Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Writing Life”
Mark Twain on Pride & Prejudice:
“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” Mark Twain.
For a list of other great quotes by Twain on writing and writers, see here.
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Into the Whirlwind is now available!
I’m thrilled to finally see it in stores, and should be available at all your favorite online and brick & mortar bookstores.
The advance word has been good. Publisher’s Weekly said it is “an emotion-filled romance to warm the soul.”
I’m really proud of this book. Although I put my characters through the wringer in this one, I hope readers have a wonderful, exhilarating time reading about a determined woman overcome the battles thrown in her path by the fire.
While I don’t think any of us would want to personally endure a catastrophe like the Chicago fire, this book will explore a love story that blends rich historical detail and characters who face the crisis with intelligence and an optimistic attitude.
My favorite novels make the reader feel like they’ve just made friends with a bunch of captivating people and are sorry to finish the last page. I hope this novel captures that quality.
I’m hugely excited to announce that my next novel, Against the Tide, will feature my all-time favorite character. Bane Alexander first appeared in the Lady of Bolton Hill as a whiplash smart and lethally dangerous 17-year old troublemaker. He is now all grown up, has straightened himself out, and is ready to set the world on fire.
If you haven’t read The Lady of Bolton Hill, no worries. Against the Tide is an entirely stand-alone novel set in Boston of 1891. The heroine is Lydia Pallas, a translator for the U.S. Navy whose skills Bane desperately needs to unravel a smuggling ring.
It took me a while to dream up a heroine who was a match for Bane. Bane is such an overwhelming force who was a scene-stealer in The Lady of Bolton Hill, so I needed a woman who could match him in terms of wit, intelligence, and bravado. She also needed to have a deep gash of vulnerability that would slice through Bane’s tough, cynical hide and make him go weak in the knees. I think that Against the Tide is the most romantic of any book I’ve written. Look for it to hit the shelves in October of 2012. Keep your eyes peeled!
I recently read a book about the art of writing movies (Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting).
What I found interesting was how the same rift that plagues the book publishing world is also a hotly contested issue among screenwriters. There is a trend among late 20th century screenwriters toward highbrow, morally neutral films that lack a clear protagonist who wrestles with good and evil before triumphing in the end. Scholarly critics love this sort of film, and tend to give Academy Awards to dreary and depressing films. Meanwhile the public flocks to Star Wars, Dances with Wolves, Lord of the Rings, and The Shawshank Redeption.
In the book world, most genre fiction is heavily based on values. Beneath the trappings of space aliens, murder mysteries or steamy love scenes, most genre novels reflect core values of justice, love, truth, fair play, accomplishment and perseverance. By the end of the novel a fantastically drawn protagonist will figure out what is worth fighting and dying for. And the American public loves it. If they didn’t, you never would have heard of Nora Roberts, Ken Follett, John Grisham, Harlan Coben, or Francine Rivers. The triumph of genre fiction in the market place makes literary writers cringe. They castigate popular fiction as predictable, simplistic, something to make the reader feel good by confirming their preconceived values.
Lucky for me, I don’t write for critics, I write for the lady in New Zealand who emailed me and thanked me for making her elderly mother happy because she fell in love with Bane from The Lady of Bolton Hill. Or the high school student who wrote to tell me that reading about Clara made her feel a little less like a dork. I write because of all the wonderful genre writers who have embodied the values of hard work, perseverance, and fighting for a cause who helped me through those stress-filled adolescent years.
I don’t know if this split will ever go away. I’m merely glad that there are plenty of readers and writers who still flock toward a wonderful, life-affirming ending.
One of the most common questions any novelist gets is “where do you get your ideas?” I can’t speak for other people, but my hunch is that most writers have a mind that is always asking, ‘what if?’ As I go through the day, something will trigger that what if question, then my imagination takes over. Sometimes it can be a turn of phrase, a news story, an interesting picture, or even a piece of music.
