Author Website
As someone who loves to read other people’s personal essays but has a hard time being so candid herself, I am kind of proud of myself for writing an honest piece for SHE WRITES, a new social networking site for writers, on the long journey to publication for Bird in Hand. SHE WRITES is a place where, as founding editor Kamy Wicoff explains, “women writers working in every genre — in every part of the world and of all ages and backgrounds — can come together in a space of mutual support.”
Publication Day, I’ve learned over the years, is an elusive concept. You imagine that something momentous will happen — after all, the date has been printed in catalogs and announced on amazon.com; it seems significant. You think of other important events in your life: college graduation, your wedding day, the birth of your first child. Things actually happened on those days. You were awarded an official degree in front of several thousand people, you suddenly found yourself yoked for life to another person, you loosed a new human on the earth.
So what do you expect for pub day? Oh, not much. Maybe just some triumphal music, mortarboards tossed in the air, a parade with marching bands, a few fireworks.
A novel appears in hardcover about a month before the pub date. It sits in boxes in your publicist’s office before making its way, with a pitch letter tucked under its flap like a schoolboy with a note in his pocket, to reviewers and others who will, you hope, help it on its way. So pub date is kind of irrelevant. Except in the ways that it isn’t. For example, glossy monthly magazines will review books in September if the pub date is after August 10th. Amazon calls any book bought before pub date a “pre-order,” and it’s not immediately available. Bookstores usually put it on shelves (or, if you’re lucky, on tables) on the official day.
But none of that has much to do with the author. I’ve come to understand that pub day is a rough marker, a general concept. And I’ve learned to view the day as a time to reflect on my own journey in publishing a book. It may not be a warm bundle in my arms, but the weight of my book in my hand, with its smooth pages and pulpy scent, makes me swoon all the same.
Exploring the Process of Coming up with the Next Big Idea
I am between novels. I’ve been between novels for close to seven months now, which is typical for me. I am a slow germinator. I’m not devoid of ideas – that’s not the problem – I’m just devoid of an idea that I think I want to spend several thousand hours wrestling with. Having written three novels, I know exactly what the commitment is.
This is what happens when I’m between novels.
The first few months, I don’t even try to get the Big Idea. I revel in the things that I’ve given up during the writing of my previous novel. I read prodigiously. I start diets and gym regimens. I fantasize about cleaning the entire house and settle for a closet. I go through entire weekends without feeling guilty. I enjoy being a civilian.
Once I get that out of my system, I start to wonder if I’ll ever write another novel. Fueled by anxiety, ideas begin to percolate. They appear in dreams. They’re triggered by odd encounters with strangers or obits and other chance juxtapositions.
I chase them breathlessly, bringing candy and flowers. Sometimes I’ll even get to know them, start thinking about introducing them to my family. Finally, a few days or a few weeks into my infatuation, I begin to discover their flaws. The voice is wrong or the subject is wrong or perhaps the idea is good but the project is beyond my power to execute. I retreat sheepishly.
I was actually 13 pages into one idea before I decided that I had no business creating a protagonist who was a Puerto Rican man in his 20’s. But first I had to agonize about whether I was being wise or lazy in deciding to give up the project. It was like a breakup. I asked various people for their opinions – my husband tried to convince me to stick with the idea – until my therapist mercifully gave me permission to stop.
We decided – my therapist and I – to go back to the idea-chasing stage with a little less desperation.
I picked up two of my favorite books about writing, Jane Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel and Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, and allowed myself to fall in love again with the idea of being a writer. I also decided to embrace the pace of summer. I bicycled to the park with Smiley’s book and a notebook. The brilliance of the sun brought me back to the summer of ’79, when I was a cub reporter in North Carolina. I scribbled some notes. And then, just because I could, I used the video camera on my iPhone to record a bumblebee parachuting from clover to clover.
My mother used to worry about my bookish ways. “All work and no play makes Debbie a dull girl,” she would say. Julia Cameron, in How to Avoid Making Art (Or Anything Else You Enjoy), says the same thing: “For most people creativity is a serious business. They forget the telling phrase ‘the play of ideas’ and think that they need to knuckle down and work more. Often, the reverse is true. They need to play.”
Novelists are good worker bees. Writing a manuscript of 80,000 or 100,000 words requires it. But maybe before a worker bee can make honey, she must first drift lazily from clover to clover, sucking the sweet nectar and getting drunk on the fullness of summer.
Debra Galant has written three novels. The first two, Rattled and Fear and Yoga in New Jersey, are comic novels about suburban life in New Jersey. Her forthcoming Cars from a Marriage, coming out next year from St. Martin‘s, follows a 20-year marriage through a series of car trips told by both the husband and the wife. In addition to writing novels, Galant is a new media pioneer. Baristanet, which she founded in 2004, was named the best placeblog in America in 2007.
