michal Friedman's performance on Room made the story LIVE and her loss was truly tragic. All of the performances on your audiobooks have been really terrific. Do you have any input into who does the reading/performance for an audiobook and do you ever listen to them to see if they captured what you feel is the right emotions?
Thanks for your time and keep up the great work.
Hello Emma,My Book club read 'Room' and we all agreed that it wasn't like anything we'd read before. And just like so many others, I wonder how you came up with the idea for 'Room' and writing it from Jack's perspective.
'Room' left me thinking long after I turned the last page.
Barbara in MD
SPOILER ALERT Hello Emma, Could you please discuss your choice for the reason that Jenny was killed? Did you consider the social context of this choice, given its historic use in many books and films? Thank you.
Hi Emma,I've been reading your books for many years, and you're one of my favourite authors. I wanted to say thank you for writing such amazing fiction. Kissing the Witch is very dear to my heart as a queer woman and a lover of fairy tales, and I'm re-reading Life Mask right now.
I have three questions:
1. You often reference and subvert fairy tales in your work (e.g. the Jack the Giant-Killer tales in Room, or tales of women whose vanity is their downfall in Slammerkin), and you've written your own book of fairy tales. What is it that draws you to fairy tales, and why do you incorporate them into your stories?
2. What was it like to have Room become so popular? Did you find life changed very much after it became a bestseller?
3. I find your historical fiction, like Life Mask and The Sealed Letter pretty impeccable in terms of research. And you're able to get into the voices and mindset of real people from history in a way that feels authentic but also accessible as a modern reader. How much research do you do, and what kinds of things do you do to understand the period and people you're writing about?
Sorry for the flood of questions, it's just so exciting to get to ask you a question! Even if you don't have a chance to answer mine, thank you for doing this :)
Hello Emma, I am very keen on your novels. I am writing an article on her postmodern collection of fairy stories 'Kissing the Witch'. Concretely, I would like to ask you about those female characters who are described as monsters or witches in order to highlight their identity's differences in contrast with tradional heroines. It reminds me Julia Kristeva's theory of the 'abject' and 'otherness'. Could some of your postmodern female characters be considered ironic projections, but avoiding the excess or the grotesque in terms of representation, of patriarchal society's mainstream fears?
Thanks.
Mod
Hi Christy. I 'stumble across' so many interesting historical incidents, I think the real question is, what makes me commit to writing about one in particular? It's partly that the incident needs to be deeply intriguing to me - presenting questions not just at the level of what/who but why. And it's partly that I have to want to spend years of my life in that world - in this case, 1870s San Francisco, a city of bewilderingly modern, speedy, multicultural urbanity. (When I'm not so attracted to the world of a plot idea, I visit it more briefly, in the form of a short story.)
Re: Blanche in FROG MUSIC, I began with key facts from the source material: she was mid-20s, a former circus rider from France who came to San Fran with her man Arthur, had a baby ('nursed out' fulltime) and made enough money in the dancing/sex trade to buy an entire building. In the newspaper reports on Jenny's inquest, Blanche comes across as a strong, impulsive character, recounting quarrels (both financial and physical) with Arthur and Ernest, desperate about her missing baby, and furious on Jenny's behalf. The rest is my invention, but you could also describe it as my response to the facts - a spinning of a web around them.
Mod
The Sealed Letter, like Frog Music, is closely based on newspaper reports of a legal case - a divorce, in The Sealed Letter, and an inquest on a death, in Frog Music. Court proceedings make fantastic sources because they're full of details that stimulate my imagination, but they're deeply unreliable: in both these cases, it sounds to me as if many of the witnesses are biased or downright lying. (And in the case of Frog Music, I think many of them were too drunk during the events that led to Jenny's death to remember with any precision.) It's extra work - a greater challenge - to spin fiction around all these hard knobbly facts, but I relish it. Using factual cases forces me to take my stories in odder, more apparently contrary directions than I otherwise would. (For instance, Helen in The Sealed Letter was cheating on her husband with two different military men; if I'd been inventing her from scratch, I probably would only have given her one lover.)
Mod
I've been planning to write a novel about Jenny Bonnet's murder in 1876 San Francisco for at least a decade and a half, so even before I wrote Room I knew that Frog Music would be next. What I didn't anticipate was what a relief it would be to write about bad motherhood in Frog Music after years on end spent with the almost saintly young mother Ma in Room (not just while writing and publicising the novel, but in working on the screenplay too). Compared with Ma I always felt like a shoddy mother to my own son and daughter, but compared with Blanche I'm impeccable! I also enjoyed the fact that Frog Music's world - not just the time and place of its setting, but its flavour, its cultural specificity and language - was so different to Room's. But oddly enough the two novels ended up having quite a lot in common, in that both of them centre on a woman in her mid-20s having her character forged in the furnace of unexpected motherhood.
