Winston Churchill once said that writing a book goes through five phases. In phase one, it is a novelty or a toy; by phase five, it is a tyrant ruling your life, and just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him/her to the public.

Do you have a monster you need to kill? A piece of writing or work of art that you need to “fling” to the public? Or perhaps a project you need to launch? If so, I’d love to hear about it.

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Once, when asked about his writing routine, award-winning writer, E.L. Doctorow, said:

“Here’s how it goes:
I’m up at the stroke of 10 or 10:30. I have breakfast and read the papers, and then it’s lunchtime. Then maybe a little nap after lunch and out to the gym, and before I know it, it’s time to have a drink.”

Here is D.L. Doctorow’s bio. It’s definitely longer than 25 words and doesn’t at all sound like the bio of someone who lounges through the day.

As I’ve shared before, I write in the mornings, Monday thru Friday, from around 9 until 12:30 and then I do marketing in the afternoons, which involves querying agents and/or publishers, typing in changes to revised manuscripts, and promoting Seeking Sara Summers. If I was a drinker, I’d definitely drink in the afternoons.

What about you? What is your writing routine? As always, I’d love to hear from you.

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Author website.

The very private, William Wall

I don’t believe that the details of my life have any relevance to a reading of my work. Besides, in many ways I lead a pretty boring life — I get up early and work as much as I can, I make coffee etc. What I want to say about my life, my thinking and my beliefs is in my books and other published materials. If I wanted to be a ‘celebrity’ (whatever the hell that is), whose every living moment is of vital interest to ‘the public,’ I wouldn’t be a writer. Writing is an essentially private business. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s an intimate one.

By the way, here is the 25 word bio on his homepage:

What do you think? Do you like knowing the personal details of the writers you read? Would 25 words be enough? As always, I’d love to hear from you.

P.S. Here’s the bio page on my website. It’s at least 500 words, maybe more. Could you do your own bio in 25 words? If you can–and you feel like sharing–please put it in the comment section!

Author, naturalist, and environmental activist, Terry Tempest Williams says:

“I live in a very, very quiet place. I have a sequence to my creative life. In spring and fall, I am above ground and commit to community. In the summer, I’m outside. It is a time for family. And in the winter, I am underground. Home. This is when I do my work as a writer — in hibernation. I write with the bears.”

I love that quote and love thinking of writing that way. A few weeks ago I started a new novel that is a huge, yet wonderful, distraction. You may have noticed that I’m not posting as often and that is why. I am obsessed with finishing the first draft and keep having fantasies of going to live in a cave (or maybe a 5-star hotel) so that I can. (As of today, I have 57,000 words. A typical novel for me is around 80,000 words.) What about you? Are you working on something right now? Are you writing with the bears? As always, I’d love to hear from you.

P.S. Happy Holidays!

P.P.S. A new book is coming out next year. You’ll be hearing about it soon.

Author website.

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I thought these drawings of literary giants were great. I’m a southerner and I have written my share of southern fiction, so of course Flannery O’Connor and Shelby Foote are my favorites. What do you think? Have you read or do you remember these writers? As always, I’d love to hear from you.

Bill Morris put together a great collection of drawings for The Millions blog. (If you don’t know this blog for fiction writers, you may want to check it out.) Here’s what Bill Morris has to say about his collection:

Since I’m convinced that people tend to be more interesting once they’re dead, obituaries have always been my favorite part of the newspaper. So whenever a noteworthy writer died, I started drawing the picture that accompanied the obit, eventually adding drawings of noteworthy long-dead writers. Here, then, is a gallery of a few of those literary giants, along with brief explanations of what was going through my head as my pen was fashioning their heads.

See more drawings and read his descriptions here.

I got a Shout Out from my writer friend, John Grabowski, last week. He didn’t tell me about it beforehand, so I stumbled upon it reading one of his latest blog posts. His posts are thoughtful, well-written and interesting, so I hope you’ll check him out. Here’s a brief excerpt of John’s blog post. He mentions me at the very end.

Worth 10,000 words

“Author portraits on the back of books are interesting to contemplate. They tell a lot about what the author (or perhaps the publisher) is trying to say about the book they want you to buy with your hard-earned money.

There are a number of different styles of author portrait. Some authors seem to eschew formal headshots at all and use pictures that seem to be taken by family or friends on vacation. These have a way of saying, “I’m just me. Here I am in the everyday.”…

Others take professional headshots, but try to look very approachable, even humble, despite the fact that they surely must have huge egos to become as famous as they did. These photos have an aw-shucks kind of quality that seems to say, “Thank you for even considering buying this book.”

(More interesting author photos with great comments from John in the longer post, and then the big surprise at the end–at least for me:)

“…Perhaps the best portraits are simply those that are natural and felt by their subjects. Twice I’ve seen pictures of my writer friend Susan Gabriel, author of the novel Seeking Sara Summers, and both times they look so similar that I can only conclude this is Susan as she really is—no pretense, just real and caring. Kind of hard to argue with that, eh?”