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Historical novelist Judith Lindbergh writes about her irrational passion for research.
The joy and burden of my literary life is research. There is nothing more exciting to me than the 22-inch high stack of academic texts, museum exhibition catalogues, and translated ancient manuscripts sitting on the corner of my desk like an untouched burial mound waiting to be exposed.
I approach my decidedly obscure topics with an archaeologist’s passion for minute detail. For my first novel, The Thrall’s Tale, about women in Viking Age Greenland, I literally studied monographs on the number of lice found in household waste-pits, not because I have a particularly penchant for lice, but because if there were lice, there were itchy, uncomfortable beds made of moss and straw; there was filthy, stinking clothing; and there were animals sleeping inside the houses with the humans in winter. I latched onto each detail not just for simple description, but to grasp a visceral awareness of what my characters endured.
With my latest novel, Pasture of Heaven, about a nomad woman warrior on the Central Asian steppes, I’m finally past the point of scrounging for details. My characters have risen from unearthed bones, bits of tarnished arrowheads, rusty daggers, and delicate, hand-crafted beads. There comes a moment when the facts fall into place and I sense my protagonist sitting beside me, quietly tapping a finger on my desk as if to say, “OK, that’s enough. Let’s go!” It’s not that I know everything, because everything is impossible to know. But the moment comes when I feel that I am “full” – I understand my characters’ basic natures, the challenges of their lives and the beliefs that sustained them, the landscape and atmosphere that framed their lives.
It’s easy to ignore that moment, because in the end (for me, at least), research is easier than writing. It’s seductive, and undeniably useful, to return to that deep, sweet well to sip. The truth is that research never really stops. Even today, if anything comes my way about Norse Greenland, I catch myself salivating like Pavlov’s dog. The trick is in sensing that moment when I’m about to overflow. Then I set my hands on my keyboard and begin to write. If I’m lucky, the spirits of the long dead are whispering in my ears.
Judith Lindbergh’s debut novel, The Thrall’s Tale, was a Booksense Pick and a Borders Original Voices selection. She teaches creative writing at the South Orange Maplewood Adult School. Learn more about her work at her website, and visit her blog, The Writers Circle: Process, practice, hope, and the business of writing.
Writer Mark Trainer talks about what he learned from Pulitzer-prizewinning author Peter Taylor:
I used to work for the writer Peter Taylor. Because of a series of strokes, he wasn’t able to type his own manuscripts. He was barely able to write legibly with a pen. I had been a fan of his writing since college, and so jumped at the chance to see how he worked. I learned a lot from him. Here are two things–a big lesson and a small trick.
First the small trick. The narratives of Peter Taylor’s finished stories had a wonderful way of seemingly straying here and there, as though the narrator were recalling whichever events from the time he was writing about popped into his mind. By story’s end he always pulled these strands together to powerful effect.
While he was dictating a new story to me, I noticed he kept repeating the same line. It was something like, “And so another person in my life disappeared seemingly without a trace.” In every day’s work, this line would come up at least once. I thought maybe he was slipping in his old age, repeating the same line again and again. But I also didn’t think it was my place to tell him how to write a story.
Then one day he dictated the line again and told me that he sometimes did this in his stories when he was afraid of losing track of a central idea that brought the narrative together–he’d just repeat the central idea again and again to keep from straying too far away from it. And sure enough, when he handed me back subsequent drafts of the story, each time iterations of the line were struck out. It seemed to me each appearance of the line was like a piece of scaffolding used for construction and taken away when he no longer needed it.
Now for the big lesson. Like I said, in the years I knew him, toward the end of his life, Peter Taylor couldn’t type. He could barely read his own handwriting. Sometimes it took him a long time to find the right words when he spoke. I was in my mid-twenties with no physical ailments and no responsibilities. I wrote an hour or two a day but was easily distracted by my social life, my job waiting tables, or maybe an old episode of The Rockford Files.
A few days a week I’d trudge over to Peter Taylor’s house and each day he would have pages of handwritten manuscript he’d worked over painfully, small notes scribbled on pieces of junk mail and napkins. When he couldn’t sleep at night he’d dictate into a tape recorder. Sometimes he tried the typing, slowly, slowly. When he put all this together, his daily output invariably dwarfed my own. Back then, I wrote like someone with no limits on time and opportunity. At his age, he knew better.
Mark Trainer is a writer in Washington DC. His fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, The Greensboro Review, The Mississippi Review, and others. His nonfiction has appeared in The Washington Post. He’s currently working on a collection of stories called Bad Daddies.