Mod
Ah, the breastfeeding ('having some', as Jack puts it, taking it so for granted that he's never needed a special word for it). I became aware that this would prove a sticking point for many readers when an assistant of my agent's reacted to it with horror in an early draft. I decided to leave it in (and in fact to have Ma comment wryly on how it bothers people) for three main reasons: (1) I think it's extremely plausible that once Ma had established an effortless and comforting breastfeeding routine with her baby, there would be nothing to make her end it by weaning him as long as they stayed in the incredibly close confines of the room (where they are never more than a few feet apart), and (2) because it helps to mark out Ma and Jack as different from other people in the world, as having their own little subculture, and (3) because it bothers some people so much. I think it's a wonderful example of how we as a society approve of mother-love officially, but only up to a point; we're deeply unsettled if that passion seems too physical or too lingering.
Mod
Great question, Yasmin. I did seriously consider making Jack a girl, but I feared that then the whole book would read as a feminist parable about nasty men brutalizing women and girls. I like the notion that Jack is male energy at its most wonderful, to contrast with Old Nick. And the sense that Jack and Ma between them represent the whole human race: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Mary and Jesus, etc.
Mod
I adored Slammerkin and Room and look forward to reading Frog Music.
As a writer is there a particular type of plotline or character that you find difficult to write and if so, how do y..."
I wouldn't say I ever get 'blocked', but that's not so much good luck, I think, as my having the knack of handling my particular kind of brain. Meaning that if I feel bored or restless I let myself skip ahead and do some work on a future book (either jotting down ideas or doing some research), or I try to figure out what's wrong with the current project - why I don't feel like writing Chapter Three. It has several times turned out that the book really didn't need a Chapter Three and that's why I got bogged down at that point. Which brings me back to your question, more specifically: my natural talent is for dialogue, and plotting is something I've really had to work to improve. So I do a great deal of planning, deciding in advance what'll happen (and what I'll reveal to my readers) not only in each chapter but in each scene. Ever since The Sealed Letter (2008) I've used this technique to try to shape a suspenseful plot so it moves with momentum, and I think it's something I've got much better at, though it's still not my natural forte.
Mod
Delighted that you didn't realise what was going on at first, Maryann. The perverse thing about doing publicity is that most writers would prefer our readers to know nothing at all before they begin our books - that's how we write them, to lead the reader word by word into the story. Having to give away some of the themes/events in advance is just a grim necessity of the publicity process. When my publishers send me a draft jacket blurb for a novel of mine it usually reveals about two thirds of the plotline, and I try to negotiate that down to more like one third.
Mod
Oo, I relish these technical questions, Janet. I remember writing my novel Slammerkin (2000) in the present tense and my agent persuading me to go back to the normal, default choice (especially for historical fiction) - the past tense - because she feared that present tense sounded too 'creative writing schoolish'. By the time I was writing Frog Music I felt that present tense was being used often enough in fiction in general and even in historical fiction that it wouldn't bother many readers. I chose it on this occasion for its sense of immediacy, its lack of hindsight or analysis, its moment-by-moment blur. As for the time jumps, I began the novel in chronological order, from when Jenny and Blanche's friendship begins, through the murder, to the solution, but I found that the opening chapters felt too desultory, too making-new-friends-no-big-deal. So then I decided to begin with the murder and have the friendship framed in that dramatic way: which, out of all the petty details of these chats and meals, are the ones that will lead to bloodshed? It makes it harder work for readers, I know, but I hope it captures the craziness of what Blanche is going through; her struggle to sort out what happened, not only in terms of her single month of knowing Jenny, but also in terms of Jenny's past and Blanche's only history with her baby.
Mod
What influenced you to write ..."
I never considered writing Room from any other point of view than the child's; to me, the child's point of view was the whole point. It's not like I wanted to write about a kidnapping and was trying to pick the best point of view; it's more like, the question of how a child emerging after spending his first five years locked up would see the world was the one that interested me. In a way Old Nick's crime is incidental; it provided the set of circumstances that created Jack and Ma's interesting relationship and Jack's unique perspective. I'm often asked (begged!) by fans to write Room again from Ma's point of view but I fear the result would be utterly banal: just another girl-in-peril sob story. I'm hoping those readers will be satisfied by the film of Room, which - as it'll actually show Ma directly, rather than just getting glimpses of her through Jack's reportage - will be a more head-on depiction of her experience than the book.
Mod
The same way I always do: by picking a new world to create, with new challenges both at the level of content (time, place, language, my protagonist's preoccupations) and genre (in the case of Frog Music, crime fiction). I need to be excited and a bit scared, with a feeling of 'maybe I'm really going to mess up this time'. What would be fatal would be any sense of repeating myself. I'm now trying a children's book, which is even scarier!
