This has been a week of extreme ups and downs. My editor doesn't like the second book. I'm headed to the beach this afternoon to decamp at my mom's condo for a few days during which I can re-read the whole manuscript (funny how quickly you can forget what you've written) and think about what to do next. Rewrite or move on to book three? Hard to say. Not only do I not know what the future will bring but I really don't even understand what's going on in the present. All this is a down but a down that I somehow feel could work to my long term best interests if I can just figure out a way to remain calm.
And in the middle of this, Australian rights to the book have sold and they're publishing it very quickly - one day after it comes out in the US, in fact. So I have been in contact with my Aussie publisher an adorable man who sounds like an even more whisky-voiced Crocodile Dundee. He is funny and nice and interested in my opnions on publicity and marketing....in short, the whole experience with the Sydney people has been a great balm for my battered ego.
My joke is that I tell my friends I'll have to become an ex-pat - move to Sydney or Rotterdam or Milan or somewhere else where the book is coming out because artists are never valued in their country of birth. No man is a prophet to his own people and all that sort of rot. And I laugh because it is a joke of course but at the same time the foreign rights sales have been a large part of what has kept me somewhat optomisitc throughout this process. There are so many setbacks or moments without movement at all....you have to find your comfort where you can. And right now my comfort is halfway around the world.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Ugh
I've just had a real setback. The editor of my first book has had the second for a couple of months and a couple of days ago I got an email from her. The bottom line is, she hates it. Doesn't relate to the character, think the two key scenes of the book are overdone, doesn't understand why some scenes are in there at all. Sorting through all this is a bit of a shock. Since the second book is based on the same characters as the first it never occurred to me she'd just flat out dislike it. Now it's time to talk to her and I don't know what to say. The things she's saying don't seem like fodder for a rewrite, they seem like a request for an utterly different book.
This is the distressing nature of this business. Everyone says "two steps forward, one step back" but it's actually not even that easy to progress. At times if feels like "two steps forward, two steps back" is more the rhythm of the dance.
This is the distressing nature of this business. Everyone says "two steps forward, one step back" but it's actually not even that easy to progress. At times if feels like "two steps forward, two steps back" is more the rhythm of the dance.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
How I Became a Famous Novelist
Just bought a hilarious book, How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely. Really smart ass, sarcastic, and frighteningly accurate view of the whole process - why we write, how you get published, what happens afterwards. To say this book casts a jaundiced eye doesn't do it justice. Even the cover is yellow....
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Back from Arizona
I just got in from a trip to Arizona. Lots of hiking, spa-ing, etc, but Tucson is also the scene of my second novel. Walking around the desert got me thinking of all the ways that place influences a book. Not just in terms of describing the plants and animals and landscape, although even that is important. My recent Kripalu workshop with Natalie Goldberg made me re-appreciate the evocative power of place-specific nouns such as "roadrunner" versus "pelican" or "barrel cactus" versus "aspen."
But I was thinking more of how metaphor arises out of place. I've been trying to think of a way of saying the Kelly is frozen and stuck and numb in the beginning of the novel and as I walked I kept - of course - seeing these rocks. For some reason it jumped out at me that a lot of the stones in Arizona are approximately the size and shape of the human heart and the phrase came to mind "the stone-shaped heart" and I decided that I liked it.
It's small. It's a line, or not even a line. But it's also the sort of thing that pleases me as a writer. There's a little click that happens in your head when you find a word or phrase that seems right, a sense of completion, like a piece coming into a jigsaw and giving you a stronger sense of the overall picture.
Are we more likely to find these "really right" words or phrases if we immerse ourselves in place? I suspect it helps. Especially if you're the sort of writer, as I am, who is better at getting things down than at thinking things up.
But I was thinking more of how metaphor arises out of place. I've been trying to think of a way of saying the Kelly is frozen and stuck and numb in the beginning of the novel and as I walked I kept - of course - seeing these rocks. For some reason it jumped out at me that a lot of the stones in Arizona are approximately the size and shape of the human heart and the phrase came to mind "the stone-shaped heart" and I decided that I liked it.