Yep, that’s me.

Read John’s entire blog post here.  Thanks, John.

I have fallen in love with the word, hooptedoodle. It hit me quickly as I was reading Writer’s Almanac this morning. I had heard the word before, but I had never actually seen it written out. Because of this sudden infatuation, I thought I would share with you an excerpt of what I was reading:

Elmore Leonard has written more than 40 novels — as soon as he finishes one, he starts on another. He’s famous for his advice for writers. In 2001, he published a piece in The New York Times called “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle.”

He gave 10 rules, things like “Never open a book with weather”; “Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue”; “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters”; and “Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.”

He wrote: “Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue. My most important rule is one that sums up the 10. If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

You can read the full Writer’s Almanac post here.

As soon as I post this, I will be off to my favorite coffee shop to write. But please note that I am intent on not “perpetrating hooptedoodle,” no matter how much I love the word. Though I may try to work the word into a future novel just for the fun of it.

What’s your take on hooptedoodle? Like it? Love it? Could care less?

I thought you might be interested in what I do in any given week, since I am a working writer. Of course weeks vary, depending on what’s going on. Last week I spent:

15 hours (approx.) writing and revising short stories and a nonfiction project. (I typically write from 9:00 – 12:00.)

20+ hrs. (1:00- 5:00) researching and querying literary agents about Temple Secrets, a new novel I completed last winter. Then I spent time marketing my current book, Seeking Sara Summers, through various forms of social networking and blogs.

I queried 34 agents for Temple Secrets (The Help meets Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil.) So far, of those 34 agents, two have requested to see the complete manuscript. Any time a literary agent requests sample chapters or a complete manuscript it’s really good news. So fingers crossed on those. (Here is the database I use to find agents.)

Please note: my former agent, Mary Grey James, who I wrote about in an earlier post, retired last month. This was upsetting to me, as she was representing three of my manuscripts. (a humorous middle grade novel, a YA and she had just begun to represent Temple Secrets.) I really liked her. Plus she believed in me. This is worth gold to a writer. And you know how expensive gold is right now!)

In addition to my usual week, I also put together a two page synopsis for Temple Secrets (it took hours to create a really good one) and attended my writers group (a great group of wonderful writers who meet at our local coffee shop).

As you can see, I take writing very seriously. Since I don’t often share about what goes on in my day-to-day life as a writer, I’d love to hear what you think about this post. Do you like to hear what I’m up to? As always, I’d love to hear from you!

Author website.
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Writer, Louise Erdrich said:

“By having children, I’ve both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. [...] With a child you certainly can’t be a Bruce Chatwin or a Hemingway, living the adventurer-writer life. No running with the bulls at Pamplona. If you value your relationships with your children, you can’t write about them. You have to make up other, less convincing children. There is also one’s inclination to be charming instead of presenting a grittier truth about the world. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I’d have written with less fervor; I wouldn’t understand life in the same way. I’d write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I’d probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I’d have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I’ve made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor.”

As for me, I have two amazing daughters who are launched into the world at this point, but when I started writing they were still in middle school and high school. I was an 8 – 3 writer, except on holidays and summer vacations, and I was a single-mom, as well. I’d like to think writing actually made me a better mom because–then, as now–I feel at my most authentic when I write.

We writers will do what we have to do to get to write. What about you? Are you a writer, poet, painter or other creative-type with children? How has this limited or enhanced your craft?

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According to Writer’s Almanac, Jhumpa Lahiri had no idea that her first novel, The Interpreter of Maladies, was a contender for any prizes, and then one day she got a phone call. She said:

“I was in my apartment. We had just come back from a short trip to Boston and I was heating up some soup for my lunch. My suitcases were still not unpacked. And the phone rang. It was one or two in the afternoon. The person who called me was from Houghton Mifflin, my publisher, but no one I knew, and she said, ‘I need to know what year you were born.’ And then she asked some other fact like where I was born. I just told her. Sometimes people need some information for a reading, for a flyer or something. And then she said, ‘You don’t know why I am calling, do you?’ And I said, ‘No, why are you calling?’ And she said, ‘You just won the Pulitzer.’”

It was the first time a paperback had ever won the Pulitzer. The Interpreter of Maladies became an immediate best-seller. Lahiri was uncomfortable with her new fame — she said,

 ”If I stop to think about fans, or best-selling, or not best-selling, or good reviews, or not-good reviews, it just becomes too much. It’s like staring at the mirror all day.”

So she doesn’t read reviews and she keeps her Pulitzer wrapped in bubble wrap. I think there may be wisdom in that. What would you do if you won a big award? Would you keep your Pulitzer in bubble wrap? Or would your Academy Award stay in the guest bathroom like Susan Sarandon’s does? Needless to say, I value your comments and I’d love to hear from you.

 
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