Mod
They are usually very clear to me, partly because I do a lot of brooding over them (planning what they're going to do, deciding what they're like, everything from body language to childhood memories). One flaw of mine is that my characters all tend to talk a lot, like me; I fear I'm not very good at representing those who are strong silent types!
Mod
It's very mysterious, Paula, how any particular word comes into a writer's mind. I know some of the filters I apply to that flow - is it a cliche? is it so obscure that readers will be deeply confused about what I mean? if the novel is set in 1876, is the word way too modern? But I can't explain the flow itself. It certainly helps to steep myself in the books of that time and place, but then what I'm writing isn't pastiche, generally - it's not pretending to be a Victorian novel - so I'm aiming for a language which isn't entirely then or now.
Mod
Mod
I worked from two directions. First I looked at all the aspects of Jack's situation that would make him weird: I studied cases of kids raised cut off from society, kids in prisons, refugees suddenly adopted into a very different society... and then I looked at all the ways in which Jack would have the same kind of energetic, pragmatic five-year-oldness of any child. And for that I followed my son around (he was four when I got the idea for the book, five by the time I was drafting it) and took notes on everything from the way he played with cutlery to his confusions about grammar.
Mod
I read Slammerkin and Room, and I found Room deeply moving. In my book club we wondered whether you felt the same emotions as you were writing, as we did while we were reading it. Are yo..."
I feel a bit bad admitting this... but the emotions I go through as a writer are not exactly the same as those you go through as a reader. They overlap, of course; when I draft a scene and read it back, of course I'm feeling excited/moved/amused in the way I hope my readers will. But I'm also feeling other writer-specific emotions. Like, after a scene of gruelling tension - 'yessss!' With a fist pumped in the air. I don't mean to make the process sound coldblooded, because I get so engrossed in my characters' situations and fates that it's an abiding obsession. But I am made happy - satisfied - by drafting a scene that may make you as the reader unhappy for the characters. I want to squeeze every possible emotion out of you. That's why I would say that while researching Room was distressing, writing it was great - the easiest of all my books. I was borne along on a wave of conviction, a sense that I knew what this book was meant to be. It's not that writers don't care, basically, it's that we are care not only about what our characters are going through but about whether the book is working the way we want it to. (Half loving mother-figure, half tyrannical puppet-master, you could say; writing Room, I was both Ma and Old Nick.)
Mod
Definitely! I'm full of respect for those who write well about children without having kids of their own (Ann Patchett would be a great example), because I lean heavily on mine. I've highlighted the passages in Room that my son (five at the time, ten now) directly inspired through his play or remarks and there's yellow on almost every page. I'm now writing a kids' book and I'm throwing most of what my own kids do and say into the mix.
Hi my name is Debbie and I read room about a year ago and it was at times hard to read what Ma and Jack we're going through in that little room. I'm a mother of three children and I'm always paranoid that something bad could happen to one or all of them. My question is how did you come up with the idea of writing about Ma and Jack? I have Frog Music on my to read list which will be my next read, can't wait to read it. Thank you for sharing your time with your fans,
Debbie
Mod
No sequel, sorry. In my mind's eye Jack and Ma are doing fine - especially him, but her too, in a more scarred way - and so there would be no story to tell; I imagine for them that they've escaped into the ordinariness of daily life in the world. I am hoping that the forthcoming movie (filming later this year) will satisfy those many fans who long to encounter Jack and Ma again in some form.
Mod
Funny, I can't remember now what scenes got cut; lots of little chats between Jack and Ma in Room, I suppose, the minutiae of playtime. I think one mistake I made was to underestimate the media frenzy there would be around such a case. It's very satisfying being the screenwriter on the movie (to be filmed later this year by a wonderful Irish director, Lenny Abrahamson, with Brie Larson starring) because I get to tackle the whole story all over again, from different angles.
Mod
My name is Sue and I am a UK reader.
I really enjoyed reading the superb Room and I am two thirds of the way through your latest novel Frogmusic, which is wonderfully well written and or..."
Frog Music was so easy in terms of atmosphere, because the murder case I was so interested in writing about happened to occur not only in San Francisco of all places (that crazy city!), in the 1870s (a nation on the verge of economic collapse), during a legendary heatwave and a smallpox epidemic and anti-Chinese riots, none of which I had to invent. Between the circus background, Blanche's involvement in burlesque dancing and the sex trade, the Chinatown location and Jenny's links to the very different sphere of nature (frog-catching in the hills), atmospheric intensity was pretty much guaranteed. All I had to do was the work, the kind for which there are no shortcuts: immersion in the sources (newspapers, social history, travel guides of the time, novels, songs, drawings and photographs of streets and performers...) The danger was not that the result would be flat or dull but that it would be an overstuffed pudding, so I had to (as always in the case of historical fiction) throw away anything that felt like a lump of research, anything that my point-of-view character Blanche wouldn't seem likely to comment on.