It's small. It's a line, or not even a line. But it's also the sort of thing that pleases me as a writer. There's a little click that happens in your head when you find a word or phrase that seems right, a sense of completion, like a piece coming into a jigsaw and giving you a stronger sense of the overall picture.
Are we more likely to find these "really right" words or phrases if we immerse ourselves in place? I suspect it helps. Especially if you're the sort of writer, as I am, who is better at getting things down than at thinking things up.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Why is plotting so darn hard?
As I mentioned in the last blog, I have started compiling notes for the book on ballroom dancing. And it has brought me right up against my worst dread.....(drum roll)......plotting.
Just the word sends a shudder down your spine, doesn't it?
I know it does mine.
Why is this so tricky? And why have I taken on not just another novel but one that has way more characters than I'm used too and thus way more character arcs.....and why have I chosen to toss the word "commercial" around in a cavalier manner, knowing full well that it implies "tightly plotted"?
There is a part of me that relishes the challenge of trying to simultanously advance multiple story lines and bring them all to fruition at the same point....there is another part of me that is terrified of the challenge.
When I get back from Arizona next week I'm going to start research in the form of interviewing. Maybe that will get me going on story and while I realize that story isn't the same thing as plot, they are closely related and maybe that will unfreeze me a bit. Wish me luck.
Just the word sends a shudder down your spine, doesn't it?
I know it does mine.
Why is this so tricky? And why have I taken on not just another novel but one that has way more characters than I'm used too and thus way more character arcs.....and why have I chosen to toss the word "commercial" around in a cavalier manner, knowing full well that it implies "tightly plotted"?
There is a part of me that relishes the challenge of trying to simultanously advance multiple story lines and bring them all to fruition at the same point....there is another part of me that is terrified of the challenge.
When I get back from Arizona next week I'm going to start research in the form of interviewing. Maybe that will get me going on story and while I realize that story isn't the same thing as plot, they are closely related and maybe that will unfreeze me a bit. Wish me luck.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Plowing
When I left New York ten days ago my editor told me she would read "The Gods of Arizona" pronto and let me know. My agent told me he was off to France for a week but that when he returned he would follow up with her pronto and let me know.
I still don't know. That's to be expected. Nothing happens fast in this business. There is no pronto in publishing and writers can become paralyzed with the waiting. Paralysis is my greatest fear. So I have spent the past week thinking a lot about the third book, the one about ballroom dancing, the one I'm tentatively calling "The Nature of the Dance." I am trying to produce a sample chapter and a 500-word pitch of the idea.
This is the exciting part of the process. The beginning, when the horizon is flat and broad and there is the sense that the story could go anywhere and that your heroine could become anything.
This is also the part of the process where you go into a bit of a fog. First drafts are physically exhausting to write. They really force you to go deep into the subconscious mind. My grandmother used to use the phrase "plowing the field" to describe complete exhaustion as in "I feel like I've been plowing the field all day." She was born in the rural south in 1905 and knew what plowing really felt like. I've never had my hand on a piece of farm equipment but first draft writing feels like a kind of plowing - taking this unbroken landscape and beginning to dig ruts in it, to create perameters and rows, to decide what goes where....to begin to enforce a type of order onto nature. You have to throw your back into it. You strike a lot of rocks.
So I walk around in a fog, obsessed with the story. The kind of headspace where you walk into the kitchen and wonder why you're there, where you pull off the road into a parking lot and begin to scribble notes onto a receipt you dig out of your purse. Oddly happy and oddly distracted.
When I first started writing, I never thought about publishing....or, if it did flit across my mind it was only in the context of "I need to sell enough to allow me to keep writing." That's pure and proper - publishing should always be in service of writing. But at some point things shift. The publishing part of it grows bigger in your mind and if you're not careful the tail begins to wag the dog (another one of my grandmother's pet phrases) and you find yourself spending a lot of time wondering what will make a book sell. Instead of "I need to publish so I can afford to keep writing" you begin to think "I need to write what I think they'll publish." In some ways that doesn't sound like much of a shift because both are important - you won't have any sort of career in the long run unless you give serious thought to both the creative and the financial side of your decisions. But even taking into account that both matter, the writing still has to come first.