Here is an example. I was reading a copy of the The New York Times from 1884 to get a sense of what people were talking about in the mid 1880’s, and I ran across a tiny news article at the bottom of the page about a group of Civil War soldiers who had all been hospitalized following the battle of Gettysburg. They bonded in the hospital, and vowed to meet exactly twenty-one years later at Niagara Falls. Amazingly, eight of the surviving ten members showed up on the appointed day. Now that is the basis for a good story!
There are lots of ways this story could be tweaked to turn it into an interesting novel or a short story. Perhaps instead of soldiers, it could be nurses. Or perhaps it is set during the American Revolution or World War I. Maybe they weren’t soldiers at all, but college students, or refugees from Nazi Germany.
I was moved by the story, but I know it is not something I am ever likely to use, so I’m throwing it out there to the world. Maybe someone will try to do some research on these amazing men and follow it up. Here is the story as it appeared on the front page of The New York Times on July 5, 1884.
Balloon photo coutesy of Diego da Silva
I love a good memoir. I find them so much more interesting than biographies, which are often written by an academic in a dry, dusty tone. Biographies are usually more concerned with getting all the details right, whereas memoirs tend to give you insight into what it was like to be a different person. People are notorious for shading their own life story, but memoirs provide fascinating insight into what makes people tick.
An example: I read an old memoir written by Princess Ileana of Romania (pictured at the left). She lived a life of immense privilege during the twilight years of European royalty, but also one of great turmoil. As a young girl she lived through World War I, then as a married woman she endured World War II. Romania had an uneasy alliance with Hitler, a man known to despise royalty, so she was in a precarious position for more than a decade. During the war Princess Ileana turned her castle into a hospital and did her best to treat wounded soldiers, but it was a dangerous time to be a princess. Romania fell to the communists shortly after the war, and although she tried to reach some sort of compromise with the country’s new leaders, she ultimately fled Romania with her children and built a new life for herself in Newton, Massachusetts. Her marriage had been a political alliance and did not survive her emigration. Princess Ileana ultimately decided to take holy vows, and lived the rest of her days as an abbess in a Pennsylvania convent.
Well! Quite the story there! She wrote her memoir, I Live Again, in 1952. Frankly, the princess could have used a good editor. The book is a long-winded slog and almost unreadable by contemporary standards, but the memoir is loaded with fascinating insight about what her life was like. She writes about what it is like to live in a castle (drafty and uncomfortable) how to make friends with communists (watch out for the charming ones) and what to do when your brother is a king but also a national embarrassment (help his son stage a takeover.)
Naturally, Ileana lead an immensely controversial life. Literary critics would classify her as an “unreliable narrator.” Her husband flew for the Luftwaffe and she spent a number of years trying to forge shifting alliances with both the Nazis and the Communists. She paints herself in a highly sympathetic light, and from this side of the Atlantic it is almost impossible to peer through past the walls of her castle to know what was really going on all those years.
So why am I rambling on and on about a memoir? As a writer, it is through devouring memoirs that I glean insight into what it is like to be somebody else. Perhaps because I write about the late 19th century, I prefer memoirs written during that era. I also enjoy contemporary memoirs, but they tend to dwell on psychological issues more than those of earlier days. Here are a few other juicy old memoirs I have recently enjoyed:
My Four Years in Germany, by James Gerard (the U.S. ambassador to Germany during WWI)
Memoirs of a Publisher, by George Putnam (a real gadfly who knew absolutely everyone in the literary world of the late 19th century)
Why not Try God, by Mary Pickford (you know who she is!)
After years of madly scribbling away in the privacy of my office, I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to finally know that actual people are reading and enjoying my book. A huge majority of the comments note the lovely cover. I agree!
At the very beginning of the design process, my editor asked me to write up some notes about what the characters look like and the setting of the book. Unlike many inspirational romance novels that are set on the prairie, The Lady of Bolton Hill takes place in Baltimore during the gilded age, so it was important to communicate the setting so people knew what they were getting. Hence, the skyline through the window. In my design notes, I spoke a lot of the heroine, Clara, as a very refined and gentle woman. This quality really comes through on the cover.
