- What is it like to write a novel?
- How do you get into a “writing mood?” Is it hard to think from a character’s mindset?
- What’s your writing process like? Do you multitask while you write?
- The dialogue in your books is so good. What’s your secret to creating believable exchanges between characters?
- You’re a busy working mother of teenagers. When, exactly, do you find the time to write?
- What’s your favorite way to write? On your commute? In a park?
- What does your writing room look like?
- What advice do you give aspiring writers?
- What advice do you have for moms who want to take on–and finish–a dream project like a book?
- What was the role of your editor? What should writers expect from a good editor on a novel? How did your editor best serve you? And what do you try to accomplish when you’re editing someone else’s work?
- How do you edit at the word and sentence level? Or do you?
- How has having a best-seller affected you as a writer?
- You mention contemporary elements in your story: brand names, TV shows. What risks do writers take by being era specific? And why did you choose to use these actual elements, even though you chose a fictional setting?
- Orphan Train was your first best-selling hit. Besides your writing chops, what factors contributed to your placement as No. 1 on the NYT list? Theme? Paperback? Distributor? Publicist? Cover image? Book clubs? Generally, what do you see as the factors that influence a novel’s success?
- Advice to other writers taking on such a sensitive, historical and meaningful writing experience such as Orphan Train?
- Talk about finding the “sandpaper” in your writing process.
- What is it like to write a novel?
As a project for school, my son Will spent several days carrying an egg around. His task was simple: all he had to do was keep the egg from breaking. As a mother of three, I wasn’t convinced by this analogy. A baby is nothing like an egg. But as my son described the feeling of carrying his egg around, I realized that it did remind me of something. “It’s always there,” Will said. “You can’t forget it or take it for granted. You feel protective and anxious all the time.” And it dawned on me: Carrying an egg around is like being in the middle of writing a book. No matter what else you’re doing, the fact of the book is in the back of your mind. If you go too long without attending to it you get nervous. Maybe there’s a crack, a hairline fracture, you haven’t noticed! It is always with you, a weight solid and yet fragile, in constant danger of being crushed. Like the egg, the weight of a book-in-progress is both literal and metaphorical. Within the accumulating pages, as inside the delicate eggshell, are the raw ingredients for something greater. But if you don’t nurture it properly you risk ending up with a mess. Keeping it intact requires patience, time, attention, and most of all commitment.
- How do you get into a “writing mood?” Is it hard to think from a character’s mindset?
When I’m starting work on a novel I gather scraps like a magpie. On the Orphan Train board I hung a hand-carved Celtic cross on a green ribbon and a stone shamrock on a red ribbon from Galway; a Native American dreamcatcher from Maine; a silver train pin from a New York Train Riders’ reunion in Little Falls, Minnesota; postcards from Ireland and from the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side. I tacked up note cards: “FOOD IN IRELAND 1900s” was one (“wheatmeal, hung beef, tongue, barley …”). Another listed ideas I wanted to explore (“links between misplaced and abandoned people with little in common”). On one card I scribbled a quote from a speaker at a Foundling Hospital reunion I attended in 2009, Wendy Freund: “In the absence of a clear story people create ghost stories about their lives. They construct phantom parents and entire lives for them. When they get the real information they move from a fantasy story to a reality. It can be hard and disillusioning. But it’s important to create a coherent narrative.” That quote informed the central themes of the novel.
- What’s your writing process like? Do you multitask while you write?
I have come to realize that I rarely do one thing at a time. And that’s the problem. When you write, you can only write. You can’t do laundry or wash dishes. You can’t make sandwiches or talk on the phone. You can’t even listen to music (or I can’t – unless I’m in a coffee shop, where for some reason ambient noise doesn’t usually bother me). It’s just you and the lined paper – or blank screen – in front of you, and any distraction will not only affect your writing that day, it may change the course or the tenor of the work you’re trying to do. Writing is not about keeping the balls in the air. It’s about letting them drop. To unspool a story is to inhabit a different space altogether. You have to let the world in your head grow until it becomes more important than the world you inhabit. You have to calm your heartbeat, slow your skipping brain, become comfortable with silence. You have to accept that you will get nothing done except this one thing – this one paragraph or page or, perhaps, on a good day, a chapter – and possibly not even that.
- The dialogue in your books is so good. What’s your secret to creating believable exchanges between characters?
Dialogue is hard to get right. It has to sound like natural speech, when in fact it’s nothing like it. When you write dialogue, you have to eliminate niceties and unnecessary patter and cut to the core of the exchange — unless the patter is crucial to the story, conveying a dissembling, depressed, incoherent, or boring personality. (The writer George Garrett called this “dovetailing.”) At the same time, it has to sound natural, like something someone would really say.
- You’re a busy working mother of teenagers. When, exactly, do you find the time to write?
I’m strict with myself: I try to finish four pages a day, 20 pages a week. (I write longhand, which I know is odd.) If I’m engrossed in my story I can write a page standing at the stove, or on the sidelines of a soccer game, or on the subway. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this three-ring circus that is my life, it’s that I’ve got to grab the moment as it presents itself.
- What’s your favorite way to write? On your commute? In a park?
This is going to sound strange, but I love writing in the back of a lecture hall or a music hall during a talk or a concert. It’s inspiring to feel that creative energy flowing all around me. I also like the ambient low-grade noise of coffee shops and generic cafés like Panera, where the staff leaves you alone for as long as you like.