Mod
My question pertains to Frog Music. I wondered if you could talk about why you presented the idea of sexual orientation..."
My own sexual orientation has always felt innate and uncomplicated - I've fallen for girls since i was 14 - but I am interested in characters for whom it's murkier than that; those who end up feeling love or desire where they hadn't expected to. I wouldn't say that sexual orientation in Frog Music is a matter of convenience, myself - I'd say that it's ambiguous. Blanche is polymorphous in her sexual interests, and she's living in a time before the labels we now use about sexual identity were firmly attached. That's one thing I like about premodern settings, in fact - that chance to get back to a time before the labels. So someone like Jenny Bonnet, whose various relationships and costumes during her 20s make her hard to label, can be presented on her own terms.
Mod
Very cool of you to do this. I've got two questions for you, feel free to pick whichever you'd prefer to answer - should you wish to pick either!
While reading Astray, I couldn't help bu..."
Great questions Kyle. I find Canadian fiction highly exciting these days, especially in its range: neither Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers or Esi Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues, for instance, are classic Canadian novels. As for Astray and my sense of place, I would say the funny thing is that I'm not particularly preoccupied with place myself, in that I don't much case where I am while I'm writing (Room was written in a small town in France, for instance). But when you're beginning a short story you urgently need to get the reader to feel as if they're 'there' - meaning anchored in both time and place - so that probably makes me emphasize the setting. And in some novels, the place - such as 1876 San Francisco in Frog Music, with its hectic proto-modern lifestyle - is almost a character in itself.
Mod
Another great technical question! I certainly considered first-person, and the time jumps wouldn't have been incompatible with that since Blanche is always the point of view character. But first-person commits you to speak in the character's voice all the time, which I would have found a strain in this case: to make every sentence, every word, something that a French-born, not-very-educated, 1870s girl could plausibly say. (I find that my historical short stories are sometimes in first person - there are several in Astray - because it's not so hard to keep it up for a few pages, whereas my my historical novels have all been third-person so far.) But third-person also gives you the opportunity to zoom in and out a bit; to imply a bit of critical distance from your protagonist, sometimes, even if you are only showing events that she witnesses. In Room I could use present tense because there is already an interesting, similar gap there, because what the reader knows (from being an adult in the world) and what Jack doesn't.
Mod
Jack's was the only point of view on such a story which seemed to me to offer something fresh, and also to avoid the voyeurism and piled-on misery of a tale of seven years of rape. Yes, I was very much aware of Plato's story of the cave; one of the things I enjoyed most in writing Room was the opportunity to play with such concepts as the real and the illusory, the natural and the social/performative. I tried to write the novel so it could be enjoyed at the most basic, naturalistic level - is the kid gonna be OK? - and also provide rich pickings for PhD students! To me, its most important symbolism is Room = Womb; Jack's story replays the journey of every human being from containment and safety to a wider world of excitement and danger.
Mod
I know how you feel - that's why I include a detailed Afterword at the end of each novel, to summarise how much I've invented and to point readers towards the many sources for what is factual in the fiction. In the case of Frog Music I've also given notes on the songs and a glossary of the French, and on my website I've added a long annotated bibliography on the documentation of Jenny Bonnet's murder. Some critics sneer at all these extras - one called it 'homework' - but of course readers are free to ignore it, and I know many readers welcome it.
Mod
Laurel, Liam, you both asked about the film. I've been highly involved from the start - in fact, I drafted the screenplay before I went looking for production partners. I'm determined to keep Room from turning into a bad film, whether the sleazy or the sentimental kind! The director is a wonderful Irish indy auteur who is moving more mainstream now but with all his integrity and taste intact, Lenny Abrahamson. He and I just happen to be Irish but the film with be set/cast in North America; the radiantly naturalistic Brie Larson is to star as Ma and we hope to film it later this year. So far it's been an astonishingly pleasant collaborative process for me (I say astonishing because novelists usually complain about the horrors of the film world!) Paradoxically, I often suggest changes, and Lenny says 'let's get back to the book'... he is as passionate a guardian of the novel's special qualities as I am, and just as determined to translate its magic into the different but equal language of cinema.
Emma what's your favorite movie and book and song and tv show and holiday and color and season and food?
Ask Emma Donoghue - Tuesday, April 22nd!
Books mentioned in this topic
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Astray (other topics)
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Room (other topics)
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Also, what's your favorite/least favorite part of your writing process?
Congratulations on the new book! :)