Aside from those initial notes, the cover illustration is an aspect of the book I have almost zero control over, so I was sweating bullets over what it would look like. In my head I have a vision of the tone, setting, and atmosphere of the book, and it is a huge leap of faith to turn all that over to someone else. I was very lucky to be paired up with such a gifted artist, Jennifer Parker, for my first cover.
It was late at night when I got the email with the cover image attached, and my computer was unusually sluggish. I remember the wave of nervous anxiety as I waited for that image to load. I think I was clenching my teeth so hard I almost gave myself lockjaw. Anyway, what a huge relief to be greeted with something so lovely!
I never realized how much work goes into the design process. The cover illustrator actually came up with several mock-ups of the cover before settling on the lady in the blue dress. Here are the rough drafts of alternate cover ideas:
Once they decided on a lady standing before a window, they hired a model, a photographer, and went to work. Here are the two, almost identical versions of the cover that made it to the final round:
They ultimately decided on the version on the left. After that, they began working on the artwork, text, spine, and layout of the back cover. All in all, I was immensely pleased and humbled to have such a great team of people working on my cover.
Henry James once said the two most beautiful words in the English language are “summer afternoon.” J.R.R. Tolkein was fond of “cellar door” as an especially evocative combination. Writers enjoy toying with words they find especially interesting, suggestive, or grating. Here are a handful of words that writers have often cited as being particularly lovely:
Gossamer; Wisteria; Wind Chimes; Halcyon; Tranquility; Nevermore; Chalice; Evanescent; Talisman; Ethereal; Oleander
On the flip side, let’s take a look at words cited as the ugliest in the English language. Thanks to writer William R. Espy for generating these candidates!
Ugliest Words: Fructify; Kumquat; Crepuscular; Gargoyle; Jukebox; Plutocrat; Phlegmatic; Blog; Ointment; Splurge; Nougat
If you can think of other particularly ugly or pretty words, let me know!
I know there are a lot of writers who read this blog, so I thought I would take a short diversion to discuss the rather stark differences between the process of getting a book published in fiction versus nonfiction.
When I was fresh out of graduate school, I impulsively decided to write a book. I had a terrific idea about a timely topic, and as a brand new librarian, I researched the process of putting a book proposal together, wrote it up, and submitted it to eight different publishers. To my delight, I had offers of publication from three of them. I took the offer from the publisher with the best reputation, and ten months later I submitted my first draft of the manuscript. A year after that the book was on the shelves.
The above example is true, and illustrates the huge difference between publishing in Fiction and Nonfiction. Let me count the ways:
1) When writing nonfiction, you always write a proposal before you get a contract. The proposal should be fairly detailed, with a comprehensive outline of the book’s scope, one or two sample chapters, an analysis of competing titles, likely markets, and projected sales. These proposals typically range from 40-80 pages.
2) Because you are only submitting a proposal, rather than a 400 page manuscript, it is acceptable to submit to multiple publishers simultaneously. Simply state in your cover letter that it is a multiple submission.
3) An agent is not essential in nonfiction. In academic publishing, an agent is almost unheard of. I have written four nonfiction books for the academic market and never had an agent until I began writing fiction. In fiction, there are very few publishers who will allow submissions from un-agented writers.
4) For a writer, delving into fiction is a much bigger risk than nonfiction. A book proposal can take a couple of months to research and put together, but you will not sink two years of your life creating characters you come to love, a plot that you are profoundly committed to, and a manuscript which may never see the light of day. I’ve had nonfiction book proposals flop and it is a disappointment, but nothing compared to the grinding wall of misery that comes along with getting a novel rejected.
Because of the relative ease I had breaking into the nonfiction market, I thought I would be able to waltz blithely into writing fiction. Not so! It took me about five years of writing, learning, and pushing through the misery of rejection before I got my first novel published. I think that is why I feel much more proud of The Lady of Bolton Hill than my other books (all published under my maiden name.)
I also hope I have not given the impression that writing nonfiction is a walk in the park. You must have credentials, a good idea that hits an untapped market, and a professional approach to the business. I loved writing academic books, but am ready to move on. My heart is now in fiction. Writing for the academic market was work, writing novels is something I do for sheer, boundless, and irrational love.
Photo courtesy of Karen Cox