- What does your writing room look like?
One of my favorite things about my study on the second floor of my house is the view: I look out over a park with a large oval pond. The dirty, squawking geese look so elegant from this distance! Recently, though, the pond was dredged as part of a someday-we-hope beautification project, so at the moment my view is a mud pit and a lot of dumbfounded geese.
- What advice do you give aspiring writers?
Write, write, write. Finish a draft. Revise. Revise again. Keep going even when you want to despair. (I always think of Winnie-the-Pooh stuck in the rabbit hole: he can’t go back, so he has to go forward. At a certain point in the process of writing a novel it feels that way to me. Every time.) The single most important thing is to FINISH. Many extremely talented writers I know and have taught can’t seem to finish a manuscript. At a certain point they abandon it and start over. The dream is always so much more perfect than the reality.
- What advice do you have for moms who want to take on–and finish–a dream project like a book?
“The writer Anne Lamott tells a story about when she was a kid and her little brother was overwhelmed by a school project about birds. Their father’s gentle advice: “Just take it bird by bird, buddy.” That’s useful to remember. You can write a draft of a book in a year if you write a page a day. The secret is not to get overwhelmed by the big picture. Set yourself concrete goals (in my case, four pages a day or 20 pages a week) and try to stick to them. Yes, this is easier said than done!
- What was the role of your editor? What should writers expect from a good editor on a novel? How did your editor best serve you? And what do you try to accomplish when you’re editing someone else’s work?
I’ve had many editors over the years, with varying skill sets and interests and personalities, and I’ve learned a lot about what I need and respond best to. I’m lucky to have an editor now who is wise, engaged and thoughtful: honest without being harsh. Among her many skills, she’s particularly good at structure. Bird in Hand and Orphan Train, my two most recent novels, are architecturally complex; she suggested changes that radically improved both books. For most of my adult life, I have taught creative writing and worked as a freelance manuscript editor – editing as many as 50 manuscripts a year. This experience taught me much about how to edit my own work and how to critique others’ work in a way that yields fruitful revision. Most of all, it taught me how to revise – which has led me to write faster and bolder first drafts. I’ve learned to trust that I’ll know what to do to improve a draft once the words are on the page.”
- How do you edit at the word and sentence level? Or do you?
I revise endlessly. I write longhand, edit the previous day’s pages on the pad the next day, eventually type up these dense scrawls (editing as I go), print off a double-spaced copy and hand-edit that, type the changes, print a single- spaced copy and hand-edit, type the changes again. Often, then, I retype the entire thing. And I find that when I re- read passages I’ve published, I usually want to edit them, too. At a certain point, as in musical chairs, I have to stop the music and sit down. I’ve learned not to give anyone pages to read until I’ve taken them as far as I can go. It’s a waste of my editor’s time if I haven’t done the hard work alone first.
- How has having a best-seller affected you as a writer?
Several years ago, when my fourth novel came out, I was at a party with a Very Famous Writer who barely deigned to speak to me. I had a Scarlett O’Hara fist-shaking moment in my head (in reality, I slunk away): As God is my witness, I’ll never be nameless again! If I’m going to spend my life at my desk, goddamn it, writing, I want at least to be recognized for my work by other writers. Tragically unambitious, I know, but it’s the shameful truth. A more serious answer is that my life has gotten better and also more complicated. I can afford to send my kids to college; I bought a house in Maine. But the demands on my time are much greater (blurbs, appearances, articles), and if I don’t learn to say no to things, I’ll never write another book.
- You mention contemporary elements in your story: brand names, TV shows. What risks do writers take by being era specific? And why did you choose to use these actual elements, even though you chose a fictional setting?
It’s a fine balance. I didn’t want to clutter the novel with brand names and pop culture detritus, but I did want to root it in specific eras and milieus, from New York in the 1920s to 1940s Minnesota to early-21st-century Maine. It’s useful to know what people are reading and wearing and watching in any given period; these details add color and verisimilitude. One of the challenges was to include time-specific period information without it sounding like regurgitation; I did this by paring back, including only the most relevant details. And I made the decision to include 2011-era technological details that I knew would be quickly outmoded because, after all, the story takes place in 2011.
- Orphan Train was your first best-selling hit. Besides your writing chops, what factors contributed to your placement as No. 1 on the NYT list? Theme? Paperback? Distributor? Publicist? Cover image? Book clubs? Generally, what do you see as the factors that influence a novel’s success?
I’ve learned that for a book to become a No. 1 best-seller – unless the author is a blockbuster commercial success already – there must be a perfect storm of factors: timing, theme, cover image, publisher support, book-club enthusiasm. If it were easy to predict or replicate, publishers would make it happen more often. This novel clearly hit a nerve: I wrote about a moment in American history that has been hidden in plain sight.
- Advice to other writers taking on such a sensitive, historical and meaningful writing experience such as this Orphan Train?
I worked hard to avoid sentimentality. That meant ruthless editing.
- Talk about finding the “sandpaper” in your writing process.
When you write novels, you need to have your characters constantly saying “no” to each other. Most of us (myself included) tend to avoid conflict in our real lives, but conflict is crucial in fiction. It keeps the story interesting.