When I told my editor I was thinking of a book about a ballroom dance studio her eyes lit up and I thought "I can sell that book." All I had was a concept. But in the ten days since that my mind has been furiously churning....who is this woman who has begun dancing? What does she want....and will I give it to her? I guess I'll give it to her slant, as in Emily Dickenson's line "tell the truth but tell it slant." That seems the way people always get what they want - they might get what they originally wanted but then find they don't want it anymore, what they think they want changes over time, they come to an understanding of themselves that renders the original desire moot. There are a thousand variations of this story and the parallels between Abby's pursuit of dance trophies and my pursuit of publication are not lost on me.
I may have started this book based on my editor's reaction, and the fact I thought I could sell it but the deeper question is: Can I fall in love with it to the degree that I would want to write this book even if I knew I could never sell it? In the meantime I just wander around dreaming the story, stopping sometimes dead in my tracks when a phrase or idea strike me as being real.
This is the exciting part of the process. But god do I need a nap.
I still don't know. That's to be expected. Nothing happens fast in this business. There is no pronto in publishing and writers can become paralyzed with the waiting. Paralysis is my greatest fear. So I have spent the past week thinking a lot about the third book, the one about ballroom dancing, the one I'm tentatively calling "The Nature of the Dance." I am trying to produce a sample chapter and a 500-word pitch of the idea.
This is the exciting part of the process. The beginning, when the horizon is flat and broad and there is the sense that the story could go anywhere and that your heroine could become anything.
This is also the part of the process where you go into a bit of a fog. First drafts are physically exhausting to write. They really force you to go deep into the subconscious mind. My grandmother used to use the phrase "plowing the field" to describe complete exhaustion as in "I feel like I've been plowing the field all day." She was born in the rural south in 1905 and knew what plowing really felt like. I've never had my hand on a piece of farm equipment but first draft writing feels like a kind of plowing - taking this unbroken landscape and beginning to dig ruts in it, to create perameters and rows, to decide what goes where....to begin to enforce a type of order onto nature. You have to throw your back into it. You strike a lot of rocks.
So I walk around in a fog, obsessed with the story. The kind of headspace where you walk into the kitchen and wonder why you're there, where you pull off the road into a parking lot and begin to scribble notes onto a receipt you dig out of your purse. Oddly happy and oddly distracted.
When I first started writing, I never thought about publishing....or, if it did flit across my mind it was only in the context of "I need to sell enough to allow me to keep writing." That's pure and proper - publishing should always be in service of writing. But at some point things shift. The publishing part of it grows bigger in your mind and if you're not careful the tail begins to wag the dog (another one of my grandmother's pet phrases) and you find yourself spending a lot of time wondering what will make a book sell. Instead of "I need to publish so I can afford to keep writing" you begin to think "I need to write what I think they'll publish." In some ways that doesn't sound like much of a shift because both are important - you won't have any sort of career in the long run unless you give serious thought to both the creative and the financial side of your decisions. But even taking into account that both matter, the writing still has to come first.
When I told my editor I was thinking of a book about a ballroom dance studio her eyes lit up and I thought "I can sell that book." All I had was a concept. But in the ten days since that my mind has been furiously churning....who is this woman who has begun dancing? What does she want....and will I give it to her? I guess I'll give it to her slant, as in Emily Dickenson's line "tell the truth but tell it slant." That seems the way people always get what they want - they might get what they originally wanted but then find they don't want it anymore, what they think they want changes over time, they come to an understanding of themselves that renders the original desire moot. There are a thousand variations of this story and the parallels between Abby's pursuit of dance trophies and my pursuit of publication are not lost on me.
I may have started this book based on my editor's reaction, and the fact I thought I could sell it but the deeper question is: Can I fall in love with it to the degree that I would want to write this book even if I knew I could never sell it? In the meantime I just wander around dreaming the story, stopping sometimes dead in my tracks when a phrase or idea strike me as being real.
This is the exciting part of the process. But god do I need a nap.
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